For this session I’d like to talk about or brainstorm other sorts of assignments that can take place across campuses.

The last two times I’ve taught my Intro to Digital Humanities course, in 2011 and in 2014, I included an assignment that responded to Mark Sample’s 2011 blog post, “The digital humanities is not about building, it’s about sharing.” The purpose of the assignments was to get students in my class working on something with students in other classes, at other universities. With digital technologies, there’s no longer a reason to pretend that the only class in the world reading this book. We can reach out to others and work with them on interpreting it or making a response to it.

The digital humanities, in other words, transforms not only our research but our learning.

In 2011, the resulting assignment was a collaboration with Mark, Zach Whalen, Erin Templeton, and Paul Benzon. We asked our students to re-network House of Leaves. That’s a fancy way of saying, we asked them to re-create the forums that accompanied the launch of the book.

In 2014, Zach and I decided we’d like to ask our students to create media objects for every page of House of Leaves. The result was A Million Blue Pages, a collaboration with Chuck Rybak, Mary Holland, Jeremy Douglass, Paul Hurh, and others.

Another good example of a cross-campus teaching project is Matt Gold and co.’s Looking for Whitman.

Again, for this session I’d like to talk about or brainstorm other sorts of assignments that can take place across campuses. How can we get our students talking to/working with one another? I imagine breaking into small groups and batting around ideas during the session and then presenting to the other groups.

Apologies for the tardy proposal. This could fall under either category of Talk or Teach.

The main focus of this session would be the use of Wikipedia (and other popular online tools, like Twitter) in the classroom. What has worked for you, what hasn’t, etc.  Part of this comes out of conversations around the Writing for Wadewitz Tribute Edit-A-Thons organized to honor a scholar who helped promote Wikipedia as a pedagogical tool (here’s the brochure she wrote on the topic).Given that there’s been multiple Tribute Edit-A-Thons in New England (plus the upcoming one in June), the session could also cover planning events like Wikipedia Write-Ins and Hack Days in academic settings.

Related to this proposal (but not its main focus): Part of what intrigues me about this subject is that there is a social justice element underneath the Wikipedia assignments and events (whether it is increasing the visibility of underrepresented groups as subjects and editors or more broadly, promoting the spread of basic digital literacy).  I haven’t observed this as much in other assignments using social media (e.g., connecting Twitter assignments to activist hashtags such as the current #YesAllWomen and the earlier #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen), but perhaps that is because I’m academically located in Early Modern and Eighteenth-Century discussions?

I’d like to propose a session that approaches DH on a macro-level. As a changing field where boundaries are being reinvented as we tackle new projects, we already know that DH can’t necessarily be defined. But shouldn’t we try to explain not what DH is, but how we use it? What makes a DH project? What distinguishes DH from other projects? What makes up the ethos of the field?