Digging in the Archives: the Gospel of Slavery

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ASSIGNMENT: DIGGING IN THE ARCHIVES: THE GOSPEL OF SLAVERY

INSTRUCTIONS FOR STUDENTS (IN COMPUTER LAB 50 MINUTES)

“DIGGING IN THE DIGITAL ARCHIVES: ABEL THOMAS GOSPEL OF SLAVERY”
To submit your entry, just click on “Add submission” and cut and paste your URL for your blog post into that submission box, add comments if you wish, and then submit.

For today’s Digital Humanities Lab assignment, you will be working directly with the pages of the 1864 children’s book, The Gospel of Slavery. 

You should begin by reading the entire book quickly through. Then each of you will take one page to work with, answering these questions (we’ll select by going around the room so no one has the same letter).

Work through the questions in MS Word, and then cut and paste your answers into your BLOG page in Blogger. (This is the blog page/URL that you posted in our first lab.) Post your URL in Moodle so that everyone in the class can find your work and also so you can get a grade.

QUESTIONS TO ANSWER:

  1. What letter/page are you working with?
  2. VISUALS:
    Describe the picture at the top of the page in detail: describe the action and the actors. Who is at the center or figures most prominently? What purpose does this serve?
  3. LEARNING LETTERS:
    This is a primer, i.e., an elementary textbook for teaching children to read.  Beginning with the letter itself and what is “stands for” in this book, summarize the major “lesson” being taught on your page.  How does the rhyming scheme support the message?
  4. DUAL MESSAGE AND AUDIENCE:
    Notice that there are two parts to “read” on each page beyond the picture itself: a rhyming section and a commentary beneath it.  Do these sections have different audiences do you think? Who are they?
  5. WHAT IS THE STORY OF THIS LETTER/PAGE?
    Think about all three sections of your page now. What is the abolitionist story that is being told here?  Is there more than one?
  6. EQUIANO, ABOLITION AND THE GOSPEL OF SLAVERY
    How does this text fit within our study so far of Equiano’s narrative and of the history of slavery in the U.S.?  What does it suggest to you about abolitionists during the Civil War? What is unsettling to you about the genre of primer as an abolitionist work?
  7. WHAT LIES BEYOND THIS ONE BOOK?
    What kinds of questions would you like answered about this book? What perplexes or puzzles you?  How might you find answers to your questions? Who is “Iron Gray” and why is he on the title page? Speculate on Thomas’s use of this name.
  8. DON’T FORGET TO CITE YOUR SOURCE PROPERLY
    Before you complete your blog post, be sure to include the primary source information. In your blog, you can begin by creating a link directly to the page. But you should also include the complete citation information at the bottom of the page. Title of the Book, Author of the Book, Title of the Collection, Where the Collection is Housed (click on “Home” for most archives), [you don’t need to include  the URL for MLA citation style, but you might want to keep it handy for your own future use], then include Web and date accessed.

HT to Rebecca Onion in Slate for sharing her discovery of this text.

 

Crowdsourced Annotation and Margaret Fuller

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ASSIGNMENT: Crowdsourced American Lit I Class Annotation of Margaret Fuller’s “The Great Lawsuit”

[This assignment was inspired by two web projects: the New York Public Library’s crowdsourced transcription project “What’s on the Menu” and Brown Women Writer’s Project’s Collaborative Annotation Project.]

CONTEXT FOR THE ASSIGNMENT

Margaret Fuller’s text, “The Great Lawsuit” is rich with references to cultural, historical and political figures and literary texts and characters. For the reader new to studying literature, this can make the text seem “boring” because impenetrable. At the same time, the average undergraduate student who isn’t passionate about literature may not find time to look up every reference in order to deepen his or her understanding of Fuller’s meanings. However, 28 average students might be willing to look up one, and together an entire class could combine their knowledge into a single “interpretively enhanced document” that includes both basic informational details about a given reference (such as those provided in a Norton Anthology footnote) and also an interpretive nudge that might help the classroom of reader’s contextual reading. This crowdsourced annotation draws upon the collective intelligence and work of 28 American Literature Survey students to create a nuanced and rich textual experience of “The Great Lawsuit.”

