by Keir Waddington

1. Digital texts and teaching medical history
KierWaddington, UK medical heritage library event
27/10/2016
1

2. DIGITAL TEXTS & TEACHING
MEDICAL HISTORY
KEIR WADDINGTON, CARDIFF UNIVERSITY

3. 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 dissertations
Bob Nicholson,

4. DIGITAL… WITH BENEFITS
 Access
 never hearing “it’s not in the
library”
 New possibilities / new
frontiers
 Expanding content / curricula

5. TRANSFORMS THE CLASSROOM INTO A
LIBRARY / ARCHIVE

6. DIGITAL… WITH BENEFITS
 Students 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?

7. BUT…

8. ISSUES
 Getting students to explore
 Vast array of digitized materials
 Flawed or misleading results
 ‘keyword blinkers’
 cherry-picking content via keyword searchers
 Speed over thought
 Irrelevance and frustration
 Trap of convenience
 Cut and paste
 What happens when the server goes down?

9. 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

10. EXERCISES
 Start small…
 Integrate (where
possible)…
 Embed skills…
 Tasks to familiarise…
 Don’t make assumptions…
 Analyse as material
objects…

11. 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

12. 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?

13. QUESTIONS?
THANK YOU