Category Archives: Digital Humanities

Using Twitter in a large auditorium

08/02/2013Digital Humanities, TwitterBenoit Majerus

Screenshot from 2013-02-08 06:43:18 — Part of a discussion around neo-colonialism

This is the fourth post that I publish on a Twitter experiment I did last year at the Université libre de Bruxelles (here, here and here). Yesterday I was invited to speak at a symposium entitled “e-Learning@UniGR – Insights/Capabilities/Prospects” on this experience. It was for me the occasion to continue to work on the results provided by the poll I took with the education service of the ULB.

One of my biggest fear was my inability to control the tweets students would post and that would immediately appear on the twitter livestream on the big screen behind me.

Half of the tweets were directly related to the content of the lecture:

students asked questions and got responses from other students
twice they did reveal faults in my slides and provided links to wikipedia to prove that I was wrong 🙂
they referred to websites interesting for the topic of the class
sometimes they started discussions on topics related to the course but not touched on in my teaching; in the lecture of colonisation, a discussion on the question if NGOs were neocolonial institutions was initiated by a student without me referring to this problematic

A quart of the tweets were about organisational problems and a quart was not related at all to the lecture. They were however not very disturbing and provoked some funny moments. The fear of a slippery comments proved to be unfounded, at least in this class.

In the survey we distributed during the last lecture of this course (more here), we also asked the students to evaluate the experience. At the end of this post, you will find the detailed results. The strongest argument in favour of Twitter, for the students, was a better conviviality inside this large auditorium. Of the 300 students that attended the class on a regular basis, only 13 did intervene actively on Twitter. But for all – at least a large majority (85% of the respondents) – (strongly) agreed with the following proposal: “Cela introduit une ambiance conviviale”. This good atmosphere made lecturing for me very pleasant, even in such a large “classroom”¹.

Chart a – Better understanding

Strongly agree	Agree	Disagree	Strongly Disagree
14%	52%	27%	7%

Chart b – Amelioration of the concentration

Strongly agree	Agree	Disagree	Strongly Disagree
8%	28%	34%	30%

Chart c – Better conviviality

Strongly agree	Agree	Disagree	Strongly Disagree
44%	41%	12%	3%

Chart d – Distracting

Strongly agree	Agree	Disagree	Strongly Disagree
13%	22%	37%	29%

Chart e – Not useful

Strongly agree	Agree	Disagree	Strongly Disagree
14%	24%	29%	33%

For those who want/need more arguments for using Twitter in classroom, read Junco, R., G. Heibergert, and E. Loken. ‘The Effect of Twitter on College Student Engagement and Grades’. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning (2010): 1–14. [↩]

Benoit Majerus

Since January 2011, I am working as an historian at the University of Luxembourg. I have written my PhD on the occupation of Belgium during World War One and World Two. In 2013 I published a social history of psychiatry in the 20th century from below. I am also co-editor of h-madness.

THATCamp 2012 in Paris

30/09/2012Digital HumanitiesBenoit Majerus

8023185068_2c3df0bc3b — Paul Bertrand (@medieviz) during his opening lecture
photo @openeditionsays

After my first THATCamp in Luxembourg in March 2012, I quite enthusiastically went to THATCamp Paris. As the Master in European Contemporary History tries to go digital, I hoped to get new ideas on the topic.

Compared to the one in Luxembourg, which had been very praxis-orientated, this one was more “philosophical”. The workshop Quels espaces physiques pour des humanités numériques ? was thus less dedicated to the practical organisation of such a space – something I was particularly interested in as we are planning a digital lab for Belval – as to general reflections on work flow and the influences DH can have on it.

Several workshops were dedicated to training – the common denominator was Zotero… an open source reference manager, which shows that there is still a lot work to do. The only francophone master dedicated specifically to digital history seems the one offered by the École des chartes entitled « Technologies numériques appliquées à l’histoire ». I hope that the Master in European Contemporary History at the University of Luxembourg – (De)coding Europe – will rapidly become a competitive alternative ( :)).

