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Digital Humanities Initiative

The CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative (CUNY DHI), launched in Fall 2010, aims to build connections and community among those at CUNY who are applying digital technologies to scholarship and pedagogy in the humanities. All are welcome: faculty, students, and technologists, experienced practitioners and beginning DHers, enthusiasts and skeptics.

We meet regularly on- and offline to explore key topics in the Digital Humanities, and share our work, questions, and concerns. See our blog for more information on upcoming events (it’s also where we present our group’s work to a wider audience). Help edit the CUNY Digital Humanities Resource Guide, our first group project. And, of course, join the conversation on the Forum.

Photo credit: Digital Hello by hugoslv on sxc.hu.

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Writing Wikipedia as coursework

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  • Very exciting. Nice work! So it seems as though you vetted the students’ writing before they posted it on Wikipedia? The MOMA experience sounds great…way to stimulate your students.

    I think that it’s a good assignment and certainly provides students with an extremely stimulating experience. I have my problems with wikipedia, mostly with some of its “editors” aggressive defense–using the wikipedia tenet of neutral tone–to repeatedly defend pedophilia. For that reason, and that reason alone, I try to discourage wikipedia’s use and I always point out how easy it is to vandalize the site.

    @Sara, Actually no, I did not vet the students writing before they posted to Wikipedia, which is in keeping the Wikipedia ethos. I did offer them peer review via their user talk pages, and the article’s talk page. And many other WP editors jumped in and vetted the contributions by reworking them, editing them, and in some cases reverting them.

    @Carl, considering that WP is such a large entity, so you think that by focusing on the way Neutral Point of View (NPOV) is implemented in one area, that you are throwing out the baby with the bathwater?

    Very nice – bravo! I don’t teach the kind of courses that lend themselves to editing Wikipedia, but I once did come up with a brief syllabus for a Wikipedia course. Its focus was the idea of collaborative writing/editing. After a theoretical introduction to argumentation and debate, it would have made the students create, and then critique and edit each others’ articles, providing valid Wikipedia-based reasons for actions taken (e.g. the extensive documentation under “Wikipedia is not…”). Then it encouraged students to enter into existing controversies (e.g. articles on nearly any current political figure), as a means of understanding the communities that built up around such articles.

    An active Wikipedian myself, I’ve occasionally tried to interest others in getting involved, but I find that academics tend to be the most resistant. I feel Wikipedia is still misunderstood in much of the academic community. Nevertheless, editors can learn some great skills: the need/importance of sourcing virtually every statement, being able to evaluate the quality of sources, understanding how documentation relates to the finished product, and particularly how to collaborate and debate with others, particularly those with whom you may disagree, and how you navigate such controversies.

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