First Day of Foundations in DH: We Data

Finally! This semester I am teaching a Digital Humanities course for graduate students at PSU called “Foundations in DH”. In a series of blog-posts that I hope to write regularly and inspired by the writing of my friend Dr. Walsh I will share my experience and thoughts throughout the semester.

The course, overly summarized, will prepare the student to create their own project workflows and document relevant pieces of it (data organization, dictionaries, management plans, context, timeline, budget if “needed”, etc.) while they get to explore the many possibilities of DH. Since it is the first time and I have a very tiny class, I am going to target the content to students’ interest as much a possible. For now that looks like: Data modeling and documentation, Latinx DH, Multilingual DH, digitale Geisteswissenschaften (DH in German), and GlobalDH. Yay!

Today was the usual “introductions” day but with a twist, thanks to “We Data: An Icebreaking Activity” by Brandon. We are sharing our experiences and I loved this idea for an icebreaker by creating/curating and then sharing information in the form of data. And I think my students loved it!

Using a few guiding questions that prompt the identification, description, collection, analysis, and distribution of data, students shared a few facts about themselves: full name, country of origin, degree, year in grad school, pets, number of languages, religion, hobbies, fun facts, etc. They also chose to narrate the data, adding some context or clarification when needed.

After learning about each other, we had a brief and general discussion of the activity using, again, Brandon’s questions:

What is data?
What is it not?
What was hard?
What did you learn?
How did it feel to represent yourselves in this way?

As I was expecting, I had both the “easy” and “hard” responses here. The student that is used to having to create datasets after interviews didn’t have a hard time putting together some information in this format. The student who is more accustomed to narrative formats was taken a bit by surprised when asked to “categorized” the information of the paragraph that one usually shares the first day of class. But both were happy with the learning process. At the same time, they didn’t dislike having to represent themselves in this way because it helped them focus more on the type of information they were going to share.

None of the students thought much about sharing sensitive data and, although we all shared personal data, they thought they could share anything they chose to, regarding the class as a safe space to do so. This fact I believe will do for interesting conversations as we move on to reading about digital archival practices, data modeling or presenting data.

I will definitely incorporate this activity in other teaching spaces, adapting it to the goal of the sessions (ie can I use it for a network analysis workshop?).

As I like doing, I modeled the exercise with some of my own data as well, sharing it in narrative form and trying to contextualize the information in connection to the course.