Moving Beyond Tool-Oriented Teaching within Digital Humanities: The Challenge of Appropriating the CLARIAH Media Suite Into Tool-Supported Pedagogical Practices (Abstract)

Abstract:
This paper presents practical insights based on the authors’ experiences of working to incorporate a specific data infrastructure - the CLARIAH Media Suite (2022) - into (Digital) Humanities pedagogical practices. These insights relate to specific questions that we deem relevant in Digital Humanities teaching today, such as: What are the challenges of appropriating new tools related to large data infrastructures into existing (Digital) Humanities curricula; how does a new tool actually challenge or support new forms of teaching; how do students engage in learning-by-doing while exploring a new digital tool and data infrastructure; and last, but not least, do students primarily learn about a tool, or do they adapt their learning and research processes by means of (alternative) tool use?
The title of this paper draws attention to a tension that we observe within Digital Humanities teaching between learning about tools and incorporating tools in learning processes (tool-supported pedagogical practices). When we teach students about cutting-edge tools (what do these tools do), we invariably also draw attention to how specific tools shape particular research practices, such as exploratory search, storytelling and curation, and how for example tool criticism (Koolen, Van Gorp & Van Ossenbruggen, 2019) allows for an understanding of what a specific tool’s design indicates about what its developers consider to be knowledge. However, based on the practical insights we share in this paper, we argue that moving beyond tool use and even tool criticism to ask and answer questions about how tools shape epistemology is especially difficult within Digital Humanities pedagogical practices, precisely because of the tool-oriented focus of Digital Humanities teaching.
We support this assertion by offering the authors’ experiences of teaching (Digital) Humanities students how to use a specific tool set to discover and learn about (1) search as a research skill, (2) remixing audiovisual materials to curate and create a virtual exhibition and (3) tool criticism/evaluation. The authors incorporated the tool set into their curricula during the Teaching Fellowship project "Suite Discoveries". Between November 2021-February 2022 the authors taught Digital Humanities and Media Studies students at the University of Groningen about a specific Digital Humanities and Social Sciences research infrastructure, the CLARIAH Media
Suite (CLARIAH, 2022) and introduced state of the art teaching modules that helped these students acquiring strategies to search, appraise, select and re-use digital sources. The CLARIAH Media Suite (CLARIAH, 2022) provides a research infrastructure for researchers in the social sciences and humanities to search and retrieve (audiovisual) sources from diverse digital or digitized collections. These include the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision archive, EYE Film Museum collections, DANS oral history interview collections and Open Images Project collections.
In this paper, we zoom in on and evaluate our teaching experiences and several hands-on approaches which enable the integration of the Media Suite in the international classroom. We present three examples of how we designed student-oriented teaching modules, at the BA and MA levels, which aim at preparing students to work with large scale infrastructures such as the CLARIAH Media Suite. We thereby demonstrate how to support students’ digital source exploration, storytelling, and curation of sources, as well as evaluation of digital tools, especially the interrelatedness of the tool, exploratory search, and sense-making for researching audiovisual materials. In particular, the evaluation of digital tools teaches students to rethink how digital infrastructures like CLARIAH change practices of (re)search, navigate language barriers, and afford new forms of discovery.
The paper is structured around three main challenges and provides scenarios for teaching modules. The first challenge is how to support students in their knowledge-building and critical awareness about affordances of large digital infrastructures such as the CLARIAH Media Suite, and what these offer them in terms of reuse and remix activities, especially the relation between access to media types (for instance to which genres) and their search strategies. The second challenge is that students learn how search tasks in archival infrastructures are different from working with for example keyword search and search engines like Google, Firefox and DuckDuckGo. Since Google has become the default space for tracing digital resources through simple keyword searching, students have become accustomed to ‘disintermediation’; it is not so obvious for them to find sources via professional intermediaries such as traditional media archives, or for that matter, explore new types of intermediaries such as CLARIAH’s Media Suite. The third and final challenge is a more meta understanding of acknowledging the concept of discovery by developing the skill of evaluating serendipitous information encountering (Erdelez et al., 2016) in highly mediated digital infrastructures. Search processes can and have been described in terms of different stages (Kuhlthau, 2017). One of these stages is exploration: when a searcher is still uncertain about what they are looking for, but is curious to learn more. Exploring information can lead to serendipitous insights, when something is encountered that is deemed surprising, yet fruitful. The paper provides practical, experience-based insights into how explorations of the CLARIAH Media Suite as a search system and interface affords and limits students’ findings in terms of re-using, tracing and curating, and discerning information encounters, and what this implies about our understandings of digital search as both a tool and as a reflection of our contemporary academic search cultures.
These three challenges point to an overarching issue in appropriating Digital Humanities tools embedded in a large data infrastructure such as the CLARIAH Media Suite into the international classrooms that formed the context of our pedagogical practice. This overarching challenge is to
move beyond learning about tools or about tool use in Digital Humanities teaching in favour of pedagogy that transcends a tool-oriented focus. Learning about the CLARIAH Media Suite in a more tool-oriented approach - and what this tool affords in terms of searching for, discovery and remixing of audiovisual sources - is one thing. It is quite another to move beyond that and learn how this particular tool reconfigures research and learning processes and even the notion of what it means to learn anything as such. For instance, how searching, exploring and refining audiovisual material in the Media Suite shaped the story and production of a visual exhibition (video).
Teaching students about “cultures of search” by investigating and exploring how search tools frame search and discovery in particular ways is one way to move beyond tool-oriented teaching as this would incorporate student insights into overarching guided analysis of how digital tools like the CLARIAH Media Suite afford “learning-by-searching” experiences. This kind of learning in turn requires teaching modules that focus on critical reflection about how tools such as the CLARIAH Media Suite figure in research and remixing practices. What is needed, in short, is a process and practice-oriented approach to tool use in Digital Humanities pedagogy. Apart from sharing how we developed our teaching modules to the courses that we discuss in this paper, we thus also conclude with suggestions about how to bring this process-approach into focus. The research presented in this long paper is in the final stages of development at the time of abstract writing, and will be completed before the conference takes place.