14 research outputs found
The ChatGPT hype as a medium to popularize and jeopardize social debates about values and virtues in education
No full textAfter two months of intense debate about ChatGPT3 in the classroom, it seems unlikely that the structure and organization of education will disruptively change. The narratives and arguments were not entirely new, but OpenAI and ChatGPT3 provided props and thrilling playgrounds to make-believe different worlds and share fascinating stories, even without believing them themselves. This presentation examines functions and linguistic features of “futuristic communication” (Grunwald 2013) and make-believe (Roßmann 2021) to explain the motivation of hyping and the emergence of hype about ChatGPT3 in education and compares it to earlier debates about Wikipedia and MOOCs in education.Hype and alarmism create hyperbolic levels of attention and expectations around issues and easily jeopardize health decisions, resources, and trust in science. ‘Hyping’ is overstating the certainty and relevance of facts and, thus, violates norms of science communication (Intemann 2020). Revealing and distinguishing different functions of future-oriented communication, however, allow us to explain what motivates unintentional and strategic pretense.Most prominently, political economy studies suggested that many future-oriented practices do not aim to factually realize a project but instead manipulate the value of research assets (Birch 2017). The Sociology of Expectation highlights a coordination function, as stakeholders mutually observe and adjust their projected actions (Borup et al. 2006). Hermeneutic Technology Assessment (Grunwald 2020) understands visionary communication as a relevant medium for social debates about related values and virtues. And finally, the philosophy of imagination (Kind 2016) discusses how constraining the imagination allows learning.The focus of this talk is on the theoretical development of our empirical approach to technology hype in education. We aim to illustrate how hype dynamics work and accelerate by attention patterns and linguistic features of an inverted ‘Chinese whisper’ effect that helps to spread the most extraordinary stories which then call for a sobering critique that maintains their topicality
Column: Drug crime can’t be broken down simply into a battle of ‘good’ versus ‘evil’.
No full textThe link between educational underachievement, literacy, social empowerment and a drugs and crime culture is real and also extremely complex, says Aodhán Ó Ríordáin.
It may seem obvious, but the first challenge for all of us trying to tackle drug use and criminality is to care. As George Bernard Shaw said: indifference is the essence of inhumanity.
Firstly I want to plant a thought into your heads before returning to it later. Writing in the Guardian newspaper last year, the author Neil Gaiman told how he once attended a lecture organised by private prison operators in the United States. In planning for the future capacity needs in this service 15 years into the future, the prison industry employed a very simple test – the percentage of 10 and 11 year old children in any given district with acute literacy problems.
The link between educational underachievement, social empowerment and a drugs and crime culture is real and also extremely complex. There are no simple ways to describe the problem, to address it or to solve it. It is my contention that it is only a society ill at ease with itself – rife with inequalities visible and invisible, refusing to challenge or to re-invent itself – that is destined to produce a culture that is so vicious and so deadly and causes so much human hurt and suffering.
Using simplistic, evocative, exploitative or sensationalist language does not inform the discussion. In my view, it turns what is a public policy emergency into comic-book-style pseudo-entertainment....
"... But What Should {I} Put in a Digital Apparatus?" {A} Not-So-Obvious Choice: New Types of Digital Scholarly Editions
No full textWe propose to develop / expand the concept of “digital edition of a text”. The specific value of a digital edition is not only in the digital form of representation of textual information: dynamic rather than static, resulting in better visual or practical usability, but it mainly lays in the ability to work with computational methods on the text and on the information it conveys. Therefore the digital edition of a text should aim to provide adequate data and functionality to further forms of processing.
Hence the idea that the “digital scholarly edition” until now often identified with the “digital critical edition”, can also take other forms focused on other types of ‘scholarly research’: from the geographical knowledge contained in the text, to the historical knowledge (time and events) often inextricably linked with the prosopography, and much more.
If the digital critical edition is a type of digital scholarly edition containing an apparatus that analyzes and describes the state of the text in the witnesses, then we can conceive e.g.
the digital scholarly geographical edition of a work – whose apparatus contains an analytical description of the geographical knowledge contained in the placenames;
the digital critical geographical edition whose geographical apparatus is layered over a base critical edition:
The knowledge contained in the text must be expressed in a highly formal manner – the same way that the critical apparatus is a highly formal device – by means of an ontology. The ontology both from a philosophical or a computer science point of view is a structure aimed to analyse and describe the categorical hierarchy of a specific domain, analysing its basic constituents (entities like objects, events, processes, etc.), the properties characterizing them and the relationships which correlate them. The resulting (structural) representation of knowledge allows to resolve conceptual or terminological inconsistencies, providing a dictionary of terms formulated in a canonical syntax and with commonly accepted definitions. It also provides a lexical or taxonomic framework for the representation of knowledge, shared by different communities of information systems that can range across several domains.
