# My Digital Humanities Rabbit Trails in 2016

# Teaching Theological Ethics

Goal: To give students agency in course planning; design term 2 teaching around student-led presentations.

- Low-fi beginnings: whiteboarding topics
- Going digital: Fed 35 topics into a digital survey
- First roadblock: canvas survey tool stinks
- Second roadblock: central IT unwilling to deploy lightweight, open-source alternative without "a business case"
- Solution: rolled my own instance of LimeSurvey on personal webhost (reclaim.com)
- Example: http://sccs-survey.org.uk/index.php/162945

- Third roadblock: Need to level playing field for students without tablets and smartphones
- Solution: Thanks to Arts IT! Discovered a big box full of iPads

## Results?

Worked well. iPads had trouble with wifi, but students just shared the 8-10 that worked.

Really interesting differences in engagement styles with the tool

Have a fantastic store of data I need to parse through to see how topic choices map onto student demographics

# Research?

Topic: climate change and low-carbon action in religious communities

Digital solution: Generate a map to consolidate practitioner relationships; resource third sector groups; parse demographics

# Research challenge?

Data exists, but huge problems with transparency, accuracy, sustainability

## Technical solution?

## OPEN EVERYTHING! Source! Data! Tools!

Mapping tools: QGIS, CartoDB, D3.js, carto.css

Project website: Jekyll via github

Sample: http://mapping.community

The next few rabbit trails:

- Decision time: Hacking resources list vs. Hacking a canvas wiki page
- Moving everything to github/gitlab
- Writing some "reproducible research" using RMarkdown
- Social network analysis
- Getting a discourse server (https://github.com/discourse/discourse)