THATCamp has opened up many opportunities for participants to share and develop skills in areas such as text mining, project management, material culture, and digital pedagogy (to mention just a few of the topics I’ve seen in browsing past THATCamps). But I want to take a step back and ask what are the skills important to digital scholarship?  My interest in the topic comes in part from my work with colleagues on a Mellon-sponsored global benchmarking study examining the skills and competencies necessary to support (and practice) digital scholarship.  I think there are some important commonalities between this proposed session and Rebecca Davis’ proposal to explore “Learning Outcomes for a Globally Networked World,” but the focus here would be more on scholars/librarians/technologists/professionals than undergraduates. (It might be interesting to compare lists of skills and competencies important to these different constituencies.)

In addition to understanding what skills and competencies are important to digital scholarship, I’d also like to explore how best to cultivate these skills. How do digital humanities centers and programs help their members to gain the skills and knowledge to do innovative, significant work? I love the spirit of exploration, collaboration and play embodied by THATCamp, but I also see the need to enable digital humanists at various levels of experience to hone their skills over a longer period of time than a day or a day and a half. (Ryan also points to the need to go beyond 101 in some THATCamp sessions.) Could we imagine new variants of the THATCamp model? Are there possibilities for online/ hybrid training, mentoring, local reading groups, partnerships with DH centers, iterative THATCamps, etc?

One of the key attractions of digital humanities in the undergraduate curriculum  is the promise that it offers a to teach skills needed for the 21st century student.  But, what are those skills? What are the essential learning outcomes needed in a globally networked world and how might digital humanities or, more broadly, digital scholarship help meet those outcomes?  For this session, I propose we look at some suggested lists of learning outcomes and use them to stimulate our thinking about what learning outcomes our institutions might offer to undergraduate students.  Then we will generate our own list(s) of learning outcomes.

This exercise and the lists of learning outcomes comes from Tanya Clement. You can find the lists of outcomes and references here: rebeccafrostdavis.wordpress.com/2013/02/07/learning-outcomes-for-a-globally-networked-world/

Here is my original description from when I conducted this exercise in the past:

Digital technologies and the Internet have changed the context for civic, work, and personal life, forcing the production and exchange of knowledge into an increasingly public, global, collaborative, and networked space, and increasing capacity to tackle complex questions across disciplines. How do we prepare students to be lifelong learners who are adaptive, networked and engaged citizens in this context? While the essential learning outcomes of liberal education promise to prepare students for ever-changing contexts, should we consider additional learning outcomes for the liberally educated student? In this session, we will debate literacies and skills required for today’s knowledge ecosystem, critique proposals for learning outcomes that reflect these new abilities, and formulate essential learning outcomes for liberal education in a globally networked world.

In my university, the European University Institute, Florence, Italy, the Dean of Studies and the Academic Service decided recently to introduce systematically the use of an anti-plagiarism software. The reason is for single Ph.D. researchers to look at the various chapters and drafts of their dissertation during the four years research/writing process and verify the originality of the contents. We want to avoid to have researchers be shamed and expelled out of the community of scholars like this student in Norway!

So, at the end of the process, when the thesis is submitted, each supervisor should perform this new task against plagiarism directly on the manuscript of his/her supervise. This task -and the instruments that are available to perform it- are today an evidence of the worldwide shift towards digital. It is taken for granted that everything we write is somewhere in the virtual space and can be retrieved and analyzed to avoid using someone else’s ideas without acknowledging it. This is an extraordinary shift in the humanities sciences towards “other” humanities. It introduced a bit of digital humanities for everybody in a way!

At the EUI, this task which was performed by the staff of the Dean of Studies and the Academic Service, has now to be performed directly by the thesis supervisor before the decision taken by the departments to officially accept that a candidate submit a thesis for discussion with the jury. The software Turnitin has been chosen and new administrative rules introduced on how to use it. Now, scholars on both side of the Ph.D. writing process: he who writes it and he who is supervising it, are both involved with digital tools. This is something that never happened before.

