12.1 Cultural Heritage Materials in Digital Humanities Teaching – A Case of Data Literacy?
Creators: name: Paavolainen, Maija
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2016
Subjects: cultural heritage, digital, humanities, teaching, libraries, data

description: Digital humanities is all about interesting humanities research questions that can be answered in a new way with quantitative methods applied to digital resources. These resources often consist of digital collections offered by cultural heritage institutions. Digital humanities research methods can be characterised as distant reading when they take the quantitative view on the qualitative material in question (text, metadata, pictures, sound) in contrast to close reading, interpretation of details and unique cases as in more traditional humanities research. Teaching students to develop a digital humanities research approach requires familiarising students with digital heritage resources. If the emphasis remains too much on the quantitative, there is a danger that the topics of research are narrowed and focus too much on the canon or the self-evident first choices that are easily available. Learning to code and to use statistical methods is not enough. The ability to formulate relevant research questions develops hand in hand with the students’ overall thinking but it also depends on an acquaintance with the range of different sources and their content. I’m presenting a case from Helsinki University Digital Humanities minor study block (25 ECT) that completed its pilot year in 2015-16. We developed a course where students engaged in both collaborative effort and reflective practice to evaluate the collections of Finnish cultural heritage institutions from the viewpoint of using them in research. The institutions participated in the course presenting their collections and answering students’ questions. I will draw together students’ findings on the availability of these collections as research data and analyse their responses to the diverse and changing field of digital cultural heritage. To consider how a digital resource is suitable for further research use several features need to be considered. The collection should be downloadable as a data set and not only available through a search interface. Well-documented collections with good quality metadata that uses controlled vocabularies are also valuable. Relevant copyright issues should be thought through in a way that, for example, does not impose unnecessary restrictions by the institution on materials that by their date of publication already belong to the public domain. All this adds to the understanding of how different heritage materials respond to quantitative methods and how an institution could proceed in opening resources that generate interest. Data literacy has been defined as combining more traditional information literacy with data management or statistical literacy. I want to suggest, that in addition to the more straightforward statistical skills that digital humanities methods entail, describing the skill of recognizing research potential of digital heritage collections as a special case of humanities data literacy brings about the change in the role of those materials in humanities research. <strong>Maija Paavolainen</strong> is an Information Specialist with more than seven years of experience in teaching undergraduates to find and evaluate sources for research in Helsinki University Library. In 2015 she has been developing Digital Humanities teaching for Helsinki University Faculty of Arts in a multidisciplinary team. With a background in Philosophy and Gender Studies, she cares about digitally- literate citizens’ equal access to knowledge and sees the University Library as a part of a co-operative network of Higher Education institutions, Cultural Heritage organisations and NGOs which are transforming research. She gave presentations at the ECIL European Conference on Information Literacy (2013, 2015) on information literacy teacher development and bachelor level teaching, and co-authored a presentation on digital humanities reproducible workflows for LIBER 2015.Twitter @mppaavol