 LEARNING OUTCOMES

  • Develop close-reading skills by providing a brief interpretation of how the background information on Fuller’s literary reference informs a reading of Fuller’s rhetorical strategy and meaning
  • Develop web-based research skills to find useful and substantive information about a cultural, literary or historical reference and apply those skills in an interpretive literary context.
  • Develop skills in 21st century digital literacy skills by participating in a crowdsourcing activity that reflects an emerging need in the wake of a flood of raw literary data.
  • Develop student success skills in interdependence in a peer-reviewed learning environment
  • Develop writing skills: ability to communicate information and interpretations succinctly for a college audience of students and the instructor

ASSIGNMENT INSTRUCTIONS STEP-BY-STEP

NOTE: Students post the google doc here as a footnote and not in Moodle.

STEP-BY-STEP INSTRUCTIONS

  1. First find your name below by scrolling beneath these instructions. Your name is assigned a number (somewhat randomly—based on last name alpha).
  2. Scroll down to the “explanatory note” assignment that corresponds to the number next to your name. This is your assigned “Close Reading Note” assignment.
  3. Log into Google Drive (using your gmail acct or your Blogger account.)
  4. Search the Google doc to find WHERE in Margaret Fuller’s text your assignment shows up. (for example, type in “Hercules” to see where Fuller mentions “Hercules.” If you re-read that section, you’ll know the direction of your mini-research.
  5. 5.      Use the web to find enough information about your assigned text to offer an explanatory note. Avoid .com sites. “.edu and .org” sites are often the most reliable. Wikipedia is a good starting place but may not be enough.
  6. Draft your note in Word and save your document so that you won’t lose it in translation!
  7. What is an explanatory note? An explanatory note gives not only information about the reference in Fuller’s text but also a brief interpretive explanation about the meaning created in Fuller’s text by including this reference.  You don’t need to stay within the usual 300-500-word CRN word count. The important thing to consider is: will this help my fellow student understand Fuller’s essay?
  8. Go to the shared Google doc.
  9. In the shared Google Doc, search and find the reference so you know where to insert your explanatory note. (Remember that for #1-4 you have one of the “background notes” and you should insert at the top of the document.)
  10. To insert a footnote, place your cursor where you want the note to go, click on “Insert” and scroll down to “Footnote.” Then cut and paste your note from Word into the note.
  11. When you are finished with your note, place your cursor back on the word that you annotated. Google Drive saves automatically.
  12. You now have participated in a crowdsourced annotation project.

GRADING CRITERIA:

This Close Reading Note follows the same grading criteria as all CRNs listed on the Moodle page.

FIND YOUR NAME BELOW

  1. Annie
  2. Connor
  3. Laura
  4. Nicole
  5. Zachary
  6. Morgan
  7. Torin
  8. Jake
  9. Wilson
  10. Cole
  11. Michael
  12. Logan
  13. Jennifer
  14. Shannon
  15. Stuart
  16. Kelly
  17. Jill
  18. Makenzie
  19. Theodore
  20. Brendan C.
  21. Kristin R.
  22. Scott W.
  23. Erica
  24. Zoe
  25. Marcus
  26. Anthony
  27. Callista

