Digital texts and teaching medical historyKier Waddington, UK medical heritage library event

27/10/2016

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DIGITAL TEXTS & TEACHING MEDICAL HISTORYKEIR WADDINGTON, CARDIFF UNIVERSITY

ACCESS

“Engaging with digital databases provides easy access to material for research, interaction, and deliberation, a source that is constantly available and only a click away”Linda Friday

The “digital archive goes wherever we go; it is always with us, always open,” removing the traditional constraints of time and location for research and accessing sources for teaching or student dissertationsBob Nicholson,

DIGITAL… WITH BENEFITSAccess

never hearing “it’s not in the library”

New possibilities / new frontiers

Expanding content / curricula

TRANSFORMS THE CLASSROOM INTO A LIBRARY / ARCHIVE

DIGITAL… WITH BENEFITSStudents at all levels can

explore beyond extracts / snippets develop new methods

of interpretation pursue or develop questions

Ownership of the pace / direction of their learning producers of knowledge?

BUT…

ISSUESGetting students to exploreVast array of digitized materialsFlawed or misleading results

‘keyword blinkers’ cherry-picking content via keyword searchers

Speed over thought Irrelevance and frustrationTrap of convenienceCut and paste What happens when the server goes down?

WHAT NOT TO FORGET

“I think, digital media have the potential to reshape the gathering, sharing, processing and analyzing of information, but they cannot ‘free’ historians from the demanding and complex tasks of interpretation and explanation”Beat Kumin, Warwick

EXERCISES

Start small… Integrate (where possible)…

Embed skills…Tasks to familiarise…Don’t make assumptions…

Analyse as material objects…

NOT, AND / OR THE BASICS… Preparation for future research

Understanding how digital texts / sources are created What do you gain? Miss?

Sense that not the whole The research process

Creative thinking Intuitive decision making Asking questions / changing questions Advise on searching Careful and critical reading Context, context, context

Its not all random - benefits of serendipity

OPTIONS… Searching

creating bibliographies how digital texts relate to other texts

Texts v paragraphs / gobbets Does size matter?

Change across editions across around a range of texts

Creating timelines – SMILE Timeline Widget, Neatline

Wikis & reviews Curated image collections Corpus linguistics?

QUESTIONS?THANK YOU