At the last minute, Happy DH Day everyone! I'd like to take this opportunity to post an informal message about what a pleasure it's been having involved myself within the DH 5000 community. I know it's not over yet, and with the Pecha Kucha approaching, the best is yet to come. I look forward to hearing about what all of you have done for the final research project, and I'm sure our last class will be most inspiring. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank Dimitri for having invited me to collaborate with him on an exclusive opportunity to explore the world of DH inside Canada's first national museum. I hope you enjoyed the presentation, and Sandro's first go at using Prezi encouraged us to try the tool; which worked quite well in facilitating Dimitri and I to edit the Prezi collaboratively. I also wanted to say how much I enjoyed these last two weeks working in groups - first with Story Trek, and recently on our last collaborative project of critical issues in DH. As the course nears an end and I reflect on DH Day, 2014; I feel privileged for having been engaged in such an interdisciplinary creative environment.

I just wanted to comment on Monday's class regarding the presentations about Story Trek. I thought it was very interesting to observe the different ways that groups had approached the task, and which issues were addressed regarding the redevelopment of Lansdowne Park. Our group wanted its users to encounter various characters for whom we created written narratives, along with random links that hosted visual graphics, humorous passersby, and clues to hint at what our story was leading to. I value the importance of the cultural heritage behind the Aberdeen Pavilion, and although I had originally felt it was important to provide significant historical information about the building, I later edited the content to include more metaphors, opinions, and recounting of memories by the character plotted on this part of the map. Giving it a human element helped compliment the factual information as Chris Eaket had suggested. More importantly, I enjoyed collaborating with my team to create a fictional scenario that was both informative and intriguing. Using a DH tool where we could work together as a group, and engage in the creative interexchange of ideas made using the Story Trek tool fun!

The Museum of Nature in Ottawa has a similar tool called Nature Trek. It's an app that can be downloaded to any iPad or iPhone, and allows its user to wander through the museum while clicking on certain areas in the various galleries to obtain additional information about objects and displays. Dimitri and I will be discussing this tool along with other technologies and DH innovations being used at the museum in our next class. I suppose the main point I wanted to acknowledge regarding tools such as Story Trek or Nature Trek, are how their ability to promote learning in a new and dynamic context can be incorporated for educational purposes. As an ESL teacher, I would like to introduce similar tools where students can engage in or even create narratives involving authentic situations that can be simulated into online stories based on experiences using English in certain situations. Again, it was the collaborative aspect of creating and sharing ideas that I found appealing about this group project, and I think it has a lot of potential for being incorporated as an ESL activity. Hopefully, Story Trek will have a public version with open access available in the future; and I look forward to experimenting with initiatives involving such tools with my ESL students.

Stéphane

I just wanted to post a summary of what I submitted for last week's assignment. I believe that there are various possibilities for developing evaluative criteria of scholarly projects in the digital humanities. If we assume that one of the main criteria DH concerns itself with involves promoting the spirit of collaboration, then perhaps the collaborative participation of scholars in any and all research activities could be taken into consideration for assessment. I suggest that collaborative efforts could be archived in digital portfolios where compilations of literature reviews, seminar contributions, peer reviews, and blog postings or other publications could be kept. The portfolio could serve as a resource for doing further research, or perhaps eventually transcribe to a popular blog where open access to new ideas could be further collaborated upon through digital networking. Moreover, the portfolio could be an interdisciplinary resource for researchers to develop in their collaborative programs.
Conventional criteria for DH scholarship must take into consideration that digital scholarship happens within complex networks of human production (Nowviskie, 2012). Because of the interdisciplinary nature of DH, where scholars from different disciplines might develop research essays or theses, conventional methods of assessment that focus on promotion and tenure of DH scholars alone might not always be suitable. For graduate students from different departments, any compilation of works made and ideas shared that can assist in advancing research should be considered for possible evaluative criteria. Furthermore, DH professors could contribute to the evaluation process by assisting in supervising and/or assessing research essays and theses done in home departments (where say a collaborative program such as ours is the case). Currently, DH seems to put more focus on research and digital projects than pedagogy and assessment, so any research initiatives by students could perhaps be given consideration for evaluation purposes.
In the area of applied linguistics, digital innovations in second language (L2) pedagogy could be promoted in L2 curriculums, and could also serve as part of the L2 evaluative criteria. In my research, I would like to promote collaborative learning so as to encourage L2 teachers to use digital texts, digital tools, and digital media while exploring the possibility of open access through discourse practices that might involve say a blog community for writing activities and peer review. Perhaps an interesting research study might be to investigate whether blogging and/or digital writing portfolios would be suitable for evaluating the intercultural communicative competence of L2 learners. Of course, the digital integration of learning activities would be unique based on an L2 curricular context, and might include activities such as webquests, critical reflection journals, VLC projects, and perhaps telecollaborative assignments. All of these components have the capacity to be incorporated into an L2 portfolio and used as part of the L2 evaluation criteria. I am currently drafting a proposal for my ALDS academic writing course to investigate the effectiveness of using blogs in developing academic writing. Interestingly, I have just discovered that this idea has been in use since 2008 in CUNY's WAC program with its incorporation of Blog@Baruch (Gold, 2012). Using a portfolio for assessment is by no means exclusive, but because its function can be multimodal and even multidisciplinary, it could make for a useful tool in both L2 & DH scholarly projects as part of the evaluative criteria.

One of the tools I found interesting was Google Ngram. In applied linguistics and discourse studies, an area of importance which is growing in research is the study of formulaic language. Studies in formulaic language attempt to digitally archive large corpora of words and phrases which can be found in didactic materials used for teaching English for Specific Purposes (ESP). An example of an ESP course would be Business English. The challenge of ESP teachers and linguists is to identify which vocabulary would be most important for students who learn English as a second language for work purposes (in this case business professionals). Formulaic researchers can conduct studies by scanning hundreds of Business English text books, and then archive the most commonly used words or phrases. This is time consuming, and because the field is rather new, much work has yet to be done. It should be noted that using a corpora of didactic materials has limitations in itself and if a teacher wants to investigate how key words or phrases compare in usage as a trend in non-ESP published books over time, a great tool is Google Ngrams.
Ngram is very easy to use and has a corpora of word frequencies from the years 1800 to 2000. Using the example of an ESP business course, a term such as entrepreneur may be used moderately in this genre of didactic materials, but may in fact be used much more frequently on a generic basis. The easiest way for a teacher to find out would be to "Ngram it" and compare the results. In addition, when ESP teachers compile word lists to help their students, if a situation were to arise where the teacher wants to narrow down his/her list, a comparison of which words are more frequently read today (as opposed to say 10 or 20 years ago - which may also be important since didactic materials are constantly being revised) can be made. This is also useful for deciding among which lexical categories a teacher may prefer to promote. For example, preference in teaching the word entrepreneur as a new lexical item for an ESP business student would be much more beneficial to the student than introducing it in a different lexical category such as entrepreneurial. Since the Ngram indicates that the noun form dominates in usage, the likelihood of the student reading the adjective form is lower and so we might assume that less exposure to a term might mean less retention of the term. This tool could also be used for assessing the writing of ESP students in evaluating their ability to use less common (or perhaps more sophisticated) vocabulary. The uses of this tool are many, but for me what is significant is how Google Ngram can impact the pedagogy of language teaching. Perhaps future studies in archiving formulaic language corpora in ESP texts will expand to include new variables in the research where the Ngram tool can be incorporated to produce new findings for formulaic language studies.