Introductory courses to plagiarism, originality check, good academic practices and, finally, to Turnitin itself, have been organized for the first time this academic year 2013-2014 for all new doctoral researchers. As History Information Specialist, I was asked to give my contribution both to the general discussion about plagiarism and to the correct way to use quotations in one’s own research/writing activity. As far as the history department is concerned, I am helping to prepare all its members –researchers, fellows and professors- to understand how they should proceed with the software. I will teach some Atelier Multimédia courses about it. For doing so, I would like to have the input of THATcamp Leadership. The first introductory course, the 8th of October will be about Good Academic Practice and the Avoidance of Plagiarism. But it’s not this specific contribution -in the EUI context- that I would like to question here. I would like to bring to the attention of THATcamp Leadership participants, what were the many queries and reflections on the use of such a software that challenged –at least for me- a “simple” task: showing how to use Turnitin. This task became more complicated than I thought. I started to think beyond plagiarism and to look at what an “originality check” was meaning in a new digital scholarly process in the Humanities and History. What could we all do with Turnitin ?  And taken for granted that all EUI scholars will have to use it, what should I tell to those who never used any software before?

So my questions to TC Leadership would be to look at this software (and other similar softwares) from a different viewpoint. Is it possible to allow our community of humanists and social scientists to integrate one of the most important methods that enriched the process of document retrieval and document analysis in the field of Digital Humanities -“text-mining”- when teaching how to use a plagiarism software? Here are some possible issues to discuss during THATcamp:

• Turnitin is a software against plagiarism. Are they any other softwares you would recommend and why? Anything in the OA/OS world ?
• Do you use these softwares only for originality checking and fighting plagiarism?
• Which other tasks could they perform ? Are they allowing us to know more and more easily about the deep web contents? And if so how and why?
• How could we trace the originality of translated texts -from English to other languages and vice-versa-, using different languages corpora?
• Could we think to use Turnitin to understand who is quoting what and in which contexts and the many other ways we interact with big online commercial textual databases like EEBO, ECCO, MOMW I & II, etc., or with open access web databases like Rousseau online ?
• Up to which extend, these textual databases accessed through Turnitin, would allow contextualized keyword searching, similarity searching, frequency searching, etc., so to understand if a quotation we plan to use has already been used entirely or partially in other writings, how, where and by whom?
• Could we perform with Turnitin a much more complex citations search then the one we were allowed to perform from years now with the Web of Knowledge (ISI) when, looking at the footnotes in a scholarly paper, we deduce that if somebody uses the same quotations, he/she may research in the same field and have similar ideas?
• Which text-mining activities are allowed using these software’s if we accept the fact that Turnitin is a good Digital Humanities tool, able to perform one of the most important tasks within “big amount of data’s”: distance/close reading, searching for contexts, origin of quotations, places of words in millions of documents?
• And, as a consequence, could we discuss if this is not only about plagiarism but if these kind of software’s may become a vector to introducing wider communities –not only the digital humanities community- to  new ways to perform their research activities? Are they taking care in a daily research activity -and even without knowing about it-, of some characteristics, of both the linguistic turn and the digital turn if we may use big concepts ?

Turnitin seems to be an instrument that allows new digital experiments with, unfortunately some technical limitations. Our session could try to problematically look at the systematic introduction of these tools in universities worldwide: now that you know how to use it and what’s in it, which tasks do you think you could perform with such a tool ? In what ways this instrument could become useful to you ? And, this is maybe the most important question, in a global world where digital documents and primary sources aren’t all written in English, how these experiments with digital texts could take care of  different cultural and linguistic frameworks ?

I was very interested to read a story in last week’s Chronicle of Higher Education about “Signals,” a piece of software developed at Purdue that gives students feedback about how they’re doing in a course: chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/purdue-u-software-prompt-students-to-study-and-graduate/46853 The data on the software’s effect on student retention was truly astonishing. Signals seems to be tightly integrated with Blackboard, but it sounds reminiscent of the promise of MOOCs to improve “learning analytics”: online.stanford.edu/news/2013/04/11/learning-analytics-stanford-takes-huge-leap-forward-moocs, even though the analytics it presents are available to students. We talked about the Signals story a bit on our podcast, Digital Campus, but I’d love to look into it even more, and to get different perspectives. It did make me wonder whether MOOCs even have the right approach to learning analytics, since mostly what I’ve heard about them suggests that such analytics are only provided to faculty and administrators rather than to the students themselves. It also made me wonder whether software like Purdue’s could be adopted and customized by universities themselves using in-house developers.