Update on DH Education Presentation

Yesterday I presented the preliminary findings of my analysis of 134 syllabi.  If you are interested in adding your syllabus to the collection, you can email it to me, or you can join the Digital Humanities Education Zotero group and place it into the Syllabi>ContributedSyllabi folder.  Thanks!

Also, if you’d like to explore the corpus yourself, you can now do so using Voyeur, a terrific text analysis environment developed by Stéfan Sinclair & Geoffrey Rockwell.

In playing around with data from my syllabus corpus last week, I noticed that a few syllabi still had HTML tags, which was messing up some of my results.  I was finally able to upload my corrected corpus to Voyeur and update some of the numbers in my slides.  You’ll notice that the number of times “text” appears across the syllabi has declined to 333–still significant, but smaller than what I previously reported.  I’ve corrected my slides to reflect these updated numbers.

Also, please note that I’m using different sources for the SEASR n-gram analysis (slide 11) and the Voyeur corpus analysis (the bulk of my presentation). The SEASR analysis is based on top-level course web pages that I downloaded into Zotero.  To create the syllabus corpus that I loaded into Voyeur, I tried to include the complete syllabus whenever possible.  However, sometimes the syllabus was divided into separate web pages, so in those cases I captured the course calendar, which typically offered the most detailed information about course content.  I’ll provide a more detailed description of my methodology soon…

 

Note: I’ve uploaded an updated version of my slides to correct a misspelling of Paula Petrik’s name.  Sorry Paula!

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Making Sense of 134 DH Syllabi: DH 2011 Presentation

For my presentation at Digital Humanities 2011 at Stanford, I am analyzing a collection of 134 syllabi to understand how the DH curriculum is being conceived.  What kinds of assignments are being made? What works appear most frequently on reading lists? What are some major concepts that the courses explore?

I hope to write up my presentation soon, but for now here are my slides. Note that some pesky HTML tags skewed some of my results, so the numbers will shift a bit.

I hope that the syllabi archive will be a community resource, both for those who want to get ideas for classes and for those interested in what the syllabi reveal about the digital humanities. You’re welcome to join the Zotero group on Digital Humanities Education (you’ll have to have a Zotero account and then apply for membership in the group).  If you’d like contribute syllabi, please place them in the DHSyllabi> Contributed Syllabi sub-collection.  Please note that the metadata in most of the collection is a little messy–I’m discovering that I can be idiosyncratic in my approaching to tagging, and haven’t had the opportunity to polish all of the metadata for the assigned meeting. Also, if you would like your syllabus removed from the collection (I found all syllabi on the web), please let me know.

I’m using Citeline to make available both the 134 syllabi and the collection of readings  I extracted from the reading lists for approximately DH courses (most of which are included in the syllabi collection.) Citeline has some nifty faceted browsing features that allow you to browse by author, date, keyword (tag), etc.