e scenarios:
- a lab as a 4th credit, just as in science labs
- a lab as a separate 1-credit co-requisite
- a lab as a standalone 1-credit course
It’s important to note that these should not be considered outsourced solutions. The subject faculty needs to be closely involved with the development and teaching of the labs even though the labs may be taught by librarians or academic technologists.
We’ve not tried the option of a 4th yet. Doing so will require identifying a suitable course and faculty willing to pursue that approach.
As previously mentioned, we had success with the second option in our Winter Term that just ended. The Scholarly Text Encoding studio was a co-requisite to a 300-level French course La Légende Arthurienne taught by Professor Stephen McCormick. The description of the French course:
Prerequisite: three courses at the 200 level. Corequisite: Digital Humanities (DH) 190. This course introduces students to the Arthurian narrative tradition of the medieval francophone world. We examine the origin and development of Arthur and the knights of the round table, the manuscript tradition in which these legends are transmitted, the concept of le merveilleux, and the role beasts and monsters play in the textual fabric of Arthurian material. The course project, which is completed in conjunction with the digital humanities corequisite studio, aims to create a website on the works of Marie de France, a medieval woman writer. Students learn how to encode text according to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). The main objectives of this course are to improve students’ reading fluency in French, and to give students an introduction to the field and applications of digital humanities.
Compare with the description of our corresponding DH studio course. A unique aspect of our DH Studio approach is that we’re also opening the studios to enrollment by students not in the aligned course. In addition to the six students from the French course, we had three students who were not enrolled in that course. The non-French language students worked on a set of Civil War letters from our archives for their text encoding project.
The studios meet once a week for a two-hour session. Since it’s only a 1-credit course, there’s little expectation for work outside the class. Assignments, grading rubrics, and grade breakdown are found on the course site. The class sessions are divided into lectures, discussions, and hands-on work with the emphasis on the latter, especially in the second-half of the term when the students are intensely working on their group projects.
The final project for the French group can be seen at Les Lais de Marie de France. (The site is in French.) It’s important to point out that the grade for the group project for the students in the French course is counted for both the grade in the studio as well as the grade in the French course, but the components of the grading is different for each course.
For Fall Term we’re offering our second DH Studio. This one has a focus on digital history. The original intent was that DH Studio: Digital History be aligned with a history course on Medieval Spain. However, more students registered for Digital History than for Medieval Spain, which was greatly underenrolled. After a flurry of emails among university administrators and pertinent faculty, the decision was made to cancel the Medieval Spain course and keep Digital History as a standalone 1-credit course.
There are a number of theories as to what happen to the Medieval Spain/Digital History registration. Did the co-requisite of the DH Studio tank the enrollment for Medieval Spain? Did the fact that the scheduling of the DH Studio conflicted with a Medieval Art in Italy course have an impact? (We didn’t notice that scheduling conflict until after registration had started.) Did a Medieval Spanish Culture course this Spring fulfill student desire for learning about Medieval Spain this year? Clearly, the logistics of scheduling and avoiding conflicts is the most difficult aspect of adding a separate DH lab component to a cours