Using IIIF to teach Digital Humanities

Practice-oriented approach to digital literacy skills 

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Davy Verbeke, Lise Foket, Vincent Ducatteeuw, Eef Rombaut, Frederic Lamsens, Christophe Verbruggen

IIIF Conference 2022, Harvard University, Cambridge (USA)

Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities

• Our focus areas
1. Digital heritage and virtual exhibitions
2. Geospatial analysis
3. Digital text analysis
4. Collaborative databases
• Support DH teaching practices at the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Ghent University, Belgium

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How to teach DH?

What is Digital Humanities?

• Computational practices for humanities research

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• Do not just talk about DH �(Kemman, 2017)

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• Hands-on approach: engaging with tools and methods �= learning by doing

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"I want to suggest that undergraduate students do not care about digital 

humanities.“

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"…we lead students brand-new to DH immediately into straw-man arguments about its broadest characterizations, whether good or bad, rather than substantive investigations of specific projects, thinkers, methods, books, or articles."

� (Ryan Cordell, 2016)

What should we teach when teaching DH?

15 transdisciplinary digital competences

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Using digital methods and/or tools to…

Benefits of IIIF for DH

• IIIF as a service
• Standardized access to digital objects
• Cite and share digital objects
• Display and storytelling
• Annotation

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• “Stitches together technology for DH’ers” (Emanuel, 2018)

Premise: �How can IIIF support DH teaching?

Two scenarios

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1. Virtual exhibitions with IIIF and Omeka S

2. Enriching IIIF collections with Madoc

1st scenario: Virtual exhibitions with IIIF and Omeka S �Teacher education case

Omeka S as the enabling platform

• Omeka S is an open-source platform used to:   
• create, curate and share digital collections 
• create virtual exhibitions

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• IIIF Server module enables IIIF support in Omeka S

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• Plugins for Universal Viewer, Mirador, … developed by Daniel Berthereau

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• Already used for teaching practices

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Workflow

Add digital items (often images)

Add metadata, tags, mapping

Use Storiiies / Exhibit.so

Share the collection

Create web pages

Showcase

2nd scenario: Enriching digital collections with Madoc�Feminist Poetry Case�In collaboration with Associate Professor Marianne Van Remoortel

Madoc

• Developed by Digirati and Funded by Universities of Ghent and Brussels, National Library of Wales
• Open-source
• Import and (re-)organize IIIF manifests and/or collections
• Participative enrichment of digital objects with metadata & annotations (e.g. transcriptions, translations, keywords, commentaries, …)
• Customized ‘capture model’ configurable in the backend
• Madoc 2.0

Poetry in 19th-century Feminist Periodicals

Import IIIF manifests (periodicals)

Create a project in Madoc

Capture model to:

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• Identify the poem in the periodical

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• Annotate the title and author

Identify the poems

Next steps

• Browse through annotated poems and choose 3 to 5 poems for in-depth analysis
• But… how to use Madoc to analyze poems?
• Hard to find one consistent ‘data model’ for each analysis
• Solution:

→ Each student created their own project with custom capture model

→ ‘HTML content-blocks’ for general reflections and to create a virtual exhibition

End result

Reflections: �Can we teach Digital Humanities using IIIF?

Reflections on the 1st scenario

The experiences: the Good

• “I found it positive that the assignment combined research competencies and digital competencies […] It gave teachers and students the opportunity to get creative. There was a great sense of practice with this assignment”

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• “I think all students would benefit from an assignment like this. Just because it is more than just writing a paper in Word, as we have had to do so many times before.”

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• "It was a clear reminder of the importance of digital skills needed as a teacher, which was sometimes confrontational for my fellow students.”

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… and some of the pitfalls

• "I experience technology as overwhelming and I found it quite a lot of information at one time.“

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• "I'm not good at digital and I don’t like doing it, so I started it reluctantly and, consequently, I did not remember that much about it."

Digital competences achieved?

Survey 32 participants: indicate by a slider which competences were achieved (0 = not achieved ; 50 = sufficiently ; 100 = largely)

15 transdisciplinary digital competences

Digital competences achieved?

Survey 32 participants: indicate by a slider which competences were achieved (0 = not achieved ; 50 = sufficiently ; 100 = largely)

15 transdisciplinary digital competences

Digital competences achieved?

Survey 32 participants: indicate by a slider which competences were achieved (0 = not achieved ; 50 = sufficiently ; 100 = largely)

15 transdisciplinary digital competences

Cfr. Davy Verbeke, SWOT-analysis for teaching with Omeka S (in Dutch)

Contact

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Davy.Verbeke@UGent.be

Scientific collaborator GhentCDH

Lise.Foket@UGent.be

Scientific collaborator GhentCDH

Vincent.Ducatteeuw@UGent.be

PhD Student

Eef.Rombaut@UGent.be

Educational researcher cultural sciences

Frederic.Lamsens@UGent.be

Software developer GhentCDH

Christophe.Verbruggen@UGent.be Director GhentCDH