MATCH THE NUMBER NEXT TO YOUR NAME WITH ONE OF THESE NUMBERED ASSIGNMENTS

  1. An introductory note on Transcendentalism
  2. An explanatory note on Margaret Fuller
  3. An explanatory note on the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments
  4. An explanatory note on Godey’s Lady’s Book Fashion Plates
  5. An explanatory note on George Sand
  6. An explanatory note on La Roche Mauprat
  7. An explanatory note on Mary Wollstonecraft
  8. An explanatory note on Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman
  9. An explanatory note on William Godwin
  10. An explanatory note on Alexander Pope’s poem, “Eloisa to Abelard” and brief background about its source in the 12th century lovers’ story.
  11. An explanatory note on William and Mary Howitt
  12. An explanatory note on Goethe’s play, Goetz von Berlichengen
  13. An explanatory note on Manzoni’s play Adelchi
  14. An explanatory note on Nikolas Ludwig, Count von Zinzerdorf
  15. An explanatory note on Pharisaism
  16. An explanatory note on the Muse
  17. An explanatory note on Minerva
  18. An explanatory note on Hercules
  19. An explanatory note on Syrens or Sirens
  20. An explanatory note on Newton
  21. An explanatory note on Rhea, Pallas and Jove
  22. An explanatory note on Robert Southey’s The Curse of Kehama
  23. An explanatory note on Ceres
  24. An explanatory note on Athena
  25. An explanatory note on Wilhelm Meister by Goethe
  26. An explanatory note on Queen Victoria
  27. An explanatory note on the naming of the state of Virginia

 

Google Docs Live for Crowdsourced Annotations

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Collaborative Annotation Project (Primary Source)

This Digital Humanities Lab assignment is taken from the Women Writers Project at Brown University Collaborative Annotation Project. We’re working in Google docs, which is working great–especially since today for example one student was home with a sick child and was Googling her groupmates while they were working.

Caveats so far: Students don’t really know what “annotation” means and aren’t quite sure how what we’re doing matters. I think I might create a very short video next time that will help them understand how the primary source material we’re working with differs from the textbooks they read in college or the wikipedia entries they rely on. Maybe bring in the Dictionary of Literary Biography and some of the other major guides and annotations.

Since this is an embedded assignment (not in a Digital Humanities class but rather in a DH-infused Women Writers class) we have so much material to cover that taking a whole unit on annotation issues isn’t practical. My goal with these assignments this first time around is to really see what works, what sticks with them, what needs tinkering with. (We spend a lot of our time doing historical background work in class, such as viewing this BBC video about Pakistan and Partition in India in order to read Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee. So it’s a matter of priorities and time….)

Here are the instructions to students. I have also created a Google doc that is heavily indebted to the Women Writer’s Project but has instructions geared to my students.

STUDENTS!

  1. To begin, find out what group you are in (scroll down below).
  2. Then, go to this website and scroll down to the list of suggested texts. Browse the texts and see which ones appeal: there are poems, recipes, letters to young ladies, the accession speech of Queen Elizabeth.
  3. Your group should agree on which text you’ll be working with: Women Writers Online http://www.wwp.brown.edu/wwo/teaching/assignments/annotation.html
  4. Then sit together and read the document that you chose.
  5. I have prepared your Google docs with the questions below embedded in the documents. Once you have chosen which text(s) you will annotate, you should copy and paste these texts into your Google doc below these questions. This will serve as the basis for your new, annotated version of the text.
  6. Now you should answer questions 1-6 to determine your procedure and rationale for your annotations. NOTE: These questions are just the first step to your annotation project. Once you’ve answered the questions, it is time to do the annotations.
  7. It’s a good idea to sign into Google so that it will be clear as you’re working who is doing which pieces of work. If you choose not to sign in, then be sure to mark your work as you go–either using a color code or keeping track with other forms of signature.Working as a group (or dividing the text into sections so that each of you can work independently on a separate section), go through the text and add annotations following the rationale developed by your group in the earlier discussion.

QUESTIONS FOR DEVELOPING THE RATIONALE FOR YOUR ANNOTATIONS

  1. What aspects of the text most need explanation for a modern audience? (For instance, unfamiliar names, references to places and events, unfamiliar words, historical and political background, information about the author’s life, etc.) Your answers to this question will create an action item for your project.
  2. What kinds of information would a contemporary have had which modern readers no longer possess? Your answers to this question will create an action item for your project.
  3. What kinds of information might we want to have that a contemporary would not have had access to? Your answers to this question will create an action item for your project.
  4. What would be the most important things to explain for a novice reader? What would most contribute to a productive reading of the text? What do you not need to explain? Your answers to this question will create an action item for your project.
  5. Identify the specific details you plan to comment on in the annotation process, and describe why you chose to focus on these. For instance, if your group decided to identify individuals and events named in the text, explain the rationale for your decision. What kind of reading and research will your annotations support? Your answers to this question will create an action item for your project.
  6. How should your annotations be presented to be most effective? (As footnotes, endnotes, marginal notes, some other format?) What difference does this make to the reader’s experience of the text? Your answers to this question will create an action item for your project.

