New subject: Has anyone used MIML?

23 Aug 2005

      I think Abdullah and James are talking about two extremes of the question I was asking.
Before posting, I took a look around and saw *graduate* humanities courses on how to use word and frontpage (which seems to me to be a misuse of resources) and on quite detailed aspects of advanced HumCom.
But what prompted the question was the sense that a conceptual, transferable understanding of things like markup, networking, database design and the like might now be as necessary as research methods are now thought to be in many places.
So many medievalists are now proposing digital projects of one kind or another. How one thinks about a new project depends to a large extent on what one already understands the possibilities to be. Since (unlike  research methods) a conceptual understanding of how the magic box works is not something one can necessarily expect to pick up in the department by osmosis, my question is really whether a conceptual overview might not be increasingly essential. The focus might be different that what a CompSci or IT department would offer, since we don't need to turn everybody into a programmer; but it would be nice if more in our field had a realistic understanding of what options are available as they plan new projects.
There is BTW an article on how CompSci departments are moving away from this in today's New York Times.
-dan
-- 
Daniel Paul O'Donnell [/pda]
Department of English
University of Lethbridge
Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4
Canada
Tel. +1 (403) 329-2377
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-----Original Message-----
From:  James Cummings 
Date:  22/8/05 23:40
To:  Digital Medievalist Community mailing list 
Subj:  Re: [dm-l] Should Medievalist Graduate Programs require a humanities	computing course?

Abdullah Alger wrote:
> Anyway, now that I am at the University of Manchester I see that there is
> an enormous gap that needs to be filled.  Some of the students here cannot
> even copy a file correctly or do simple tasks in Word.  We do have some
> courses that enable some students to understand some basic concepts, but
> if you ask them what HTML is or how to write a web page there will be
> question marks written all over their faces.

Is it really the job of humanities departments to provide this 
education?  These tasks are basic computer literacy which has little 
to do with 'Humanities Computing' per se.  Almost every university in 
the UK has some provision for IT training should students require it. 
  Even at the University of Manchester where you are students can take 
courses via the IT Services:
http://www.itservices.manchester.ac.uk/trainingcourses/

Surely what you should be doing on any course which requires basic IT 
skills (or heaven forfend more advanced skills!) is stating this as a 
prerequisite and directing students to the IT Services to receive 
training in these skills.

If teaching a course (say on use of XML for producing critical 
editions or general text encoding) I don't think that we should feel 
any compunction in listing basic familiarity with HTML as a 
prerequisite, as long as students have access to training in that 
area.  (I'm not suggesting you say they must have taken specific 
course X, simply that they are aware that it is a prerequisite and so 
they should have learnt it somewhere.)

It just seems to be an inefficient waste of resources for us to 
duplicate training that is already available to most students.  Great, 
offer topics which use a higher level of technology to drive the 
learning process, but where it isn't the end in itself (teaching 
palaeography on computer is a good example of this).  If increasingly 
all the interesting courses list 'At least basic computer literacy' as 
a prerequisite then students will start to make sure they have these 
skills.

But of course, I was using mainframes at the age of 8, so my 
perspective may vary from yours. ;-)

-James

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