Hello, all. On Thursday and Friday, February 18th and 19th, the digital humanities were afoot at the faculty center. I was happy to begin a series of talks-discussions about digital humanities in general and thinking about it in a community college context in particular, focusing this week on the experience of being a participant in a Summer 2015 NEH Institute at Lane County College in Eugene Oregon, “Beyond Pockets of Innovation, Toward a Community of Practice.” The project director was Dr. Anne McGrail, who is on the English faculty there. Thanks to the generosity of institute colleagues who shared their material on the DH@CC Commons (see slideshow at the bottom of this post), I was able to share specific examples of the digital humanities in practice (or in progress toward practice) at other community colleges. This was an aim of the institute, i.e. to think about what it is possible and practical to do in a community college setting and how that setting is unique. Examples from other community colleges are invaluable, since they can enable us to think about different ways of doing things and perhaps move us past an “it can’t be done” mentality.
Because my aim in these posts isn’t to replicate my talk in print, but to point those interested in the direction of the topics discussed by me and those who were able to attend (as well as to give everyone access to links that were in the slides), I’ll move right to those examples, found on slides eight and nine below. These are also both openly posted to the DH@CC Commons site by their authors.
In the first (slide eight), Sharon Utakis and Dominique Zino, both at community colleges in the CUNY system, rethink the possibilities for a first year seminar required across CCs in the CUNY system. They think about how to collaborate on a project about the history of (a) local neighborhood(s), and how digital resources and tools might enable them to do this. What we might use this example to think about is that the course did not originate with the desire to “go digital;” instead it started with the desire to collaborate and with the goal of their course, which is lovely: “What we want students to gain: an introduction to how different liberal arts disciplines would approach the study of their neighborhoods.” Then they asked how the digital tools and resources at their disposal (see slide) could facilitate their goals. The primary step was to ask what the course should do, and did not stem from a vague idea or mandate to use technology. Somehow.
Dominique and Sharon’s example pairs nicely with Jack Norton’s (Normandale Community College): the syllabus and materials for an entire Global History course (slide nine) designed to highlight the digital practices of contemporary historical research. Look for the document entitled “Read This First,” where Jack compares how historians work today compared to how they worked, er, before. There, Jack writes:
What has changed is our way of getting at the past, our toolbox of history. Before we had books, and museum objects, and pictures, and letters and all sorts of other physical stuff. Now, we have all that, and new digital tools that give use greater access to the stuff we had before, and new ways of understanding it. For example, go to http://nytlabs.com/projects/chronicle.html . Type in a word and you can see its usage in articles in the NY Times magazine from the 1850s to today. 10 years ago we simply couldn’t do this type of analysis. Now we can. So, we are going to use a bunch of new digital tools this semester. One advantage of this approach is that everything I want you to use is: free, web-based, and user-friendly. As long as you can use a web- browser, you can use this semester’s digital tools.
Both courses will teach students about how digital resources and tools are used in the humanities today; Jack’s course has as an explicit goal of highlighting digital resources and tools and integrating them into a pre-existing course. As in our NEH seminar, these examples are starting points: for conversation, critique, ideas of your own, feedback, etc.
The examples lead back to the question of what a “community of practice” of DH looks like at a community college and at ours in particular, inside and outside of the classroom. At the faculty center, I began my talk with a general definition of digital humanities (slide two) and a musing that has now become slide three, “You may already be doing digital humanities without thinking about it.” On slide four, I give some examples of various types of DH, and I wondered aloud about how many people were already using “the digital” in class and in their own work, but did not consciously think of it as “digital humanities, ” as part of a field and academic community. Perhaps we need to move to “conscious digital humanities,” a phrase I tweaked from the field of Interdisciplinary Studies, where the same question often arises. What do you think?
Cool things that came up in conversation:
- The Open Culture site: a wonderful curated archive/gateway to free cultural resources on the web including open source textbooks, courses, MOOCs, public domain films, audio recordings, books, etc.
- Summer NEH Institutes and Seminars for 2016! This came up on Friday. The deadline for applying is March 1, 2016. Be sure you’ve clicked the tab for “college and university.” This includes adjuncts and lecturers and independent scholars. Talk to me or Marilyn or Rob and we can point you to others on campus who have also won places in a seminar or institute if you’d like advice. If you teach K-12 full time, you may also be eligible for the many offerings for school teachers. Have at it! You still have time to put together an application.
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Comments from within and outside of the Ocean community are quite welcome. You need to leave your email address but it will not appear with the comment. Guest posts are welcome; let me know if you’ve written something you’d like to have posted here. Hope to see you in person for the next in the series on March 3rd (4-5 p.m.) and 4th (2-3 p.m.) at the faculty center, Gateway 306. Marilyn and Rob provided wonderful cookies and coffee for each session, which made for a convivial atmosphere, as did everyone who attended.
*I have left a link to an Honors project in a World Lit II class on slide four with other examples, though it is password protected at the moment. If anyone would like to see Hannah’s e-portfolio, I’m happy to show it to you. Meanwhile, I’ll see if she will set it to public for a little while. If you are on a Mac and the slideshow will not advance in your browser, try Chrome.