HOW MUCH TO ANNOTATE?
Once you have answered questions 1-6, you can fine-tune your text selection. If you chose a whole book or collection, you should decide on a manageable selection for each member of your group to work on. Or alternatively, you can select a group-sized document and then divide up the work so that different members will follow the leads set out from your answers to questions 1-6 above.

Whichever way you go, be sure you choose a manageable but challenging selection (perhaps a single poem or equivalent each or a page or long paragraph of prose).

[Today in class, Katlyn took a recipe from one of the books and completely translated it from 17th century English into contemporary recipe language. This works great for a recipe. She will be making notes about her rationale for doing that in the Google doc. But would it be a good idea to completely translate a poem? What might be lost by doing that? Perhaps using the “Comments” section in Google would work better with poetry–maintaining the original material qualities of the poem while also preparing a modern audience for some of the unfamiliarity of it. [Links to Google docs have been unlinked to protect student information]

Google Doc for Group 1 Mohammed, Wanetta, Tonia, Jessica

Google Doc for Group 2 Courtney A., Nikki, Kasha, Destaney, Duskin

Google Doc for Group 3 Lorrie, Symone, Ryan, Jess, Teresa

Google Doc for Group 4 Courtney W, Katlyn, Michael, Edward

Google Doc for Group 5 Kaitlyn, Matt, Ahleah, Syrena, Michelle

Follow Up: How Well Did Your Annotations Help Your Reader?
When the annotation process is complete, each group should choose another Google doc from a different group to read.  (Each group would then be reviewing an unfamiliar text that has been annotated.)  Each group should compare the annotated version with the original, and then in discussion consider the following questions:

  1. How much difference did the annotations make to the comprehensibility of the text? What insights were possible with the annotated version that were not possible with the original?
  2. What kinds of annotations were most helpful? Which ones were least helpful?
  3. What is the overall effect of the annotation on the text? How does it alter your impression of the text?
  4. How did the annotations address you as a reader? What knowledge did they assume you had? Did you feel comfortable in that role?

Assessment:

As digital humanities work is often collaborative in nature, the same issues that come up with scholars with respect to documenting contributions emerges with students. (This has always been true of collaborative group work.)  So I have created a collaborative grading rubric for students to grade their own work on this project. A version of the Collaborative Grading Rubric is available as a Google doc–formatting didn’t quite translate from Word, but it’s legible here.

 

ASSIGNMENT: Ngrams on 18th and 19th Century American Lit Themes at the Mid-Term

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ASSIGNMENT: Ngrams on 18th and 19th Century American Lit Themes at the Mid-Term

Prior to this DH Lab, we had finished the mid-term class assessment, and had made our way up through The Scarlett Letter. The lab class is just 50 minutes, so to introduce the concept of Ngrams, I used the now-classic TED talk “What We Learned from 5 Million Books”; it provided a quick introduction to the Google Ngram viewer and what it might afford students for text mining purposes.

On our Moodle LMS, I provide links to Ted Underwood’s Stone and the Shell Blog on etymology and poetic diction so that  really engaged students can read Professor Underwood’s lucid and sophisticated ideas about what text mining is beyond Google. And I also link to the Atlantic Monthly’s article on the new Google Ngram viewer.  I try to adhere to my own “DH at the CC” principle of “do it during class or they won’t get to do it at all.”

Here are the instructions I gave to students in a smart classroom with some demo’ing on my part first:

For this week’s DH Lab, use your readings so far and the examples from The Atlantic Monthly and the TEDx talk to dig around the 19th century for trends in the way people were writing about themes from the decades that we’ve been reading in.

