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.

This is a discussion session about One Week One Tool and Serendip-o-matic (serendipomatic.org) Specific discussion topics can be driven by the participants, but possible options:

– leveraging the DPLA and Europeana APIs
– challenges maintaining product development with remote collaborators (who all have other primary job functions)
– advantages and disadvantages to an interdisciplinary team
– lessons learned from building a product in a week that can be extrapolated to the real world

We will have representatives from project management, outreach, design and development.

If anyone wants to learn how to use Omeka in a classroom (and/or talk about the benefits/challenges of doing so), I could lead a session on this.  I have had good luck using Omeka to start “Writing of Indigenous New England,” an archive of literature written by Native American people in this region (indigenousnewengland.com).  My students have partnered with local museums and historical societies, basically helping them to digitize their physical exhibits; they have also worked with contemporary Native authors, giving them personal pages (including Wikipedia pages–another topic I’d be happy to discuss). Using Omeka, humanities majors can learn a great deal about public writing, public history (including literary history), and public engagement. ..and come away with greater confidence about their “marketable” skills, as well.

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?