ch 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 course.
One suggestion from a department head has been to make the 1-credit studio optional rather than a co-requisite. From the perspective of teaching the studio that is feasible. But it raises the question as to why anyone in the companion course would register for the studio if it were not required. And an optional studio creates a significant pedagogical burden on the instructor teaching the other course: two types of term project assignments would need to be created and graded. I really don’t think the optional studio is viable due to the pedagogical issues it causes for the companion course.
DH pedagogy at the undergraduate level is still in the experimental stages. Start with the basics by introducing assignments that can be done using readily available tools. But don’t stop there and don’t beat the students over the head with these small DH assignments in every course. A bit of student backlash against DH is developing. Boredom sets in from creating timelines and maps in course after course. We’re trying to figure out how to create a scaffold of DH skills.
An English major met with me to discuss the possibility of enrolling in the Digital History studio this fall. At first, he wasn’t sure if he wanted to take the course. Then he asked straight out, “What skills will I learn in this course?” He was quite honest: as a senior, he was eager to add skills to his resume.
I described how we’re going to be examining demographic data and creating Web-based data visualizations that will chart changes over time. He got it. He flipped out his MacBook and registered right then for the class.
We’re a liberal arts college. Through the DH Studios we’re trying to create more contact time with the students so that they can build the confidence, critical thinking, and lifelong learning skills needed to work with technology and digital information in their studies and in their careers.