A Decade in Digital Humanities

The paper reviews the meaning and development of digital humanities giving the examples of work published in various DH areas. The paper discusses what using these technologies means for the humanities, giving recommendations that can be useful across the sector. This is the paper published from Melissa Terras' professorial lecture at University College London

Crowdsourcing Bentham: beyond the traditional boundaries of academic history

Transcribe Bentham is an award-winning crowdsourced manuscript transcription initiative that intends to engage students, researchers, and the general public with the thought and life of the philosopher and reformer, Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), by making available digital images of his manuscripts for anyone, anywhere in the world, to transcribe. In the two years since its launch in September 2010, over two million words of crowdsourced transcription have been produced by volunteers. This paper will examine Transcribe Bentham’s contribution to humanities research and the burgeoning field of digital humanities, within the context of crowdsourcing. It will then discuss the potential for the project’s volunteers to make significant new discoveries among the vast Bentham Papers collection, and examine several examples of interesting material transcribed by volunteers thus far. We demonstrate here that a crowd-sourced initiative such as Transcribe Bentham can open up activities that were traditionally viewed as academic endeavours to a wider audience interested in history, whilst uncovering new, important historical primary source material. In addition, we see this as a switch in focus for those involved in digital humanities, highlighting the possibilities in using online and social media technologies for user engagement and participation in cultural heritage

Family Digital Literacy Practices and Children’s Mobile Phone Use

Smart phones are ubiquitous in everyday life and are having a major impact on work, education, social relationships and modes of communication. Children are the fastest growing population of smart phone users, with use often focusing around internet access, e.g., 1 in 3 internet users in the UK are under 18 years of age. Despite their widespread use, relatively little is known about the factors that underpin children’s use. The home is a significant ecological context of development and recent research has highlighted the importance of the home environment in promoting and supporting the development of both safe and unsafe online behavior. Yet the importance of these influences currently remains relatively unrecognized. Therefore, in this paper we present a narrative review of evidence examining parental practices concerning digital communication technologies and applications, with a particular focus on smartphones, and how they relate to the use of technology by their children. Emerging evidence to date indicates that two important factors are at play. Firstly, parental technology use is closely related to that of their child. Secondly, that despite parents frequently voiced concerns about the nature and extent of their child’s mobile phone use, parents themselves often engage in a number of unsafe internet behaviors and excessive phone use in the home environment. Our review identifies two crucial lines of enquiry that have yet to be comprehensively pursued by researchers in the field: firstly, the adoption of a psychological perspective on children’s emergent behaviors with mobile devices and secondly, the influential role of context. Given parental concerns about the possible negative impact of technologies, parental awareness should be raised about the influence of their behavior in the context of internet safety along with the adoption of good digital literacy practices. It is anticipated that a comprehensive characterization of the associated contextual factors influencing smartphone use will serve as a catalyst for debate, discussion, and future research

A conceptual framework for learners self-directing their learning in MOOCs: components, enablers and inhibitors

The conceptual framework presented in this chapter describes the learning components influencing the learning experiences of adult informal learners engaged in MOOCs offered on the FutureLearn platform. It consists of five learning components: individual characteristics, technology, individual & social learning, organising learning, and context. These five learning components are driven by two enablers or inhibitors of learning: motivation and learning goals. For adult informal learners, motivation is mostly intrinsic, and learning goals are mostly personal. This research investigated the informal learning of 56 adult learners with prior online experience, as they studied various subjects in MOOCs. Literature on MOOCs, mobile and informal learning provides scientific support, in addition to literature clarifying the rationale for self-directed learning as a focus of investigation. The participants of this study voluntarily followed one of three FutureLearn courses that were rolled out for the first time at the end of 2014. Data were collected at three stages through an online survey (pre-course), self-reported learning logs (during the course), and semi-structured one-on-one interviews (post-course). The data were analysed using Charmaz’s (2014) method for constructing a grounded theory

Mapping the Bentham Corpus

University College London (UCL) owns a large corpus of the philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). Until recently, these papers were for the most part untranscribed, so that very few people had access to the corpus to evaluate its content and its value. The corpus is now being digitized and transcribed thanks to a large number of volunteers recruited through a crowd-sourcing initiative called Transcribe Bentham (Causer and Terras, 2014a, 2014b). The problem researchers are facing with such a corpus is clear: how to access the content, how to structure these 30,000 files, and how to get relevant access to this mass of data? Our goal has thus been to produce an automatic analysis procedure aiming at providing a general characterization of the content of the corpus. We are more specifically interested in identifying the main topics and their structure so as to provide meaningful static and dynamic representations of their evolution over time

Extra-Organizational Learning: Learning Beyond Organizational Boundaries

Organizational scholars have studied learning processes within and across organizational boundaries. In this paper, we introduce the concept of extra-organizational learning to explain the mechanisms that enable learning among external individuals who are not bound to the focal organization by an employment contract and yet their tasks benefit the focal organization. We study the crowdsourcing project Transcribe Bentham, where the crowd transcribes documents of historical importance, and show how participants learn by doing and by socially interacting with experts from the organization. We explain how this process of extra-organizational learning differs from known processes of inter-organizational learning and crowdsourcing as ‘distant search’ and we discuss implications for the organizational learning literature

