Changing the viewpoint to that of the instructors, we would like to discuss the achievement of the course (its “performance”) in comparison with the learning objectives.
In general, what is realistically achievable in such a course? In particular, what is the best the balance between broadness (covering the whole editorial process) and depth (e.g. detailed knowledge of certain aspects)? It became clear that one cannot equally serve both objectives—the generalist as well as the specialist—in such a short time. In retrospect, the course achieved a generalist overview. For example, teaching the basic rules of entity-relationship modeling and using them in this phase of the project (modeling metadata) was useful as a means to make explicit what would otherwise be neglected. In this course, however, entity-relationship modeling was used more as a tool to force the students to think systematically and describe the
28 There were also a couple of minor issues addressed respectively by suggestions made by the students, which do not reflect on our approach as such. Suggestions that might be of general interest for teaching at summer schools encompass: providing a glossary of terms, handouts of slides and additional material (provided by us only on Moodle), charts and illustrations as references (e.g. of the process as a whole or the infrastructure).
29 Comparing the results of a recent study of TEI-based manuscript encoding, showing that it takes an average of 1.5 years from a first encounter with TEI until its first application in a project; see Marjorie Burghart and Malte Rehbein, “The Present and Future of the TEI Community for Manuscript Encoding,” Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative 2 (2012), http://jtei.revues.org/372.
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object of their study rather than claiming that entity-relationship modeling is necessary in any digital editing project and aiming to enable the students to use this technique perfectly.
To what extent is the course a starting point for the participants’
own work? Although this had not been explicitly declared as a learning objective, it became clear in retrospect that it should be the overall objective or aim of the course. The students’ feedback confirmed that the course enabled them to do further work and self-directed studies particularly through its generalist approach. Teaching students to use the TEI guidelines seems to serve this purpose better than thoroughly discussing single elements.
From these more general considerations, we would like to assess the achievement of the six major learning objectives as outlined in Table 1, compared with the actual course performance (Table 6).
Learning be really helpful was the fact that the course was embedded into the program of the summer university which allowed the
could only be achieved on a generalist perspective (see and as such conveyed at least superficially. Deeper knowledge and understanding could not be conveyed (see above).
2. Hands-On Teaching Digital Humanities 75 especially the last aspect of this objective—to apply modeling techniques—must be regarded as too ambitious. For the other two aspects (knowing and
collaborative work. Although the wording of this objective does not really allow measuring its achievements, collaborative work was certainly facilitated during the course.
Table 6. Achievement of (major) learning goals.
Our non-didactic objective to “bring [the edition of the corpus] to online publication” was clearly too ambitious. The result of one week’s work was (naturally) quite far away from being publishable in both completeness and quality. What worked very well, however, was the succession of the various phases of our editorial process. Overall, our “final product” followed indeed the objectives the group had set in the beginning of the course, texts were encoded on the basis of rules defined by the group in the data modeling sessions, and the edition featured what was intended (browsing, etc).30
30 As an alternative, the instructors could have prepared a best practice solution for each phase of the workflow and use these as input for the next phase instead of using what the group agreed upon.
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In the following, we would like to list some of the issues we encountered and suggest possible solutions that might help to prepare similar courses:
• With respect to organization, such a course requires extremely careful, anticipative and thorough preparation. In comparison to a
“traditional” workshop with lectures and loosely (if at all) coupled exercises, the preparatory effort is higher and technical set-up takes longer.
• The “dynamics” of such an approach in combination with the heterogeneity of the group clearly requires two instructors respectively, one instructor and one tutor. In sessions in which the students are asked to reproduce something (e.g. set-up of a database connection) it is more helpful if one of the instructors explains and demonstrates while the other serves as a tutor and checks that everybody reaches the same level.
• The practical sessions require intensive coaching by the instructors.
• Concerning practicalities, minor details need to be taken into account or at least one should not be surprised. For example, oXygen installations can have different languages in the user interfaces. This makes explaining its usage a bit annoying; not everyone might be familiar with Moodle or a wiki or other tools you use, so introducing these tools takes additional time. The use of fewer systems than we did might be good general advice.
• It was very helpful that the SADE infrastructure we used covered most of our needs. This gave us the time to concentrate on digital editing as process performed as a humanist scholar rather than as
“typesetters, printers, publishers, book designers, programmers, web-masters, or systems analysts,” to reprise (and for the future hopefully refute) Shillingsburg’s statement from the introduction of this chapter.