Leaving Paris on Wednesday, two ideas began to mature in my head:

As in Luxembourg six months ago, the use of digital tools to teach was completely absent: I would like to organise a thematic THATCamp specifically consecrated to how you can use wikipedia, twitter, facebook… to teach.
As several DH-masters are organised around Europe, getting the best students from these trainings together for a book/code sprint or summer school could be fascinating for students and teachers.

I am very curious what other people (among others @bobreuter, @NicolasRoland, @cclivaz, @ClaudineMoulin…) think about this.

For those who want to read the transcription of alls the discussions, click here and then on the topic you are interested in.

P.S. In 2010, THATCamp-Paris launched the Manifest of the Digital Humanities; in 2012, THATCamp-Paris decided to create a francophone DH-association in the next future.

P.P.S. Cécile Armand has published her impressions on this THATCamp-Paris under the title: Retour(s) du ThatCamp Paris 2012.

Benoit Majerus

Looking for an Associate Professor/Professor in Digital History

18/06/2012Actualités / News, Digital HumanitiesBenoit Majerus

Word cloud of the first day of #dhlu realised by Frédéric Clavert with "many eyes"

My university is looking for an Associate Professor/Professor in Digital History. Thanks to René Leboutte and the CVCE, the Digital Humanities had been present in Luxembourg for some years. After the successful DHLU Symposium 2012 and THATCamp Luxembourg/Trier, our history department argued that it would important to be active on this new research field. I think that we are the first university on the continent that offers a chair in Digital History and I am very proud of it. The job description reads as follow:

The Assistant Professor/Professor will be expected to undertake research focused on Digital History from different perspectives notably to act as an intermediary between new technologies and humanities and / or by analysing of the uses made of new digital tools for history (archives, narratives…). He/she should also help to identify and promote good practices in Digital Humanities and contribute to the planned development of digital infrastructures for research.

The Assistant Professor/Professor’s research programme should complement and further develop existing research strengths within the Laboratoire d’Histoire. The successful candidate will have proven research expertise in one or more major areas of Digital History and Modern History (15th – 20th century).

The Assistant Professor/Professor will further have the opportunity to participate in wider interdisciplinary research projects in IPSE, notably in the field of European Studies as well as in Luxembourg Studies.

The Professor’s teaching obligations will be in the Bachelor en Cultures Européennes (BCE) and in the Master in European Contemporary History (MAHEC). Beyond the development of her/his own teaching within the programme, the successful candidate may be asked to assume specific administrative responsibilities in cooperation with the Course Directors of the BCE and the MAHEC. At Master level, he/she will develop the “digital environment” of the programme. At the Bachelor level, he/she will offer lectures and seminars in Modern European history, and will develop the use of new media and technology in the presentation and/or teaching of history. He/she may also be asked to contribute to other cognate programmes e.g. the forthcoming doctoral school.

For more information click here.

Benoit Majerus

Making a blog with students

29/05/2012Digital Humanitiesblog, history of EuropeBenoit Majerus

The Master in European Contemporary History at the University of Luxembourg gets a “digital” touch. There is a new logo “(De)coding Europe” indicating the aim to de- and reconstruct the narratives on European history, a logo with a little hint to the question of programming. There will probably be an Associate Professor/Professor in Digital History next year. And there is since 2011/2012 a course called Digital Humanities, which will be taught next year by Frédéric Clavert. This year I tried to give the students some notions on this topic by creating a blog, dedicated to the history of Europe. Since today, h-europe is public. The hope is that the students from this Master will review books¹ and web pages, announce conferences, present recent number of journals dedicated to the European history, prepare bibliographies on specific themes and publish them on Zotero.

(Un)surprisingly, none of the students had ever managed a blog before and so I had to spend far more time than initially planned on teaching very fundamental staff such as introducing a hyperlink in a text². Most of them did not know how to follow a journal electronically (RSS-feed, email…). And some still don’t think that such an exercise is necessary for historians.

Today I am quite curious if we succeed in assuring regular posting – at the moment we have enough material to publish a weekly post till october – and if the blog gets a readership. So have a look at h-europe today and tell us what you think about it.