(Start with 1800-1900 in American English but you can play around with those years if it serves your research purpose….)

You will probably have to try a few of them before you find any that make some real sense. Once you find an ngram that seems interesting or telling to you, post the link to it and offer a comment on what you think it might mean. In other words, try your hand at “culturomics” and text mining.

And here are some interesting ngrams that students found. What I like about these is how their tacit and emerging ideas about American literature and history are present in their choice of word pairs and clusters.

 

 

Scott found that “heaven” and “hell” were less prevalent than “god” and the “devil.”

 

From Mary Rowlandson’s Captivity Narrative to Equiano’s Slave Narrative, the juxtaposition of captivity/slavery and Christian ideology was emerging as a theme for students.

 

 

Some students used the lab to follow their own interests, as here with “easter” and “christmas”–interesting nonetheless.

 

This student found an interesting trend that suggested while “old” and “new” changed places, “change” was less commented upon.

My strongest impression of using this assignment in class is that students were thoroughly engaged in it, looking for words that would bring an interesting data patten. One or two were satisfied with utterly flat lines, such as what emerged for “who, what, where, when, how, why,” but overall students posted intriguing ngrams that led them to more questions than answers–which is just what I had wanted them to see about this kind of text mining.

What continues to be a challenge in doing DH at this level is to fully integrate these new tools into class in a way that supports their ongoing 10-week investigation of the subject matter–here, “American Literature.” Last term, In Women Writers, I focused too much on the tools and left the integration behind. This term, I’m asking them to use fewer tools and leading them through a more archival approach–through primary sources, material culture etc. Since we only have one day in the lab–and students thoroughly enjoy and engage in face-to-face discussion the other two days, it will be a matter of really designing each of these assignments in such a way that each of these labs will give a double aha moment: about how new tools can offer new ways to think about old ideas and even lead to new questions altogether….

 

DH Lab: Digging in the Archives I _Gospel of Slavery_

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INSTRUCTIONS FOR STUDENTS (IN COMPUTER LAB 50 MINUTES)

“DIGGING IN THE DIGITAL ARCHIVES: ABEL THOMAS GOSPEL OF SLAVERY”
To submit your entry, just click on “Add submission” and cut and paste your URL for your blog post into that submission box, add comments if you wish, and then submit.

For today’s Digital Humanities Lab assignment, you will be working directly with the pages of the 1864 children’s book, The Gospel of Slavery. 

You should begin by reading the entire book quickly through. Then each of you will take one page to work with, answering these questions (we’ll select by going around the room so no one has the same letter).

Work through the questions in MS Word, and then cut and paste your answers into your BLOG page in Blogger. (This is the blog page/URL that you posted in our first lab.) Post your URL in Moodle so that everyone in the class can find your work and also so you can get a grade.

QUESTIONS TO ANSWER:

  1. What letter/page are you working with?
  2. VISUALS:
    Describe the picture at the top of the page in detail: describe the action and the actors. Who is at the center or figures most prominently? What purpose does this serve?
  3. LEARNING LETTERS:
    This is a primer, i.e., an elementary textbook for teaching children to read.  Beginning with the letter itself and what is “stands for” in this book, summarize the major “lesson” being taught on your page.  How does the rhyming scheme support the message?
  4. DUAL MESSAGE AND AUDIENCE:
    Notice that there are two parts to “read” on each page beyond the picture itself: a rhyming section and a commentary beneath it.  Do these sections have different audiences do you think? Who are they?
  5. WHAT IS THE STORY OF THIS LETTER/PAGE?
    Think about all three sections of your page now. What is the abolitionist story that is being told here?  Is there more than one?
  6. EQUIANO, ABOLITION AND THE GOSPEL OF SLAVERY
    How does this text fit within our study so far of Equiano’s narrative and of the history of slavery in the U.S.?  What does it suggest to you about abolitionists during the Civil War? What is unsettling to you about the genre of primer as an abolitionist work?
  7. WHAT LIES BEYOND THIS ONE BOOK?
    What kinds of questions would you like answered about this book? What perplexes or puzzles you?  How might you find answers to your questions? Who is “Iron Gray” and why is he on the title page? Speculate on Thomas’s use of this name.
  8. DON’T FORGET TO CITE YOUR SOURCE PROPERLY
    Before you complete your blog post, be sure to include the primary source information. In your blog, you can begin by creating a link directly to the page. But you should also include the complete citation information at the bottom of the page. Title of the Book, Author of the Book, Title of the Collection, Where the Collection is Housed (click on “Home” for most archives), [you don’t need to include  the URL for MLA citation style, but you might want to keep it handy for your own future use], then include Web and date accessed.

