Location
KIPJ Room G
Session Type
45-minute concurrent session
Start Date
30-4-2019 1:20 PM
End Date
30-4-2019 2:05 PM
Keywords
Digital Humanities, Comic books, Graphic novels, Text Encoding Initiative, XQuery. Text mining, Digital scholarship
Abstract
Two librarians taught an Honors course at James Madison University titled “Comic Books, Analysis, and Digital Scholarship.” This non-coding-requirement course introduced students to the critical study of comic books by way of DH and online tools like IBM Watson. JMU Libraries has a growing collection of comic books (more than 10,000 single issues) and a commitment to foster DH research, hence rationale for the course. Students were introduced to online annotation platforms and comic-book-extended TEI (Text Encoding Initiative), using spreadsheet entry to code a Golden Age comic book in the public domain. In addition, the students used enterprise AI (IBM-Watson) and search engine reverse image lookups to spark engagement and to promote digital literacy, most notably a hermeneutics of suspicion in relation to the corporate interests vested in these powerful tools. The blend of comic books and these technologies proved an excellent entryway into DH projects at the undergraduate level.
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Included in
Curriculum and Instruction Commons, Digital Humanities Commons, Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Commons
Elementary, My Dear Watson: An Undergraduate Comic Books Course Using Enterprise AI and TEI
KIPJ Room G
Two librarians taught an Honors course at James Madison University titled “Comic Books, Analysis, and Digital Scholarship.” This non-coding-requirement course introduced students to the critical study of comic books by way of DH and online tools like IBM Watson. JMU Libraries has a growing collection of comic books (more than 10,000 single issues) and a commitment to foster DH research, hence rationale for the course. Students were introduced to online annotation platforms and comic-book-extended TEI (Text Encoding Initiative), using spreadsheet entry to code a Golden Age comic book in the public domain. In addition, the students used enterprise AI (IBM-Watson) and search engine reverse image lookups to spark engagement and to promote digital literacy, most notably a hermeneutics of suspicion in relation to the corporate interests vested in these powerful tools. The blend of comic books and these technologies proved an excellent entryway into DH projects at the undergraduate level.