Digital Leap in Teaching and Learning: Digital Humanities

Digital Humanities implies the multi‐purposing and multiple channeling of humanistic knowledge. Digital Humanities is a channel gate for analog, digitized, and born-digital software tools, which help in research and teaching, and learning programs. ‘Digital Humanities is methodological by nature and interdisciplinary in scope. It involves the investigation, analysis, synthesis, and presentation of any information in electronic form. It helps to study the electronic media that affect the disciplines in how they are used, in which they are used, and also what these disciplines have to contribute to our knowledge of computing.

Digital Humanities practices are very useful for students to develop the ability of collaboratively work, critically think, understand the importance of narrative and visual communication, and communicate using new media. It is a matter of grafting digital elements onto the traditional classroom methods. It develops such abilities that will be useful, to students pursuing any 21st-century career path. It means iterative scholarship mobilized collaboration and networks of research. The research utilizes a variety of source material both visual and textual like published traditional humanities texts, digital texts like websites, emails, blogs, visual like physical and digital and other popular DH working methods online writing or blogging, text analysis, data analysis data mapping data visualization data linked photogrammetry 3-D modeling and many others. This paper will focus on different strategies for the support of digital humanities which will accelerate the initiation and growth of DH programs within and among universities and colleges and polytechnic institutions.

Key Words: Digital Tools, Computational, Technologies, Methodology, Peer Practice, Pedagogy, Openness.

Introduction

The term Digital Humanities (DH) is extensively becoming more of a buzzword. DH field is a well-established and widely-known term. Earlier “Digital Humanities” is known as Humanities Computing has its roots in the 1940s (formerly) and, but most probably since the 1980s. The digital humanities curation has been an allied area of activity, concern, and research.

During the last decades, the digital computer and the humanities have taken place under the umbrella term “Digital Humanities.”The humanities have become digital by making the objects of study available in digital platforms, by introducing numerous digital analytical tools, and by establishing digital means of communication for collaborating and associating during the research process, for discussing and disseminating research results, and for interacting with society at a large area. According to Svensson, P collaborative possibilities and epistemic traditions are imperative for better gauging and understanding Digital Humanities and also facilitate its future progress and development.

Changing Trends In Digital Humanities

Though the technology makes Digital-Humanities work feasible or easier as it also increases its “risk of obsolescence,” as hardware and software decay or become outdated easily. The new and changing manifestations of online cultural content have posed many challenges in the way of the preservation of the digital heritage.” As it is said, “Digital Humanities interprets the cultural and social impact of new media and information technologies–the fundamental components of the new information age –as well as creates and applies these technologies to answer cultural, social, historical, and philological questions, both those traditionally conceived and those only enabled by new technologies.” It implies that D.H helps in the preservation, management, and accessibility of cultural, social, and historical, resources ranging from curating or managing online collections to data mining large cultural data sets cannot be neglected or underestimated to preserve valuable indigenous knowledge of different nations.

One can find the notion that Digital Humanities is “less a unified field than an array of convergent practices”. it seems to be the most useful way to describe or enumerate the observations and more so the conditions that led to this mapping exercise, which also seeks to outline some kind of a trajectory of practices that converge at this contemporary moment to engender new meanings of and around the digital, rather than to produce a conceptual history of the term in the Indian context or even imagine an extant field of some or other sort.

Though this notion of convergence, as per definition, although not apparent or clearly expressed by anyone in India, seems to be the best possible way to describe the way in which certain practices and discourse have grown around the intersection of humanities and digital technologies in India. This rather organic growth of DH projects, practices, and coursework in the absence of a meta-theory that would drive its epistemological concerns is an important conceptual question for each field itself, and open a challenge for the study. Thus, while the broader conversation around DH spans everything from instructional technology, new media and art practices, and integrated science education to cultural analytics, the core concerns often remain the same, that of the intersection of previously separate domains of knowledge that are now coming together, and the crucial role played by the internet and digital technologies in bringing them together.

