Conference Agenda

Panel Proposers

Sofia Papastamkou & Stefan Krebs (C²DH, Ranke.2)

Measuring the Impact of Open Educational Resources on Digital Methods for Humanists

The rise of digital humanities (DH) in the early 2000s was paired with an inherent tension regarding pedagogy and education. On the one hand, humanists need to appropriate and integrate digital technologies in their research and teaching, both processes being subject to what has been qualified as “digital interferences” (Lucchesi 2020). On the other hand, the higher education institutions prove(d) slow to adapt their curricula to these needs. In this context, informal networks of scholars stepped in to fulfil training needs on an ad hoc basis (workshops, summer schools, THATCamps…) acting as a sort of “invisible college” for digital humanities (Crymble 2021). This both community-led and open pedagogy (Kirschenbaum 2010, Varin 2013) produced pedagogical outputs, electronically published and openly distributed thanks to the web technologies, now widely known as open educational resources (OER) as per UNESCO’s definition.

In this context, over the past couple of decades, several online platforms that propose OER for digital methods and skills in the humanities and arts have emerged (see e.g. Schriebman et al. 2016; Edmond & Garnett 2017). These projects are committed to open access and generate community engagement in various forms, whether top-down, bottom-up or mixed. Eventually, they also contribute to a linguistically more diverse DH landscape, either by being multilingual or by publishing non-English resources.

The span of life of OER in DH allows us to have the necessary distance, and data, to ask the question of their impact to the community. Impact is a large concept that can be understood in different ways. Following a macro level definition provided by the OECD, impact would address the “so what?” question: the difference a given intervention can make and its potential transformative effects. We propose a panel as stakeholders in three publishing initiatives of open educational resources on digital methods for the Humanities: DARIAH-Campus (https://campus.dariah.eu/), Programming Historian (https://programminghistorian.org/) and Ranke.2 (https://ranke2.uni.lu/). The panel focuses on possible ways of measuring and understanding the impact of the lessons we publish for the purpose of better serving the expectations of the communities involved: publishers, authors and various contributors (translators, reviewers...), educators and learners, as well as various supporters. The panel will consist of three presentations (10 minutes each) and a joint discussion (30 minutes).

Evaluating the (Re-)Use of Open Educational Resources: the case of Ranke.2

Sofia Papastamkou (C²DH, Ranke.2)

In the recent scientific literature on OER, impact seems to be synonymous principally with their (re)use, e.g. by educators integrating them in their teaching practices or by learners to fulfil their training needs (Manju & Batt 2021) or indeed in the sense of “any types of reworking activities that secondary users engage with when they work with resources that have been produced by primary creators, such as modifying, adapting, remixing, translating, repurposing, personalising or re-reversioning” (Pulker 2020).

The focus of this talk is the project Ranke.2 (ranke.uni.lu), a history-oriented teaching and training platform on digital source criticism. Launched in 2018, Ranke.2 is a top-down initiative, open to the community, the existence of which is intertwined with the constitution of a digital history interdisciplinary centre (Centre for Contemporary and Digital History) at the University of Luxembourg.

The paper will use quantitative and qualitative findings from Ranke.2, to explore how educators made use of the lessons in their courses, how they adapted them to their teaching needs and what were the learning outcomes their students achieved. This will help us to better understand the users’ perspective on OER, and what we can learn from it to improve our teaching resources. Beyond uses, the talk will also lean on a broader framework as per (Ebner et al. 2022) to propose an overall assessment of impact and appreciate the investment of various types of resources on the production of such OER.

Going Beyond Quantitative Metrics to Evaluate OER: the case of Programming Historian

Anisa Hawes (Programming Historian), Charlotte Chevrie (Programming Historian)

Programming Historian englobes four Diamond Open Access journals (English, español, français, português) publishing ‘novice-friendly, peer-reviewed lessons that help humanists learn a wide range of digital tools, techniques, and workflows to facilitate research and teaching’.

Programming Historian lessons are created by a global community of authors, editors, peer-reviewers and translators who have collaborated to create more than 200 lessons. Since our online launch in 2012, our website has had over 10.8 million page views. That is 6.1 million unique users from countries across every continent. Analysis of web traffic data has allowed us to track patterns of global and local usage, and better understand the diversity of digital humanities skills sought and needed across different cultural contexts (Crymble & Im 2023).

As part of our commitment to open source values and practices, we publish all our journals under the CC-BY 4.0 Licence. Within its terms, the CC-BY Licence enables each of our four journals to translate, adapt and localise what we have already published across their collective directories. A broader impetus for choosing a licence which offers the freedom of adaptation and circulation is that it opens opportunities for others to do the same.

Various non-affiliated groups and individuals have already taken up the opportunity to translate and localise some of our lessons for their own audience. Mapping of initiatives that emerge from the opportunity offered by our CC-BY Licence as self-organised ‘community teams’ is an alternative way of visualising Programming Historian’s reach.

Meanwhile, a growing network of educators regularly centre our lessons within their classrooms. This involves agile adaptation of text and code upon screen, to voice and action in the classroom. Some educators and institutions have developed their own teaching models which integrate and build upon the lessons we publish. Capturing this use of Programming Historian in teaching is another prism through which we can measure our impact.

Beyond quantitative metrics, this presentation will explore possible qualitative measures for evaluating how learners and educators in our communities experience, use and re-use our resources.

Exploring the User Base of OER: the case of DARIAH-Campus

Vicky Garnett (DARIAH-EU / Trinity College Dublin)

Siobhán McElduff (Trinity College Dublin)

DARIAH is the ‘Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities’, an EU-wide organisation that supports the research and professional practices of scholars and practitioners in the Digital Arts and Humanities. DARIAH-Campus is the hub for training resources developed within the wider DARIAH eco-system. It functions as both a discovery framework for resources hosted on third-party websites, and as a hosting platform to publish new training resources directly: the majority of resources catalogued on DARIAH-Campus are ‘External Resources’, that is those hosted on third-party websites (usually project or institution websites). Some resources are published directly to DARIAH-Campus (‘Hosted Resources’). In addition to these two main resource types, DARIAH-Campus also offers a means to ‘capture’ live training events, in a structure that mimics the programme of the event, compiling presentation slides, videos, speaker biographies and event photos.

There are two key audiences for DARIAH-Campus: those who publish training content on the platform (in whichever form); and those who use the training and learning content on the platform as either supporting resources in the provision of training, or as resources for personal skills development and lifelong learning. Much of the outreach activities to date has been with the view to encourage content providers to publish their resources to DARIAH-Campus, and this has been successful. However, having achieved a strong representation on DARIAH-Campus of excellent Digital Humanities training content from the DH community, we want to start placing more emphasis on building the consumer-base: those who use the training and learning materials.

This paper will therefore showcase the initial results of a long-term project investigating the uses of DARIAH-Campus within the broader community of scholars, educators and practitioners in the Digital Humanities, and what barriers and opportunities exist to accessing and utilising the training and learning resources available on online platforms.

Panellists & Moderator [live session]

Panellists

Vicky Garnett (DARIAH-Campus)

Anisa Hawes (Programming Historian)

Sofia Papastamkou (C²DH, Ranke.2)

Moderator

Stefan Krebs (C²DH, Ranke.2)