From a scholarly point of view we can also add that digital critical editions of classical works whose textual tradition is made of many witnesses are still very rare. The ancient literatures scholars usually ask to the digital no more than authoritative collections of texts (TLG, PHI, and online digital libraries). So the opportunity to enrich the digital text with variants (especially from a new collation of manuscripts) has known little practical application. The peculiar nature of textual variance in classical texts, where the discarded lesson is a mistake to recognize and remove, contributes to this closure face to the opportunities of the digital. Consequently a digital critical edition aimed to include a bigger number of variants – that is ‘errors’ – than in printed format is unsustainable in terms of cost / benefit evaluation. Thus a new space for reflection opens, no longer linked to the form (that is to the textual tradition) but to the content of the text formally analysed in the apparatus, which might be thought of as a space open to contain other, new, kinds of knowledge
Workshop proceeding - Labs for Labs: A participatory workshop on digital lab practices in the humanities and social sciences
No full textBrief description This half-day workshop was designed as a participant-led knowledge sharing platform for digitally-oriented labs in the humanities and social sciences. Individuals managing labs (e.g., directors and software engineers), those affiliated to labs (e.g., project coordinators, researchers, educators. etc.), those who make use of labs (teaching staff, researchers etc.), or who have an interest in developing a new digital lab or expanding existing ones, were welcome to participate. The workshop provided the opportunity to share experiences and learn from others on both the intellectual and operational function of labs, aiming to exchange good practices for successful and sustainable digital labs. Two existing labs of differing scales and levels of maturity led the facilitation of the workshop: The Plant (Playground and Laboratory for New Technologies) at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University and King's Digital Lab (KDL), King's College London. Format Half day workshop, total: 4 hours PART 1: Lightning papers: Sharing Knowledge, Wisdoms, and Practices Lightning paper session (75 mins) 5-7 minutes per paper c.30 min discussion Break 15 minutes PART 2: Design Thinking Activity: Good Practices for Sustainable, Inclusive, and Collaborative labs Brainstorming in small groups divided based on the above topics (60 mins): Break 15 minutes Convergence phase (60min) Round of Presentations of the findings per topic Drafting a Lab Manifesto Closing remarks (15 mins) List of presenters Maastricht University & King's Digital Lab - Workshop Introduction Alexander Czmiel - TELOTA, Berlin-Brandenburg Academy Leif Isaksen - Exeter DH Lab Natalia Ermolaev - Centre for DH, Princeton Sebastian Flick - Data Science Lab and Digital Humanities, Uni. of Bern Fabian Cremer and Thorsten Wübbena - DH Lab, Institute of European History (IEG), Mainz Michael Donnay - Digital Humanities Research Hub, School of Advanced Study, Uni. of London Alison Langmead - Visual Media Workshop, Uni. of Pittsburgh
Labs for Labs: a participatory workshop on digital lab practices in the humanities and social sciences
No full textThis is a half-day workshop designed as a participant-led knowledge sharing platform for digitally-oriented labs in the humanities and social sciences. Individuals managing labs (e.g., directors and software engineers), those affiliated to labs (e.g., project coordinators, researchers, educators. etc.), those who make use of labs (teaching staff, researchers etc.), or who have an interest in developing a new digital lab or expanding existing ones, are welcome to participate. The workshop will provide the opportunity to share experiences and learn from others on both the intellectual and operational function of labs, aiming to exchange good practices for successful and sustainable digital labs. Two existing labs of differing scales and levels of maturity will lead the facilitation of the workshop: The Plant (Playground and Laboratory for New Technologies) at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University and King’s Digital Lab (KDL), King’s College London.BackgroundLabs are becoming increasingly embedded in digital scholarship in the humanities. According to El Khatib et al. (2020) a lab is “a hub for digital scholarship that facilitates and provides both physical and virtual space for collaboration, access to tools and resources, and services for researchers broadly defined, including students, faculty, and staff from across campus and citizen scholars from the local community.” As with many elements of digital scholarship there are different applications of the associated infrastructure and labels used to describe them, such as labs or centres. There are also more epistemic questions as to whether digital labs act as producers of research subjects or containers for them (Malazita et al, 2020). El Khatib et al. (2020) divide digital scholarship centres into two categories “commons-type”, which are service driven, and “lab- or makerspace-type”,which are research-driven and faculty-directed (El Khatib et al., 2020, 12). Pawlicka-Deger (2020) created a typology: “the center-type lab, the techno-science lab, the work station-type lab, the social challenges-centric lab, and virtual lab”, arguing that there has been a shift from laboratories as physical places towards more conceptual ones. Regardless of the terms we use for such infrastructure, and their exact orientation, there is a certain amount of common ground on the positioning of digital labs within the research workflow, while emphasising their vibrant and innovative nature as well as differences based on local contexts (El Khatib, 2020, 13). Alongside the enthusiasm in