There are a number of highlights of my year in working with postgraduate research students, and the Arts and Humanities in the Digital Age programme led by the Open University through the CHASE partnership is definitely on the list.
Each year, a group of postgraduate research students from across the UK comes together to learn about the methods, approaches and tools of work in the digital humanities, and to undertake a project using what they have learnt.
For the first year since its creation, we have allowed students to run individual projects, which in some cases are closely connected to their current doctoral research. We have also focused more on project management and the workflow over the course of the next few months.
As many digital humanities educators will realise, there is a difficult balance to strike between learning key principles and techniques in preparing, managing and analysing data, and applying what has been learnt to ‘real life’ datasets provided by the students themselves. To tackle this, we are allowing students to bring their own data as well as providing sample datasets as they progress, through which they can experiment with data transformations.
The last three days have been a real joy as we - the educators - learned so much from our participants, and their ambitions for their projects. It was also inspiring to witness the very constructive peer feedback that our groups of students provided. Receiving comments on the strengths and weaknesses of a project concept in the relative safety of a small group in a workshop allowed many students to refine and in some cases reframe their project ideas.
We are all very much looking forward to the next workshop on data preparation and management at the end of the month.