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07030248044CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background Of The Study
Digital Humanities (DH) is an imaginative practice harnessing cultural, social, economic, and technological limitations for the purpose of bringing systems and objects into the world. Digital humanities work in the middle of digital technology and humanities disciplines (Daniel, 2014). The digital humanities has so far encountered drastic and enticing growth over the past years, expanding across a number of academic fields and, in the process, assisting to reshape and reframe discussion and deliberations about the nature of scholarly research, peer review and publication, and academic promotion and tenure. Digital humanities already yield more than four-hundred thousand unlike results in a Google search (Blanke, 2014).
Since all the processes of digitization are processes of remediation, understanding the identicalness or sameness of binary code, digital file formats, the movement of analogue materials, and the character of born-digital materials is very important to understanding digital environments. Networked conditions of exchange play other roles in the growth and enhancement of digital humanities and other digital projects. Standards and practices introduced by communities form another important part of the technical infrastructure embody cultural worth (Houndmills, 2014).
Teaching, learning and establishing a Digital Humanities (DH) presence in the institutions of higher learning has had both its difficulties and opportunities. A deficiency of awareness of or education about the Digital Humanities is the largest barriers and one which have drawn a lot of attention and out to address. (Blanke 2014)
On the one hand, while a good number of scholars surveyed thought that the Digital Humanities would play a major role in the future of Humanities teaching and scholarship, very few were actually involved in or had completed Digital Humanities projects themselves. For a good number, their engagement with Digital Humanities projects has been majorly in terms of accessing materials through databases rather than creating digital surrogates and/or manipulating those digital surrogates for software assisted data-analysis, Brown, J. S.; Collins, A.; Duguid, P. (1989).
This implies that most scholars use Digital Humanities scholarship to facilitate their own research and teaching, but are not themselves producers of those digital projects.
On the whole DH tends to function in terrains that are in one way or the other linked to, but somewhat different from the traditional humanities; for instance, digital humanities centres may be based in traditional academic departments but also in libraries, museums and other cultural heritage and memory institutions (Arellano 2010).
DH research is often collaborative, interdisciplinary and trans-institutional. It is important that students are made aware of these challenges by looking at practical, real world examples of projects and practices so that they may be challenged to delve into new ways of thinking ( Brockbank, Anne, and Ian McGill. 2007)
1.2. Statement Of The Problem
The poor teaching and learning in the tertiary institutions as a result of several factors ranging from poor quality lecturers to poor educational environment. These have resulted to the poor academic achievement of student in the humanities discipline thus making the humanities field of study less attractive for the students (Brockbank et al 2007).
The poor teaching and learning of humanities in Nigerian tertiary institutions also has ultimately weakened the educational system as people prefer to study humanity courses in the tertiary institutions abroad where they would have access to very conducive teaching and learning environment (Arellano 2010).
The poor implementation of digital humanities in teaching and learning in Nigerian tertiary institutions may have massively contributed to the poor teaching by lecturers and academic performance of students which has negatively affected tertiary education development in Nigeria.
1.3. Theoretical Framework
Information Theory in Cognitive Science, Humanities and Neuroscience
The term “information processing system” has often been used to describe the brain. Indeed, information theory can be used to understand a variety of functions of the brain. We mention a few examples here.
• In neurophysiological experiments where a sensory stimulus is varied and the spiking activity of a neuron is recorded, mutual information can be used to infer what the neuron is coding for. Furthermore, the mutual information for different coding schemes can be compared, for example, to test whether the exact spike timing is used for information transmission (Rieke, et al. 2000).
• Information theory has been used to study both perceptual phenomena (Attneave, 2004) and the neural substrate of early visual processing (Barlow, 2001). It has been argue that the representations found in visual cortex arise from principles of redundancy reduction and optimal coding (Olshausen and Field, 2000).
• Communication via natural language occurs over a channel with limited capacity. Estimates of the entropy of natural language can be used to determine how much ambiguity/surprise there is in the next word following a stream of previous words giraffe and learning methods based on entropy can be used to model language (Berger et al., 2006).
• Redundant information arrives from multiple sensory sources (e.g. vision and audition) and over time (e.g. a series of frames of a movie). Decoding theory can be used to determine how this information should be combined optimally and whether the human system does so (Ghahramani, 2004).
• The human movement control system must cope with noise in motor neurons and in the muscles. Different ways of coding the motor command result in more or less variability in the movement (Harris and Wolpert, 2008).
Information theory lies at the core of our understanding of computing, communication, knowledge representation, and action. Like in many other fields of science, the basic concepts of information theory have played, and will continue to play, an important role in cognitive science,neuroscience and digital humanities.
Critical Theory and The Mangle Of Digital Humanities
As the various fields of the digital humanities have begun to mature and gain institutional traction, a debate has started to coalesce around the relationship between the "critical" function of the humanities and the "building" and "making" claims of the digital humanities (Ramsay; Mandell; Liu 2011 and 2012). While "making" was obviously central to the formation of the artifacts and objects of study in the humanities (whether musical compositions, works of art, literary texts, or films), the institutional and disciplinary formations of the humanities have largely focused their intellectual energies on criticism and interpretation.
1.4. Purpose Of The Study
The major purpose of the study is to examine digital humanities teaching and learning among students of tertiary institutions in Lagos state. Other objectives of the study include;
1.5. Research Questions
1.6. Research Hypotheses
H01: There is no significant impact of implementing digital tools in teaching humanities in tertiary institutions in Lagos state.
H02: There is no significant relationship between the application of digital humanities and students academic performance in tertiary institutions.
1.7. Significance Of The Study
This study would be of immense importance to government at all levels especially the Lagos state government in enhancing the teaching and learning of humanities and also towards the development of the Nigerian tertiary education.
This study would also benefit both undergraduate and post graduate students who are interested in developing further study on the subject matter through the provision of relevant literature in the course of their study or research.
The study would of immense benefit to educational policy makers in drafting effective policies that would improve the teaching and learning of digital humanities among students of Nigerian tertiary institutions.
1.8. Scope Of The Study
This study is restricted to the impact of digital humanities in teaching and learning among students of higher institutions in Lagos state, Nigeria.
1.9. OPERATIONAL DEFINITION OF TERMS
1. DIGITAL: Digital describes electronic technology that generates, stores, and processes data.
2. HUMANITIES: The humanities are studies about human culture, such as literature, philosophy, history and other related disciplines.
3. DIGITAL HUMANITIES(DH): Digital humanities is a distinct and still growing area of study that houses all the practice of humanities research in and through information technology, and the delving and examination of how the humanities may slowly develop through their engagement with technology, media, and computational methods.
4. ENCODE: the process of putting a sequence of characters (letters, numbers, punctuation, and certain symbols) into a specialized digital format for efficient transmission or transfer.
5. CODE: a system of signals or symbols for communication
6. TEXT VISUALISATION: The processes of making words stand out either by means of font size or color according to their usage frequency, Word Cloud has its significance in both text analysis and digital humanities scholarship
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