The main purpose of technology is to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of learning and teaching, regardless of the nature of the learning employing a combination of human and non-human resources to bring about more effective solutions to problems. Actually, this Instructional Technology is the Development (Research, Design, Production, Evaluation, Support-Supply, Utilization) of Instructional Systems Components (Messages, Men, Materials, Devices, Techniques, Settings) and the Management of that development Organization, Personnel) in a systematic manner with the goal of solving educational problems

One can see it is a systematic process of designing, carrying out, and evaluating the total process of learning and teaching in terms of specific objectives, based on research in human learning and communication and employing a combination of human and non-human resources to bring about more effective instruction. “The activity system, composed of the (subject) and his mediating tools and environment (rules, community, division of labor), is defined by the object, or objective, of the activity. The object-oriented nature of the activity is what gives it direction, as well as what distinguishes it from other activities. The object should correspond to the motive that drives the system and the interrelationship of its elements.” such under-utilization and associated role change have reinforced the opposing activity system; making change less likely to affect a return to the teacher-learning construction of the object:’ now research as the process of tool selection, search and relevance evaluation.

Actually, this is a general model the research team should construct a model of individual practice for focusing on the challenge which is mostly silent in each context

Methodologies And Tools

Methodologies and Tools have taken over education and the web cloud today, as researchers look at new issues/ arising problems, while they revisit assumptions of the past. As we know, both the field of Digital Humanities and the tools continue to grow and evolve, one is bound to see even more amazing creations and in-depth re-assessments of prior knowledge. As Kale Greenfield says, “Any humanities study that either focuses (self reflexively) on the digitality of its subject, or any field of humanities that's study is enhanced through digital tools and methods.” Even more exciting, anyone can participate in this latest technology-enabled venture. One can find the content of this research methodological toolkit comprise of a list of a wide range of methods, which have been classified as text-analysis techniques, database design, numerical analysis, methods proper a brief description of all of the techniques, and methods ten in-depth fiches that describe a particular method in great detail. Actually, this “Toolkit” is a collection of related information, resources, or tools that together can guide users to develop a plan or organize efforts to follow evidence-based recommendations or meet evidence-based specific practice standards.’ Technology innovations are increasing the demand for reforms in teaching and learning approaches, which in turn, are having a significant impact or influence on technology use expectations”

“…in scientific research, you start from two beginnings, each of which has its own kind of authority: the observations cannot be denied, and the fundamentals must be fitted. You must achieve a sort of pincers maneuver.” - Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind.

Digital Humanities Toolkits: A Cloud Of Knowing

The best-known cloud-maker is Wordle, and while Con-cordle might not produce word clouds as fancy as Wordle’s, described as the “Not so pretty cousin of Wordle.” it offers some important features of interest to language teachers and students. Word clouds (Concordle ) are very popular in presentations, on WebPages, used in books, lessons, etc., as attractive assemblies of words. The essential feature of a word cloud is that the more frequent a word is in the input text, the bigger it appears in the cloud. And the cloud in this context is a graphic containing the keywords in the text, that the user provides. For one thing, this allows one to see what the keywords are, which is useful if you are preparing to read a text whose keywords one is unfamiliar with. And it can give you some idea of what a text is about. (folk.uib.no/nfylk/concordle)

4.2 Sophie it is used or allows users to combine text, visual images, video, and sound, simply and easily and without any programming knowledge or training in the use of more complex tools such as Flash. The system allows for comment frames for adding discussions within books, the development of digital libraries compatible with the Sophie, i-Pad app, and the creation of timelines. Importantly, Sophie includes HTML5 export for data integrating multimedia content and can be used and read on a wide variety of devices.” (sophie2.org/ trac.).

Timeline It is a product of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology “dynamically presents historical data in a flexible online environment. Switching easily between vertical and horizontal orientations, researchers can quickly scan large numbers of events, highlight and filter events based on subject matter or tags, and re-contextualize historical data.”

It is reached through Facebook, Google, or Twitter/blog account. The software allows a person to join a number of libraries, museums, and other institutions in sharing your photos or other materials with users around the world and also helps to “glimpses of the past and build up the huge story of human history.”

Tools It is an open-source, web-based reading and analysis/interpretation environment for any digital text. It helps scholarly reading and, interpretation of texts or corpus, particularly by scholars in the digital humanities, but it is also by students and the general public. It can be used to analyze online texts or once it is uploaded by users.

