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Thursday, November 27, 2014

Five things we mean when we say digital humanities

Libraries as Problem Shapers: some thoughts sparked by Brian Croxall (five things that we mean when we say digital humanities)

Brian Mathews (Virginia Tech.) comments: It was great to learn about Emory’s Center for Digital Scholarship but the real reason Brian Croxall was on campus was to talk about digital humanities. We hosted him in the library and his talk was insightful and entertaining.
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The main takeaway for me was his five things that we mean when we say digital humanities:
  1. Humanistic examination of digital objects
  2. Digital scholarly communication
  3. Digital pedagogy
  4. Creation of digital archives and primary source materials
  5. Digital examination of Humanistic objects
 From: The Ubiquitous Librarian, 24th November 2014

Sunday, November 9, 2014

Can universities survive the digital age?


The fifth annual international IE University conference on “Reinventing Higher Education” discussed Bologna, English as the lingua franca and engagement between business and universities. But perhaps it will be the ‘digital natives’ of the next generation who will be higher education’s greatest challenge...

“I was not taught digital marketing in my degree because the change in the business model was so rapid that the university did not have time to adapt,” said Cristina Rojas, 23, an economics graduate.

Rojas added that in 2013 Facebook and Twitter were only known as social networks, they had not developed their marketing potential online and “professors did not even know that they existed”...

Santiago IƱiguez, President of IE University, concluded: “The Millennial generation is creative, cosmopolitan, entrepreneurial, sociable, with a distinctive global awareness and commitment, and they demand more control over their own learning experience.

From: University World News, Paul Rigg, 31 Oct 2014, Issue no. 341

Thursday, October 30, 2014

How to transform the higher education sector in South Africa

 How to transform the higher education sector 

The role of universities in fostering both their own transformation and the transformation of society at large came under intense scrutiny in a packed Baxter Concert Hall on 21 October 2014. Top university leaders debated issues of transformation in a discussion organised by UCT’s Faculty of Humanities and chaired by its dean, Professor Sakhela Buhlungu.
Transformation Debate

Watch the video of the debate
Sharing the panel with UCT Vice-Chancellor Dr Max Price were Professor Jonathan Jansen, rector and vice-chancellor of the University of the Free State, and Professor Mamokgethi Phakeng, vice principal for research and innovation at the University of South Africa.

From: UCT's Daily News, 21 October 2014, Story by Yusuf Omar, Image by Michael Hammond

Monday, September 15, 2014

Reports on Humanities in SA - relevancy & future actions 2014+?

  1. Report on the Charter for Humanities and Social Sciences 2011

Report commissioned by the Minister of Higher Education & Training for the charter for Humanities and Social Sciences June 2011
Department Higher Education and Training, Republic of South Africa

2. Consensus Study on the State of Humanities in South Africa: status, prospects and strategies

Published by the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf)  August 2011
ISBN- 978-0-9814159-3-2

Friday, September 12, 2014

Humanities Graduates valued/needed?

Move over, Stem: why the world needs humanities graduates

Global problems can't be resolved without a humanities perspective, so academics need to get out into the world and make the case for their subject...

So what's up with our cloistered historians and philosophers, our literary critics, classicists and scholars of the fine, performing and otherwise liberal arts? Clearly there's some gathering global anxiety within the academy and it's mainly around the difficulty of getting broader social recognition for the two convictions about humanities that are motivating these discussions.

Humanities graduates have unique skills

Humanities perspective is needed in all global challenges

From: The Guardian's Higher Education Network, posted by Paul Smith 19 March 2014
Paul Smith is director of the British Council in the US. He spoke at Oxford University as part of the activist humanities conference.

 

Monday, June 2, 2014

Academics Anonymous...