HT to Rebecca Onion in Slate for sharing her discovery of this text.

Doing DH@theCC Receives NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant

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I am so excited to hear that we have been awarded an NEH Office of Digital Humanities Start-Up grant for 2013-14. So looking forward to the project. The National Survey of Digital Humanities at the Community College is now open.  If you teach in community college, please complete the survey! We are especially interested in hearing from part-time humanities faculty.

To learn more about the origins of this project, click here.

In the fall we will gather in Louisville at the Community College Humanities Association national conference for a special pre-conference strategic planning workshop. I am deeply grateful to these experts who have agreed to join our conversation about what digital humanities looks like and could look like at the community college:

Jake Agatucci, professor of English at Central Oregon Community College, editor of The Community College Humanist newsletter and creator of “Digital Games Culture”

Rebecca Frost Davis,  Director of Instructional and Emerging Technology at St. Edward’s University in Austin, TX

Matthew K. Gold Associate Professor of English and Digital Humanities, City Tech and Graduate Center, CUNY

Dean Rheberger Director of MATRIX at Michigan State

Jesse Stommel, Assistant Professor, Univ. of Wisconsin/Madison, Department of Liberal Studies and the Arts, co-founder of Hybrid Pedagogy

Terri Whitney, Professor of English at North Shore Community College and director of Hawthorne in Salem

I hope to come away from the CCHA with a new plan for how to support DH work in community colleges nationally.

See you in Louisville!

 

 

Digital Humanities Has Arrived–but Not Quite On Community College Campuses

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Defining Digital Humanities for Community Colleges

NOTE: This project received an NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant for 2013. Read about it here.

Digital Humanities (DH) has emerged on college campuses, libraries, museums and on the Internet as practice, object of discourse, and disciplinary incursion, even as historians and literary scholars are actively engaged in lively definitional discussions about what exactly digital humanities is.  The definitional debates currently surrounding the field reveal the stakes and vitality of the digital humanities as an emerging discursive and cross-disciplinary field; in scholarly and educational orbits such as HASTAC and the MLA the field is, as one digital humanist put it, “hot.”

As a method and set of practices, theories, applications, artifacts, exhibits and pedagogies, DH is becoming a feature of faculty research agendas, historical and literary exhibit partnerships, university course offerings, etc. In fact, a recent tempest in a teacup occurred when one blogger implied that candidates without digital humanities on their CV should not expect a job interview in the humanities. [William Pannapacker, “No DH, No Interview”] But this energy has not extended to community college humanities programs.   A look at the most recent Community College Humanities Association (CCHA) national conference program, for example, entitled “Trailblazing in the Humanities,” suggests that DH has yet to catch on institutionally with humanities programs at community colleges.

At this definitional moment in digital humanities, when its constitutive features, disciplinary boundaries, signature methods and curricula are inchoate and subject to reinvention, community colleges can influence the conversation and help shape the contours of the field.  In particular, educational leaders and community college humanists should be engaged in helping to define the disciplinary entry points for lower-division college students who make up the community college demographic.

Community Colleges Have the Technological Infrastructure to Join the Conversation
Community colleges are poised to begin a systematic inquiry into their role in the development of DH nationally. While DH has yet to take shape at community colleges, technology is already a part of the pedagogical and operational infrastructure at larger institutions. At my institution, Lane Community College (Lane), for example, Online Learning and Educational Resources are a strategic direction of the college; goals include building capacity in faculty and staff to create innovative online learning and educational resources, providing the required tools, infrastructure and professional development to use emerging technologies, and exploring the effectiveness of online learning and educational resources.

