In addition to textarea and text objects, the canvas object (provided in HTML5) is a powerful tool that deserves more attention than I can provide here for its graphic display capabilities. Figure 6.5 is an example of a more complex tool using both the HTML5 document.getElementById attribute and canvas object for web pages. I developed this script during the EMDA 2015 institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library.
And this brings us to the most exciting part of using HTML5 and JavaScript in the classroom: students can use it to answer their own questions about literature (or any of the text-focused areas suggested above). Once they know how to get text into the tool, how to use textboxes or the coveted canvas object to get results out, and a few string processing methods, there is an immense amount of analysis that they can do entirely on their own!
If you need to assess your students, it is best to assess their analysis of the data provided by the tool. If you have two sections of the same course, try using this project in one section and have students do the book balancing and hand transcription assignment in the other. My bet is that those doing the coding project will produce better analyses of the text and will have higher familiarity with the texts than those who simply compare the print copies and transcribe. I have not been able to gather assessment data to support this hypothesis, as I teach programming courses that require a programming approach, even in a digital humanities framework.
Figure 6.5. Linguistic complexity visualization of Othello.
As a low-cost way to allow students to create their own tools to answer their own questions about their own text-based areas of interest, HTML5 and JavaScript cannot be beat in terms of their ubiquity, flexibility, and ease of use. Experiential learning on a zero budget is the direction to go in any text analysis–based course.
NOTES
1. I was accepted into and attended the “Early Modern Digital Agendas: Advanced Topics” institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library in 2015 through a National Endowment for the Humanities grant.
2. M&B Skelt, Skelt’s Characters and Scenes in Othello (London: Theatrical Warehouse, 1823).
3. William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice, Folger Digital Online Texts, accessed (and downloaded) May 27, 2017, http://www.folgerdigitaltexts.org/?chapter=5&play=Oth&loc=p7.
4. Skelt, 6.
5. Educational scholarly research has produced a huge volume of scholarly support for experiential learning, beginning with Arthur Chickering’s seminal work on the method. See, Arthur W. Chickering, Experience and Learning (New York: Change Magazine, 1977). However, there is some recent discussion that current English literature teachers are not commonly using experiential methods to teach Shakespeare, as evidenced in Barrie Wade and John Sheppard, “How Teachers Teach Shakespeare,” Educational Review 46, no. 1 (January 1, 1994): 21–28.
6. For example, my public library in Omaha, Nebraska, accessed May 7, 2018, https://omaha.bibliocommons.com/v2/search?query=JavaScript&searchType=smart, showed thirty “Website or Online Data” sources, when I searched for JavaScript after logging on as a registered user.
7. Folger Shakespeare Library, stacks.
Fostering an Understanding of the Value of Metadata in Digital Humanities
Hamilton College
DIGITAL HUMANITIES PROJECTS REQUIRE WIDE-RANGING skill sets and awareness of many tools and resources, including the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), digitization practices, geographic information systems (GIS), data visualization, and metadata. While digital humanities projects are usually produced by the combined effort of a number of experts in these fields, it is still imperative to introduce those new to digital humanities to a broad overview of many of these topics so that they are aware of the role these resources play in digital humanities and how these tools can be used to benefit their projects.1
Metadata is a crucial part of digital humanities because it provides a way of accessing and organizing data. Metadata provides key terms and phrases for finding digital objects, ranging from newspaper articles and essays to interviews, photographs, and videos. Adding metadata allows objects in a repository to be findable and improves their discoverability. It can be used to supplement full-text searching and adds value by correcting misspellings, supplementing abbreviations so that they are searchable, and adding alternate spellings to facilitate searching.2 Therefore, metadata is the foundation of the work that is done by scholars, allowing for the careful description of objects in ways that support new connections between objects and the analysis of items within a collection.
A basic understanding of metadata should be taught in all classes that are focused on developing skills in digital humanities in order to instill an early understanding of both the importance of metadata and the general principles of how to create metadata. In the past, metadata has been viewed primarily as librarians’ work; however, developing skills in metadata will allow those embarking on a journey into digital humanities to develop a deeper understanding of their data. The usefulness of this information literacy extends beyond digital humanities into the broader topic of digital scholarship. Developing a clear understanding of metadata while having the opportunity to create metadata is crucial to the development of a foundation for digital humanities scholars at all levels.
The following is a general suggested approach for a one-shot metadata-centric session in a digital humanities class. It may be adapted for use by librarians and professors who are seeking to educate students on how metadata is an important part of the digital humanities research that is being done, regardless of topical areas. This grounding of the discussion of metadata into the larger context of digital humanities will allow students to develop more comprehensive insights into the digital humanities projects they have reviewed in class, providing them with the ability to see the role that metadata plays in digital humanities projects.
SETTING THE STAGE
It is imperative to set the stage for a discussion about metadata with undergraduate students who are enrolled in an introduction to digital humanities course. Students may be intimidated upon first hearing that they will be working with metadata. While students may know the basic definition of metadata (i.e., “data about data”), this definition is insufficient because the word data can be vague to those who are new to the field of information. Instead, starting with what is familiar when introducing the topic to them, and using scaffolding to help them build from what they know to the unknown, will more quickly gain their interest.
There are several ways to accomplish this. One way that is frequently successful as an initial overture toward making them feel more comfortable is to try incorporating an example of the everyday organization of information using metadata that they create, and organize by, without even realizing it. One favorite question to pose is, “How do you organize your closet?” There are numerous ways of doing this (e.g., by color, by type of clothing item, by season, by style, by outfit, as well as by some combination of these), and getting students to realize that they are already working with and organizing objects using metadata is an eye-opening experience for many of them.
Another example that gets students thinking