the uptake of digital approaches to humanities scholarship, such infrastructures also face many challenges that to a large extent mirror the complexity of the socio-technical environments that labs inhabit (Smithies and Ciula, 2020; Ciula and Smithies, forthcoming). There is a high volume of abandoned and discarded projects (Antonijevic, 2015, 148) and a degree of obsolescence both in terms of their outputs and for their existence as a whole. Much of this has to do with how sustainability approaches are defined (Smithies et al., 2019) and how expectations for the future are formed and managed. There are also a multiplicity of matters relating to the physical space they occupy and technology they host, alongside various intellectual matters concerning their role and identity in knowledge creation. For example, conventional academic systems and established norms have repeatedly failed to adapt to the newer roles that emerge alongside labs, such as Research Technology Professionals and Alt-Acs, who perform crucial work in often precarious roles with poor recognition (Ciula, 2022; Papadopoulos and Reilly, 2020; Pawlicka-Deger, 2022). Despite these issues, structural and good practice guidance for labs is rather limited, and this stands to reason given the diverse variety of ambitions, settings, and contexts in which they operate. However, with substantial investment in digital infrastructure, the rapid pace of technological change and a shifting scholarly landscape, including reforms in research assessment and the recognition of atypical outputs, comes a strong need for exchange and collective learning between labs. <br/
ADHO 2019 workshop Accelerating DH Education: Proceedings from the Black Box
Get PDFProceedings of a workshop on 'Accelerating DH Education' at the annual ADHO conference in Utrecht on 8th July 2019. Contents *Workshop summary and outcomes *Presentations *Original workshop abstract accepte
Advances in Digital Scholarly Editing : Papers Presented at the DiXiT Conferences in The Hague, Cologne, and Antwerp
No full textAs the papers in this volume testify, digital scholarly editing is a vibrant practice. Scholarly editing has a long-standing tradition in the humanities. It is of crucial importance within disciplines such as literary studies, philology, history, philosophy, library and information science, and bibliography. In fact, digital scholarly editing represents one of the longest traditions in the field of Digital Humanities — and the theories, concepts, and practices that were designed for editing in a digital environment have in turn deeply influenced the development of Digital Humanities as a discipline. By bringing together the extended abstracts from three conferences organised within the DiXiT project (2013-2017), this volume shows how digital scholarly editing is still developing and constantly redefining itself.DiXiT (Digital Scholarly Editing Initial Training) is one of the most innovative training networks for a new generation of scholars in the field of digital scholarly editing, established by ten leading European institutions from academia, in close collaboration with the private sector and cultural heritage institutions, and funded under the EU’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions. The partners together represent a wide variety of technologies and approaches to European digital scholarly editing.The extended abstracts of the convention contributions assembled in this volume showcase the multiplicity of subjects dealt with in and around the topics of digital editing: from issues of sustainability to changes in publication cultures, from the integrity of research and intellectual rights to mixed methods applied to digital editing — to name only a few.</p
Three Challenges in Developing Open Multilingual DH Educational Resources The Case of The Programming Historian
No full textInternational audienceWhat are the necessary conditions for developing multilingual open DH educational resources? Drawing on the English, Spanish and French-speaking editions of The Programming Historian, the aim of this lightning talk is to discuss three challenges encountered while implementing linguistic and cultural inclusivity and access.The first challenge concerns the internationalization of the Editorial Board and our lessons. In 2016, a Spanish-language team was recruited in order to translate tutorials under the title The Programming Historian en español. In 2018, the Board recruited a French-language sub-team and in April 2019 it launched The Programming Historian en français. The Board also published a set of “Guidelines for writing for a global audience”: authors are encouraged to write tutorials that are as much accessible as possible, having in mind cultural differences. The second challenge is the translation process. The act of translating requires extensive teamwork and coordination across our editorial team. Our translations are adapted to the target audience and they usually contain new instructions that cover the necessary steps to process texts and data in Spanish or French. In addition, these new full-language initiatives have challenged our infrastructure as an Open Access scholarly publication. As we are committed to publishing openly reviewed tutorials to a high standard, there is an extensive set of technical, editorial and administrative processes and policies in place.The third challenge is the production of original lessons in Spanish and French. After translating more than 40 tutorials from English to Spanish, in April 2019, The Programming Historian en español has just released its first two original tutorials in Spanish. The design of a strategy to promote lessons that address research questions relevant for the Hispanic and Francophone communities seems a priority in the near future. Lessons that use alternative methods could contribute to increase the diversity of DH, especially if translated into English