Technology’s status as institutional priority at Lane has resulted in a huge leap at the college in five years: courses are being developed using Open Educational Resources (OER), and the exponential growth in online course offerings, e-portfolios to track student learning, and a Knowledge Network “collaboratory” have all helped faculty and staff to create a community of practice with respect to technology across disciplines.  But as the college takes on more of a 21st century technological character, the question that scholar Alan Liu asked of the field pertains: where is the cultural criticism in our digital projects? Something is missing in the embrace of digital technology in higher education at the community college, and digital humanities offers one way to explore what that is.

Definitional Debates and Disciplinary Uncertainty are Problematic at Two-Year Public Institutions
Why have community colleges been slow to embrace DH, even as they have embraced technology? One reason may be related to the definitional debates currently occurring in DH.  Teaching with technology is being adopted by humanities departments in community colleges. Some community colleges may easily confuse DH with their current adoption of technology for pedagogical purposes and for efficiency or currency in online courses. Online classes, syllabi online, shared curriculum through Open Educational Resources, videos and screencasts integrated into the face-to-face classroom: community colleges have readily adapted these digital media into their pedagogies. While practices of DH converge with some of these innovations, the critical scrutiny that DH brings to the picture may not fit as readily with administrative agendas in a community college setting.  Digital humanists may have to bring this aspect of the technological innovation landscape.

As with humanities scholars in the field at large, community college humanists share an uncertainty about the value of DH methods and technologies. Community colleges are embracing technology across the curriculum in response to the pressure to be lean and fiscally “sustainable,” and traditional humanists are responding in different ways to the resulting changed environment. Some embrace online courses, pedagogical tools and digital methods of production as “cool” (vide Liu 2012) and welcome students’ response to their knowledge work.  Others reject “virtual” learning environments and technologies, proudly claiming Luddite status and defending the printed versions of their Norton Anthologies.

Digital humanities offers an alternative to both of these responses to technology.  It functions as an extension of technology into cultural inquiry and also critique of the technologies that make it possible. As a field, digital humanities is itself an object of inquiry, a teaching tool and a participatory medium that joins graduate students, senior scholars, curators and librarians in an engagement with essential digital competencies for 21st century community college students. Elite colleges and universities may debate the definition of digital humanities, but its culture of collaboration and its critical interventions into the dominating power of technology itself lends it an indisputable value in a world searching for ways to comprehend what James Gleick (2011)  calls “the information.” The DH approach to the current forms of power in information society could enable community college students to critically engage with technology in a new way.

Importance of Communication outside the Collaborative but Specialized World of Digital Humanities
Community colleges are not alone in confronting the uneven development of digital humanities.  Because of its interdisciplinarity and fluid definition, digital humanities has not been uniformly welcomed or understood outside the immediate boundaries of the field.  For example, Ryan Cordell describes his  experience introducing a digital humanities course through his college’s institutional committee structure and notes the institutional lag between hiring specialists with DH expertise and research agendas such as his own and the reception of that expertise institutionally (he eventually renames his course “Technologies of Text” and the course is approved). This is one consequence of the term “digital humanities” lacking an agreed-upon referent. Some have argued that this fluidity is part of its strength and reach.  But at community colleges, the challenges posed by inchoate definitions may be more striking. Community colleges are under more careful scrutiny for fiscal accountability and relevance to the labor market, and undefined outcomes and aims make it vulnerable to dismissal by wary boards of education and even deans with an eye on the bottom line. For DH to take hold, it will take an intentional, systematic and collaborative approach.