Learners Self-directing Learning in FutureLearn MOOCs: A Learner-Centered Study

This qualitative research study focuses on how experienced online learners self-direct their learning while engaging in a MOOC delivered on the FutureLearn platform. Self-directed learning is an important concept within informal learning and online learning. This study distinguishes itself from previous MOOC learner studies, by reporting the self-directed learning using a bottom-up approach. By looking at self-reported learning logs and interview transcripts an in-depth analysis of the self-directed learning is achieved. The data analysis used constructed grounded theory, which aligns with the bottom-up approach where the learner data is coded and investigated in an open, yet evidence-based way, leaving room for insights to emerge from the learner data. The data corpus is based on 56 participants following three FutureLearn MOOCs, providing 147 learning logs and 19 semi-structured one-on-one interviews with a selection of participants. The results show five specific areas in which learners react with either the material or other learners to self-direct their learning: context, individual or social learning, technology and media provided in the MOOCs, learner characteristics and organising learning. This study also indicates how intrinsic motivation and personal learning goals are the main inhibitors or enablers of self-directed learning

The British Library Big Data Experiment: Experimental Interfaces, Experimental Teaching

Many digital humanities–taught programmes aim to engage undergraduate and postgraduate humanists with computational methods and practices (Hirsch, 2012; Cohen and Scheinfeldt, 2013). It is relatively rare, however, to routinely engage computer scientists with the needs, methods, and worldview of historians, literature scholars, librarians, and related researchers (Spiro, 2012). This poster describes an ongoing collaboration between British Library Digital Research and the UCL Department of Computer Science (UCLCS), facilitated by the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities (UCLDH), that enables and engages students in computer science with humanities research issues as part of their core assessed work. We demonstrate that CS students can provide an experimental test-bed for developing, exploring, and exploiting technical infrastructure and digital content in ways that may benefit humanities researchers within a library context. Encouraging students to develop skills in a new (and often foreign) domain encourages their critical thinking and provides real-world, complex issues that stretch and develop their technical abilities as well as their understanding of user requirements. Furthermore, from the problems, issues, and potentials such collaborative working raises, we learn more about the nature of computational infrastructure we rely on for research, and perceptions of the institutions’ core business in delivering digital content. As the British Library has a vision for transforming access to and research with its digital collections, the British Library Big Data Experiment forms an important complement to the British Library’s ongoing infrastructure activities through enabling the development of experimental services that offer unconventional engagement with its digital collections (Farquhar and Baker, 2014). All taught programmes in UCLCS require students to undertake an industry exchange 4 where they work in teams as clients to an industry partner. Though UCLCS has experience with developing student projects in partnership with digital humanists (Martin et al., 2012), industry partners have tended to come from the financial or manufacturing sectors. The British Library Big Data Experiment is an umbrella for a series of activities where the British Library is the client for assessed UCLCS project work, allowing for a rolling, responsive program of experimental design, development, and testing of infrastructure and systems. At agreed milestones during the project, the British Library provides access to required data, knowledge of data structures, and project requirements. UCLCS and UCLDH jointly provide technical and academic support to the student teams. In June 2014 the first British Library Big Data Experiment team was convened with a dissertation project, submitted in fulfilment of the MSc in Software Systems Engineering (Georgiou, Stavrou) and Computer Science (Alborzpour, Wong), using a collection of circa 68,000 17th- to 19th-century digitised volumes to underpin the design of a research-oriented web-based service. Microsoft Azure 5 APIs were implemented that functionally scale to the data, whilst the students worked in close consultation with humanities researchers who may wish to use the capabilities of such a system. The final public output (http://blpublicdomain.azurewebsites.net/) represents an attempt to capture the complex and multifaceted needs of humanities researchers whilst offering unconventional services such as bulk download of text based on metadata queries, word frequency lists, and OCR text previews. Following this successful pilot, the British Library Big Data Experiment is undertaking further collaborative work, including machine learning and mobile app development strands in autumn/winter 2014 and a second MSc dissertation project in summer 2015. Both UCLCS and its students have an appetite for embedding problems faced by memory institutions within CS learning outcomes. In partaking in such truly interdisciplinary project work, students develop new skill sets, question their assumptions about the role of library and humanities scholars, and provide useful experimental design within the institutional context. In addition, having CS students engage with humanities scholars as a routine part of their degree allows humanists to understand their research needs and institutional structures, from a different perspective. We present the British Library Big Data Experiment as a model ripe for reuse and we argue that the benefits of such collaborative programmes outweigh potential risks. The Big Data Experiment is, then, both an experiment in teaching and an experiment in involving and integrating those undertaking advanced study in computer science into memory institutions and humanities scholarship

Performance and long-term stability of the barley hordothionin gene in multiple transgenic apple lines

Introduction of sustainable scab resistance in elite apple cultivars is of high importance for apple cultivation when aiming at reducing the use of chemical crop protectants. Genetic modification (GM) allows the rapid introduction of resistance genes directly into high quality apple cultivars. Resistance genes can be derived from apple itself but genetic modification also opens up the possibility to use other, non-host resistance genes. A prerequisite for application is the long-term performance and stability of the gene annex trait in the field. For this study, we produced and selected a series of transgenic apple lines of two cultivars, i.e. ‘Elstar’ and ‘Gala’ in which the barley hordothionin gene (hth) was introduced. After multiplication, the GM hth-lines, non-GM susceptible and resistant controls and GM non-hth controls were planted in a random block design in a field trial in 40 replicates. Scab resistance was monitored after artificial inoculation (first year) and after natural infection (subsequent years). After the trial period, the level of expression of the hth gene was checked by quantitative RT-PCR. Four of the six GM hth apple lines proved to be significantly less susceptible to apple scab and this trait was found to be stable for the entire 4-year period. Hth expression at the mRNA level was also stable