Academics Anonymous: break down barriers between disciplines

 & Three ways we are stifling research

Universities are outdated – big problems require thinkers who can transcend the traditional boundaries between subjects
academics working
Academics from different disciplines need to work together more. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian
The world is changing at an incredible rate. Pressing problems like climate change and the related social unrest are connected to an ever-growing population and dwindling resources. It has become clear that these vast problems cannot be answered by single academic disciplines, working within archaic institutional settings and throttled by systemic boundaries.
Working across disciplines is the key to answering the big questions, focusing on what is needed to solve problems, and transcending the boundaries of conventional approaches and disciplines. However, in academia we have put boundaries in place to stop this happening, and the pace of change to adopt new strategies is glacial at best.
From: The Guardian, Higher Education Network  30 May 2014

Thursday, May 22, 2014

Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme Report

together with African Minds 
and SARUA, (Southern African Regional Universities Association)
 has just produced an important report
 (authors: Henry Trotter, Catherine Kell, Michelle Willmers, Eve Gray & Thomas King)
entitled  

"SEEKING IMPACT AND VISIBILITY : Scholarly Communication in Southern Africa"

From the executive summary:

African scholarly research is relatively invisible for three primary reasons:
1. While research production on the continent is growing in absolute terms, it is
falling in comparative terms (especially as other Southern countries such as China
ramp up research production), reducing its relative visibility.
2. Traditional metrics of visibility (especially the ISI/WoS Impact Factor) which
measure only formal scholar-to-scholar outputs (journal articles and books) fail to
make legible a vast amount of African scholarly production, thus underestimating
the amount of research activity on the continent.
3. Many African universities do not take a strategic approach to scholarly
communication, nor utilise appropriate information and communications
technologies (ICTs) and Web 2.0 technologies to broaden the reach of their
scholars’ work or curate it for future generations, thus inadvertently minimising
the impact and visibility of African research.

Recommendations: 
To university administrations
•Offer a reduction in teaching time to scholars who demonstrate ambitious research activity.
•Establish digital platforms for sharing publication success by university scholars.
•Develop policies mandating that all publicly funded research be made open access
•Put all university-affiliated journals online and make them open access
•Induce academic staff to create personal profiles on their departmental web pages
•Establish or identify support service providers who can translate scholars’ research for government- and community-based audiences.
•Develop a network of communication officers/content managers so that disparate dissemination activity can be pursued in a more cohesive and strategic manner.
•Encourage scholars to share their research insights on Wikipedia.
•Invest in training for library staff so that they can operate effectively in the new scholarly communication landscape.
•Train and incentivise scholars to use Web 2.0 platforms
 To university scholars
• Share responsibility with the administration for research visibility. Communicate research findings to the audiences that could best leverage them for developmental purposes.

Thursday, January 30, 2014

Digital Humanities

How the Humanities Compute in the Classroom

Computer-assisted scholarship in the humanities dates back decades. In the past five years, though, the kinds of work collectively known as the digital humanities have taken on fresh luster. Observers have called this technology-inflected research "the next big thing."
Beyond the headlines and hoopla, digital scholarship has begun to work its way into the academic ecosystem. In the following collection of articles, read more about how the digital humanities play now in the undergraduate classroom, whether they pay off in tenure and promotion, and what it takes to create a work of digital scholarship that will last.

- See more at: http://m.chronicle.com/article/How-the-Humanities-Compute-in/143809/?cid=wb#sthash.ttugUO0c.dpuf
Computer-assisted scholarship in the humanities dates back decades. In the past five years, though, the kinds of work collectively known as the digital humanities have taken on fresh luster. Observers have called this technology-inflected research "the next big thing."
Beyond the headlines and hoopla, digital scholarship has begun to work its way into the academic ecosystem. In the following collection of articles, read more about how the digital humanities play now in the undergraduate classroom, whether they pay off in tenure and promotion, and what it takes to create a work of digital scholarship that will last.

- See more at: http://m.chronicle.com/article/How-the-Humanities-Compute-in/143809/?cid=wb#sthash.ttugUO0c.dpuf
 Computer assisted research in the humanities dates back decades. In the past five years, though, the kinds of work collectively known as the digital humanities have taken on fresh luster...digital scholarship has begun to work its way into the academic ecosystem. Read more for how digital humanities play out in the classroom and for collection of articles.