The following books will be reviewed in the next future: Kaelble Hartmut, Kalter Krieg und Wohlfahrtsstaat : Europa 1945 – 1989, München, Beck, 2011; Raphael Lutz, Imperiale Gewalt und mobilisierte Nation : Europa 1914-1945, München, Beck, 2011; Leboutte René, Histoire économique et sociale de la construction européenne, Bruxelles, PIE-Peter Lang, 2008; … [↩]
Frédéric Clavert has written an interesting post on this question entitled Digital natives ou Facebook natives? [↩]

Benoit Majerus

Microsoft Academic a more powerful tool than Google Scholar, but…

23/04/2012Digital Humanities, Digital ToolsBenoit Majerus

While googling ‘Google Scholar Metrics’ for my post two weeks ago, I discovered Microsoft Academics. As with other project such as Bing Maps, Microsoft tries to compete with Google. And as Google, Microsoft seems to label now every new service it offers ‘beta’. Microsoft Academic offers immediately several (visualisation) tools that Google Scholar doesn’t such as h-index, genealogy maps, co-authors maps, academic maps…

But the major problem with Microsoft Academic is its database. If Google Scholar does cover quite a large field – even most of the articles published by a historian on psychiatry are referenced – Microsoft Academic seems not to be particularly strong for the humanities. So most of the nice tools proposed by Microsoft Academic are not very useful.

I must have however admit that the list of the most important journals in history, proposed by Microsoft Academic, does already be closer to my personal list, even if it continues to overrate the journals dedicated to the sciences studies, which appear central in the history field on Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic but are rather marginal in the universities.

Benoit Majerus

Review – Parallel Archives

16/04/2012Digital Humanities, Digital ToolsDigital ToolBenoit Majerus

At the DHLU Symposium 2012, I complained in a tweet that there was no equivalent to Zotero for managing my archives. Marin Dacos from openedition.org told me of a product developed by the Central European University in Budapest, called Parallel Archive. Last week, I spent some time at the archives of the Rockefeller Foundation in New York and decided to give it try. Parallel Archive (PA) is essentially a tool to manage the photos you take during your research: all eight researchers who visited the archives of the RF last week took photos and several complained that they have no idea how to manage them. That’s why I stopped using a camera because I have hundreds of photos on my computer, which I have never looked at. This time I used PA from the beginning on: it allows you to upload the photos, obliges you to describe them, makes pdf’s of the them and transforms these pdf’s into text thanks to an optical character recognition software that produces satisfying results for English texts. The aim of the organisation behind Parallel Archive, the Open Society Archives (OAS), is to create a digital repository of all the millions of documents that are copied every day but remain on the computers of the individual researchers.

At the moment, PA suffers however from four major flaws:

Since 2008 (!), there has been no development. I was a little bit worried on the perennity of the site¹. I wrote them a mail and got an answer from Csaba Szilagyi, one of the guys working for PA, who reassured me that the project is still supported. He told me that they plan to start a second phase this year and that from now on all the online requests addressed to the OAS for documents will be served via PA.
Several small technical problems remains. The downloaded pdf’s are sometimes of dreadful quality and no longer ‘readable’. It is not possible to rotate all your photos at once: so you have to do it individually, which takes a lot of time, when you have copied a report of 50 pages. The options to sort your photos before transforming them into a pdf are quite limited.
The private space is not very important (500 MB) and so you are obliged to make your archives public (no limits for this option), which is understandable when one knows the general philosophy of the project, but which is problematic in a lot of archives where you don’t have the right to put your photos on the internet.
Finally, only a few scholars use PA at the moment. Is it because nobody knows about it or are researchers reluctant to share their work?

In general, I found PA however convincing and it would be interesting to persuade institutional archives to join PA by proposing the researchers already prepared folders where they can post their photos. I spoke with one of the archivist of the RF who estimates that a least a fifth of their collections has already been photographed individually. Would it not be great to have access to all these copied material from wherever you are working? And I am sure that the restoration of the Historical Archive of the City of Cologne which collapsed in 2009 would not take 30 years, if they had used a system such as PA. PA cannot replace institutionalised digitisation programs, but is a great complementary tool to these projects.

I downloaded all the pdf’s on my computer. But I was less anxious about losing my usb-stick with everything on it, because I knew that all my photos were saved on PA. [↩]