Digital Humanities Initiative

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Next Meeting: DH & Ed Tech – October 13th at 6:30pm, GC Room 6417

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  • October 4, 2010 at 7:50 pm #13376
    Charlie Edwards
    Member

    Hi all,

    We’re delighted to announce our next meeting: October 13th, 6:30pm-8:30pm, in CUNY Graduate Center Room 6417. Continuing our theme, “Defining the Digital Humanities,” we’ll turn to the relationship between educational technology and the digital humanities. Our own Mikhail Gerkovich, Joe Ugoretz, and Luke Waltzer will present their work on key initiatives in networked pedagogy: Blogs@Baruch and Macaulay Honors College’s ePortfolio Gateway and Macaulay Social Network. And Boone Gorges will discuss Anthologize, the product he helped develop this summer in One Week | One Tool.

    Readings to follow – but don’t worry, we’ll keep them short and sweet this time!

    Links:
    Blogs@Baruch: http://blsciblogs.baruch.cuny.edu/
    Macaulay ePortfolios: http://macaulay.cuny.edu/eportfolios/
    Macaulay Social Network: http://macaulay.cuny.edu/eportfolios/social/
    Anthologize: http://anthologize.org/
    One Week | One Tool: http://oneweekonetool.org/

    October 7, 2010 at 9:24 pm #20440
    Charlie Edwards
    Member

    Hi all,

    Our speakers on Wednesday have given us some background reading for the session. It may look like a long list after all, but they’re provocative texts and mostly short blog posts – and no need to tackle the 455 comments on the Fisch! ☺

    Mikhail Gershovich, Luke Waltzer, and Joe Ugoretz will be discussing technology and pedagogy in the context of their work, and DH.

    From Mikhail:
    “Writing in the 21st Century: A report from the National Council of Teachers of English” (attached to this post)

    From Luke:
    Mike Neary and Joss Winn – “The Student as Producer: Reinventing the Student Experience in Higher Education” (http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/1675/)
    Luke Waltzer – “The Path to Blogs@Baruch” and “Guerrillas in the Midst” (http://lukewaltzer.com/the-path-to-blogsbaruch/, http://lukewaltzer.com/guerrillas-in-the-midst/ )

    From Joe:
    Will Richardson – “Dear Kids, You Don’t Have To Go To College” (http://weblogg-ed.com/2006/dear-kids-you-dont-have-to-go-to-college/)
    Karl Fisch – “Is It Okay To Be A Technologically Illiterate Teacher?” (http://thefischbowl.blogspot.com/2007/09/is-it-okay-to-be-technologically.html)

    Boone Gorges will talk about his work on Anthologize, focusing on how/whether/to what extent tool-building can be understood as part of DH when the latter is understood as an academic discipline. He recommends:
    Steve Ramsay – “Anthologize It” (http://lenz.unl.edu/wordpress/?p=212)
    Tom Scheinfeldt – “Where’s the Beef? Does Digital Humanities Have to Answer Questions?” (http://www.foundhistory.org/2010/05/12/wheres-the-beef-does-digital-humanities-have-to-answer-questions/)

    And we can’t leave out educational technologist Jim Groom’s classic “I Bleed CUNY Blood” (http://bavatuesdays.com/i-bleed-cuny-blood/)

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    October 8, 2010 at 8:10 am #20441
    Joost Burgers
    Participant

    Hi All,

    I’m sorry but I’m going to have to miss this, as I’ll be at a conference in Albuquerque.

    See you all next meeting,

    Joost

    October 8, 2010 at 8:50 am #20442
    George Otte
    Participant

    People have way more than enough to read, but I can’t resist noting that my first blogpost ever on the Commons (March before last) was wholly devoted to snarky comments about Kathy Yancey’s “Writing in the 21st Century”:
    http://purelyreactive.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2009/03/17/cranky/

    October 13, 2010 at 9:48 am #20443
    Kate Moss
    Member

    Hi All,

    I wish I could make it! Wednesday evenings are impossible for me right now due to another commitment.

    However, I am glad the group is here and I look forward to joining in on events in future.