From: Chronicle of Higher Education, Marc Parry, January 6 2014
Computer-assisted scholarship in the humanities dates back decades. In the past five years, though, the kinds of work collectively known as the digital humanities have taken on fresh luster. Observers have called this technology-inflected research "the next big thing." - See more at: http://m.chronicle.com/article/How-the-Humanities-Compute-in/143809/?cid=wb#sthash.ttugUO0c.dpuf
Computer-assisted scholarship in the humanities dates back decades. In the past five years, though, the kinds of work collectively known as the digital humanities have taken on fresh luster. Observers have called this technology-inflected research "the next big thing."
Beyond the headlines and hoopla, digital scholarship has begun to work its way into the academic ecosystem. In the following collection of articles, read more about how the digital humanities play now
- See more at: http://m.chronicle.com/article/How-the-Humanities-Compute-in/143809/?cid=wb#sthash.ttugUO0c.d
Computer-assisted scholarship in the humanities dates back decades. In the past five years, though, the kinds of work collectively known as the digital humanities have taken on fresh luster. Observers have called this technology-inflected research "the next big thing."
Beyond the headlines and hoopla, digital scholarship has begun to work its way into the academic ecosystem. In the following collection of articles, read more about how the digital humanities play now
- See more at: http://m.chronicle.com/article/How-the-Humanities-Compute-in/143809/?cid=wb#sthash.ttugUO0c.dpuf
Computer-assisted scholarship in the humanities dates back decades. In the past five years, though, the kinds of work collectively known as the digital humanities have taken on fresh luster. Observers have called this technology-inflected research "the next big thing."
Beyond the headlines and hoopla, digital scholarship has begun to work its way into the academic ecosystem. In the following collection of articles, read more about how the digital humanities play now
- See more at: http://m.chronicle.com/article/How-the-Humanities-Compute-in/143809/?cid=wb#sthash.ttugUO0c.d
Computer-assisted scholarship in the humanities dates back decades. In the past five years, though, the kinds of work collectively known as the digital humanities have taken on fresh luster. Observers have called this technology-inflected research "the next big thing."
Beyond the headlines and hoopla, digital scholarship has begun to work its way into the academic ecosystem. In the following collection of articles, read more about how the digital humanities play now in the undergraduate classroom, whether they pay off in tenure and promotion, and what it takes to create a work of digital scholarship that will last.
- See more at: http://m.chronicle.com/article/How-the-Humanities-Compute-in/143809/?cid=wb#sthash.ttugUO0c.dpuf
Computer-assisted scholarship in the humanities dates back decades. In the past five years, though, the kinds of work collectively known as the digital humanities have taken on fresh luster. Observers have called this technology-inflected research "the next big thing."
Beyond the headlines and hoopla, digital scholarship has begun to work its way into the academic ecosystem. In the following collection of articles, read more about how the digital humanities play now in the undergraduate classroom, whether they pay off in tenure and promotion, and what it takes to create a work of digital scholarship that will last.
- See more at: http://m.chronicle.com/article/How-the-Humanities-Compute-in/143809/?cid=wb#sthash.ttugUO0c.dpuf
Computer-assisted scholarship in the humanities dates back decades. In the past five years, though, the kinds of work collectively known as the digital humanities have taken on fresh luster. Observers have called this technology-inflected research "the next big thing."
Beyond the headlines and hoopla, digital scholarship has begun to work its way into the academic ecosystem. In the following collection of articles, read more about how the digital humanities play now in the undergraduate classroom, whether they pay off in tenure and promotion, and what it takes to create a work of digital scholarship that will last.
- See more at: http://m.chronicle.com/article/How-the-Humanities-Compute-in/143809/?cid=wb#sthash.ttugUO0c.dpuf
Computer-assisted scholarship in the humanities dates back decades. In the past five years, though, the kinds of work collectively known as the digital humanities have taken on fresh luster. Observers have called this technology-inflected research "the next big thing."
Beyond the headlines and hoopla, digital scholarship has begun to work its way into the academic ecosystem. In the following collection of articles, read more about how the digital humanities play now in the undergraduate classroom, whether they pay off in tenure and promotion, and what it takes to create a work of digital scholarship that will last.
- See more at: http://m.chronicle.com/article/How-the-Humanities-Compute-in/143809/?cid=wb#sthash.ttugUO0c.dpuf