The lag in DH among community colleges is not only unfortunate for community college students but for four-year programs to which they may transfer.  At Lane, for example, transfer programs make up the college’s largest service population, and all degree-seeking students take Arts and Letters courses.  Community colleges provide foundational humanities courses for transfer students seeking a four-year degree and for two-year-degree-seeking students through the general education requirement.  Engaging community colleges in the digital humanities conversation could pave the way for community college humanities programs to provide introductions to the field and to the skills required. Without such engagement, community college students of the humanities will only learn of DH as a discipline and practice if they continue to four-year colleges and may not be prepared when they arrive there.

Community colleges are often the gateway to degrees for low-income, first-generation students, returning adult students, students of color, and students with disabilities. If they miss the opportunity to engage these and all students with the methods, objects of inquiry and in some cases revolutionary ways of seeing that digital humanities offers, they risk falling short of their mission.

Indeed, Matthew K. Gold’s makes this point in his essay, “Whose Revolution? Towards a More Equitable Digital Humanities.” The lag in full entry of community colleges into the digital humanities “revolution” is an inequity that needs to be addressed:

As digital humanists, the questions we need to think about are these: what can digital humanities mean for cash-poor colleges with underserved student populations that have neither the staffing nor the expertise to complete DH projects on their own? What responsibilities do funders have to attempt to achieve a more equitable distribution of funding? Most importantly, what is the digital humanities missing when its professional discourse does not include the voices of the institutionally subaltern? How might the inclusion of students, faculty, and staff at such institutions alter the nature of discourse in DH, of the kinds of questions we ask and the kinds of answers we accept? What new kinds of collaborative structures might we build to begin to make DH more inclusive and more equitable?

One way to address the lag in community college engagement is to find out what digital humanities could look like at the lower-division level, and to place digital humanities at the center of any educational reform efforts occurring at community colleges.

I am also pursuing a grant which, if we are funded, could help develop a community of practice among community college humanists. At CCHA in October 2013, I am planning an interactive workshop for faculty interested in developing projects that engage students in digital humanities.
 

New Category of DH Participation: Tinkering Lurker

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So I have been following digital humanities scholars and scholarship since around summer 2011, with a goal of developing a sabbatical project that I call “Bringing Digital Humanities to the Community College and Vice Versa.”  Happily, I was awarded the sabbatical, and I plan to take it Fall 2013 after I finish work on a Title III grant.

My commitment to DH so far has been first to follow scholars who post on the internet, to find published materials of interest and to read them as much as possible. But since our work at the community college leaves very little room for sustained concentration, my main commitment has been to find a DH site every day and to write some kind of meaningful and if possible substantive tweet about it every day. I haven’t missed many days, and so at this point, I say with Mark Sample that “serial concentration is deep concentration.” In fact, this form of concentrated but interstitial work has been something of a revelation. Zotero has been essential in this regard, because while I tweet about a great site I see or read, I want to go back to them all someday, and I work from 3 computers every day.

I’m taking on this blog as a way to record my thinking over the next year before I actually take my sabbatical, and to try to synthesize ideas that have come to me serially. There are many threads that are floating through the DH scholarly world right now, but NONE of them are about DH at the CC, and I think that this blog can help me to reflect on the relevance of the conversations I read for DH work at Lane.

For example, just yesterday I found a fantastic little collection at the NY Public Library. The menus themselves are fascinating–just seeing what people were paying a lot of money for in New York hotel restaurants helps explain why people were thinner in the 30s! But how is this relevant for a community college? It just so happens that the library is looking for transcribers! That’s right, if you have a few minutes to spare, you can go into the collection and transcribe the words on the menu, verbatim, with prices, and participate in digital humanities archiving. This would be a great service learning project for our Culinary Arts students. And while they’re learning culinary and dietary history, students are also getting practice at digital literacy and transcription. To understand that the menus are photographs and therefore not searchable is a really important lesson in how technology and marking up works.

In the “real” DH world as I see it practiced, the coin of the scholarly and reputational realm is coding and markup. And I sure hope to learn that. But I also think there’s a lot of DH that can be done at the freshman and sophomore level that may involve coding but that may not.Doing a service learning project such as the one I describe takes a tiny dip into understanding DH. These are the kinds of insights I’d like to collect in the coming year. And I’ll collect them here.