    October 13, 2010 at 7:38 pm #20444
    Corey Frost
    Participant

    I was hoping to be able to come this time, but I was waylaid by an unexpected ordeal in trying to submit a grant application today and a generally busy week. I’m enthusiastic about the group, though, and hope to jump in soon.
    Corey

    October 18, 2010 at 8:15 pm #20445
    Charlie Edwards
    Member

    First of all, a big (belated!) thank you to Joe, Luke, Mikhail, and Boone for presenting their work at our meeting on Wednesday.

    It was a very rich session – we could easily have spent two hours on any one of the topics (i.e. we bit off a little more than we could chew!). Check out the notes from the meeting (posted in Documents, see left hand navigation), but here’s a summary (presenters, pls correct anything I missed/got wrong):

    1. Boone talked about his work on Anthologize (http://anthologize.org/), a WordPress plugin developed in one week at the NEH-sponsored summer institute, One Week | One Tool that turns blog content into an ebook. The discussion opened onto some large questions: how is tool-building an academic endeavor? Is it OK if the theorizing of the making of the tool happens afterwards, in retrospect? What tool-building enterprises belong inside the big tent of DH? Where do you draw the line?

    2. Joe shared a presentation highlighting trends in digital pedagogy – e.g. approaches for managing technological distractions, working with the massive collective brain (teaching Google-fu), giving students experience as creators to make them better critics.

    3. Luke discussed Blogs@Baruch and the theoretical (and political) arguments it makes. B@B supports 30 sections over multiple disciplines; he used as an exemplar Tom Harbison’s “Modern American History” class, which is running right now (see http://blsciblogs.baruch.cuny.edu/his1005fall2010/category/featured/ ), with two sections working in a shared blogging space. (Tom is a member of this group, we’re happy to say.)

    4. Mikhail shared the work he and his students did via the blog he developed for his film class “Fear, Anxiety, & Paranoia,” in Spring 2010 (http://blsciblogs.baruch.cuny.edu/eng3940h/), explaining the online sources (such as swank.com and YouTube) and tools they used.

    Discussion in the technology & pedagogy portion of the evening turned to the relationship between ed tech and DH – is there the same level of political engagement in DH as in ed tech? Are the differences here a matter of tone, rather than substance?

    But there were a lot of issues that we didn’t have time to get into. Attendees, and those who couldn’t make it, feel free to jump in here and pick up the discussion. I’m sure the presenters (and Tom) will be happy to answer questions on their work too.

    October 18, 2010 at 8:43 pm #20446
    Matthew K. Gold (he/him)
    Participant

    I want to join Charlie in thanking Boone, Joe, Luke, and Mikhail, who did a wonderful job of showing some of the fine DH and Ed Tech work going on in CUNY. This is important work that CUNY DHI can and should build on; I’m sure that as our group moves forward, it will continue to revisit the presentations and issues brought up last week. Thanks to all who came out, and thanks to Charlie for doing such a fine job on the notes — please do check them out.

    Members of this group who missed the event should not miss Luke Waltzer’s just-posted rumination on Ed Tech and the Digital Humanities: http://lukewaltzer.com/on-edtech-and-the-digital-humanities/ It’s a fantastic post that gets to the root of some of the tensions we have been discussing in recent weeks between DH and Ed Tech.

    What resonates with me is the degree to which either Ed Tech or Digital Humanities has the potential to reshape traditional academic practices. Luke’s posts suggests that Ed Tech, by virtue of its lineage and its disjuncture from traditional scholarship, may in fact mount a more radical critique of academic practices than DH. Discussing the concept of “alt-ac” (http://nowviskie.org/2010/alt-ac/), he writes:

    “Adapting for myself the pressure to publish, travel to conferences, keep up with the canon, to constantly produce and present new research — all of the things that seem necessary to establish one’s self within the digital humanities, even as an ‘alt-ac’ person — doesn’t really seem ‘alt’ at all. It seems about exactly what I expected from a career in academia.”

    It’s an interesting argument that has been articulated more than once on twitter (notably, as Luke mentions, by Jim Groom), and it’s something that this group should discuss. To what extent can or should the Digital Humanities disrupt staid academic forms of exchange? Is it enough to change the forms themselves (books –> blogs –> twitter), or are more fundamental steps required given the troubled state of the humanities in particular, and the academy more generally?

    In asking these questions, I don’t want to divert comments from Luke’s blog, so please feel free to comment there, or here, or in both places.

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