It is a community-supported- text as well as social network analyzer (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Insta--gram, RSS feed, or Text/CSV files/) that automatically summarizes and discovers social networks (online conversations on social media sites.)It is created by researchers, no programming or API skills are required to use it, and it is a user-friendly way to explore and visualize and use publicly available data.

It “is an open-source tool that enables anyone to build visually rich, interactive timelines. Beginners can create a timeline using nothing more than a Google spreadsheet,” adding media from such sources as Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Dailymotion, Google Maps, Wikipedia, Sound Cloud, and Document Cloud.

It helps users to search historical data, copying and pasting from existing spreadsheets by dragging and dropping to upload tabular data (e.g., .csv, .tab, .tsv). One can link to a file in a public Dropbox folder.

It provides a wonderful suite of tools that allows for the creation and sharing of scholarly, collections or exhibits comprising (“complex narratives …adhering to Dublin Core standards.”

It is an Omeka add-on product, that allows more tools for creating maps and timelines.

It provides a key toolkit that requires no technical or programming knowledge. It can be used for a wide range of projects, such as creating repositories, exhibits, maps, and multimedia.

It is an open-source community that offers free downloads of its software and a blog for sharing, with the goal of making it “the best GIS tool in the free and open-source software (FOSS) community.”

It is free visualization software that allows taking a wide variety of data-based information (from spreadsheets, files, etc.) to create interactive data visualizations for mounting on the web.

It supports scholars in the creation of long-form, and born-digital online scholarship using a variety of media, with little required technical expertise.

Conclusion

We are living in the age of technological advancement; the areas of Digital Humanities or digital computing have evolved over several decades. The traditional method of teaching lay more emphasis on a teacher and, its repetitive practice mechanical drills, and memorization, are traditional hallmarks. Today, the humanities have become digital by making the objects of study available in a digital platforms, by introducing numerous digital analytical tools, and by establishing digital means of communication for collaborating and associating during the research process, for discussing and disseminating research results, and for interacting with society at a large area. Now, Digital Humanities is either contemplates to be part of the research scholarship or others which can be perceived published products or its outcome assessment as the true coins of the area. It is still emerging, and the ultimate form(s) perhaps it or it may take are not yet comprehensible/understandable; however, research needs to prepare and practice for the future from today, by chasing and following opportunities with research information as a possible entrance to the joint hand of Digital Humanities research; it incorporated open science, citizen science, visualization, and appropriate standardized frameworks, models and infrastructures; by looking for chances to enlarge and expand their expertise through systematic improvement; by being eager to begins alliance with third-parties as essential and most importantly, ‘by being conscious of all fact and facets of Digital Humanities as it relates to them, from the wide-ranging ongoing discussions and debates to its place in their own culture’. The actual set of skills or abilities that students and practitioners of Digital Humanities must be expanded and enlarged or updated to consider the needs of the present scenario of socio-cultural, historical, and philological context. As “Our economic system works well for those who find meaning in economic competition and the material rewards it brings. To a lesser but still significant extent, our system provides meaningful work in service professions (like health and social work) for those fulfilled by helping people in great need.”

No doubt the area is vast and it provides an ample opportunity for researchers to identify different facts and facets for carrying out further research, in different fields, especially in developing countries or nations, where the concept is still in its evolutionary phase. One can see, that “Web technologies have the ability to “support active and social learning, provide opportunities and venues for student publication, provide opportunities to provide effective and efficient feedback to learners, and provide opportunities to scaffold learning in the student’s Zone of Proximal Development”. As Kurhila, Jaakko says, “The only way to improve teaching is to subject it to unfettered criticism. Openness is the way to develop education in the right direction. To make such openness a reality, digitalization is required.” Digital leap in teaching and learning has already born fruit in the form of a wide variety of innovative ideas from digital classrooms to the utilization of virtual reality. The number of digital resources produced (or digitized), stored, analyzed, and explored in any Digital Humanities project is immensely vast (especially) if we take into account the introduction of linked data), so the traditional humanities tools have to be either substituted or helped with additional tools in the form of interactive visualizations.

References

1. Seels, B. B., & Richey, R. C. (1994). Instructional technology: The definition and domains of the field. Washington, DC: Association for Educational Communications and Technology.