Panel 2014

The Summer School will feature a public panel discussion. Under the motto "Crossing borders in Digital Humanities curricula & education" the question will be asked whether we should not think of developing radically new forms and structures of teaching and learning in the Digital Humanities.

Saturday 26.07.2014 16:15-17:15 im GWZ HS 2010

Some thoughts. We said more than once that Digital Humanities is about crossing boundaries of disciplines, countries, languages and cultures and that it is cooperative in nature. Projects play an important role. We call Digital Humanities a new epistemology because it is difficult to define it in terms of the Humanities disciplines which started to come into being in the 19th century.

In Germany there have been many discussions about a reference curriculum. Computer Science has a reference curriculum. The argument for a reference curriculum, i.e. a model against which all real curricula could be evaluated, is that it would help Digital Humanities to become accepted or recognised by Computer Science.

But is the question really whether Digital Humanities is recognised by Computer Scienece or whether the Humanities by means of Digital Humanities become more like the Natural Sciences, another argument which is brought forward and even sometimes by Digital Humanists themselves?

Should the Digital Humanities not rather analyse their own nature, their own historical development and the needs of their own work? And following from there should they not create their own formats when it comes to curricula or certificates, experiment with formats and develop their own evaluation criteria?

There are various experiences with respect to teaching and learning in the Digital Humanities: workshops, ThatCamps, Summer / Winter Schools. My personal experience and impression is that such formats are very well suited for the teaching and learning in Digital Humanities. The more international they are the better. I see more eagerness, more communication and exchange, and more joy than in ever traditional university format.

Such questions among others are in the centre of this panel.

The panelist are:

Sabine Bartsch (Acting Professor of English Linguistics, Corpus and Computational Linguistics, Institut für Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft, TU-Darmstadt)

Alejandro Bia (Professor, Department of Statistics, Mathematics and Computer Science, Miguel Hernández University Elche, Spain)

Elisabeth Burr (Chair for French, Francophone and Italian Linguistics, Institute for Romance Studies, University of Leipzig)

Laszlo Hunyadi (Professor, General and Applied Linguistics, University of Debrecen)

Ray Siemens (Canada Research Chair in Humanities Computing and Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Victoria)

Toma Tasovac (Belgrade Center for Digital Humanities)

Elke Teich (Chair for English Linguistics and Translation Studies, Institute for Applied Linguistics and Translation, University of the Saarland)

Programme

• Elisabeth Burr "Introduction / Presentation of panelists" (5 minutes)
• Short presentation by each panelist on experiences, ideas, expectations with respect to the topic (5-7 minutes)
• Discussion among the panelists (ca. 25 minutes)
• Open discussion with the floor (ca. 30 minutes)