This five-day seminar was designed to introduce a group of LS&A humanities faculty to a wide range of computer technologies that would be useful for teaching, research, and administration.
The overall goal of the seminar was to present the technologies in ways that highlighted the usefulness of each technology in the context of the work of each participant. The mornings were given to demonstration/discussions of the various technologies and the afternoons were spent in a computer lab learning various technologies with individualized help. According to the participants' written evaluations, the seminar was very successful, exciting them about the possibilities technology offers them, particularly for research and teaching, training them enough in specific technologies to know where to go next, and uniting the participants and staff in building a collaborative environment to enable future work. We look forward to repeating this seminar with another group of faculty if possible.
The five days followed these topics:
Computer conferencing was also discussed, demonstrated, and developed. We set up a conference for the seminar that is still ongoing. The Internet and associated tools now provide effective new ways to collaborate. Electronic mail and X.500 mail groups allow an instructor to communicate with students in a one-to-one way outside of the classroom or the office. Students can also communicate with each other in these ways.
Acquisition of information: This session focused on the most widely available U-M resources of the greatest use to registrants, e.g., MIRLYN and associated databases, Humanities Text Initiative, MLA Bibliography, and generalized access tools such as Gopher and, more powerfully, Netscape for navigating the World Wide Web. We discussed the structure of information and the way easily accessed (cheap, convenient, simple) information tends to drive out difficult to access (expensive, inconvenient, complicated) information.
Information resources of all kinds, books -- journals, photographs, and films -- are now accessible through computer networks. This session explored the nature of the resources available and the tools needed to gain access to them. Most of the world's major library catalogs are now available on the Internet. Increasingly vast stores of text and more complex document images are being made available every day. New information services, both free and fee-based, are coming online. This session explored information resources online and on CD-ROM.
This session concerned itself with acquiring the information (anonymous FTP, building files by copying into word processor documents, screen grabbers, and so on) and introduced the notion that different uses of data suggest different forms of acquisition (ASCII files in a standard word processor, databases, bibliographic software, spreadsheets, and so on). It is now possible to acquire the text of a document, extract quotes from the document verbatim, and place the quotes strategically in a paper being generated in the word processor. Fortunately, it is also possible to extract the citation and automatically produce a correctly formatted bibliography. It is also possible to capture and manipulate photographs, sounds, and video. All of these techniques were demonstrated and practiced.
Manipulation of information: This session included file format conversion tools (e.g., changing a graphic from the format in which it was acquired to one that can be used one's word processor), disk indexing tools (to allow people to search randomly over notes taken over a great period of time), bibliographic software, and text manipulation programs such as concordance and index makers. John Price-Wilkin presented the UMLIBTEXT project and explained SGML coding of texts. The session also featured a demonstration of WordCruncher, a DOS/Windows program for analyzing text. In this session, we discussed and demonstrated the various tools that are available to manipulate and analyze digital information. Sophisticated textual analysis that occupied scholars for years at a time can now be done routinely in a fraction of a day.
Presentation of information: This session included classroom computer projection and interactive, multimedia technology, and setting up multimedia Web sites (including the introduction of HTML for creating Web documents). The session concentrated on the use of Microsoft Power Point to create graphics for a lecture. Emily Cloyd presented her system for showing images, sounds, and video to classes, and Mike Lougee presented digital still and video capture.
Creation of compound documents: This session concentrated on the creation of pages on the World Wide Web as a way of publishing scholarly papers and serving the needs of classes. The session explored techniques for HTML authoring so each participant could create a home page on the World Wide Web.
Overall, the seminar was very successful. The group met in the Ehrlicher Room and the new DIAD lab of the School of Information and Library Studies. These facilities were more than adequate for the purpose. Participants had substantial hands-on experience and ample individual assistance. The evaluations turned in by the participants were uniformly enthusiastic. The knowledge gained from teaching the seminar will be used to plan the seminar for teaching assistants in August 1995 as well as the course planned for the fall term, subtitled "Research and Technology in the Humanities." We both look forward to repeating this faculty seminar if possible.
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