Sources such as the Sustainable Futures series on community-based archiving detail the ethics and practical considerations of building and sustaining community-led archival collections. And the Archive Journal series Undergraduates in the Archives, for instance, addresses the challenges, benefits, and logistics of incorporating archives in undergraduate humanities curricula. But no source to date provides a comprehensive study of how digital archives and humanities pedagogy interact, inform each other, and even determine new contours in each of these respective areas. Panelists will offer a distinctive mix of the technical and the theoretical. They will forefront how the practical, nuts-and-bolts considerations of featured projects interact with theoretical implications for ethical archives-based humanities pedagogy.
The panel will consist of three 20-minute presentations followed by questions and discussion.
Kelley Kreitz will consider how remix studies can help build on current practices within DH pedagogy for engaging students in new ways with archives relevant to Latinx history. As digitization makes archives increasingly accessible for classroom use, it becomes possible for students to conceptualize and engage with literature in new ways. Drawing on recent thinking within remix studies and the digital humanities, as well as recent experiments in courses on Latinx literature and on literature, culture and media at Pace University, the paper explores the playlist as a conceptual model for rethinking how students might find their own pathways through literary history--when they can approach it through archival collections as opposed to established literary canons. The paper will incorporate recent pedagogical examples and argue that shifting from literary canons to playlists in the classroom provides a means of increasing participation in humanistic inquiry and, ultimately, of democratizing the production of knowledge.
Gabrielle Dean will discuss the course Author-Canon-Archive, cross-listed in the Johns Hopkins University’s Department of English and Program in Museums & Society. She taught this undergraduate course in special collections last fall to examine nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature through the lens of canon construction, probing the relationship of canonical absence and presence to archival practices and values. Broadly, the course asked, what counts as American literature and who do we consider an American author? Whose literary remains do we preserve and cherish? How does cultural heritage stewardship reinforce dominant social structures—and in what ways can it help us examine those structures, or even rearrange them? The course focused these large questions on three distinct “debates” in American literature: the use, appropriation, and retelling of American Indian biographies from the colonial era through the late nineteenth century; the relationship of gender to citizenship before, during, and after World War I; and deployments of African-American vernacular and “folk” themes from the 1870s through the 1930s. Inquiries were carried out through literary readings—both familiar and unfamiliar texts—and analysis of primary sources: original publications, manuscript material, and digital collections. Students in the class had to undertake several “archive dives,” critical investigations of digital archives; write an original Wikipedia article or significantly expand an existing article; and, for the final project, “edit” a section of an invented anthology of American literature—by researching, assembling, and reading texts that recreate or reframe a particular portion of the American literary canon, and writing an essay explaining their editorial philosophy and process.
François Vignale will present on an ongoing experiment of database teaching using archival sources for undergraduate students. The course takes place in the context of a general introduction to digital humanities for second-year students. The decision was made to set up a digital library and online exhibition (both powered by Omeka) based on digitized material from the City of Le Mans archives. One group of students focuses on the issue of indexing archival content and the construction of controlled vocabularies used for the description as well as the selection of the material that will be showed in the online exhibition. The selection and editorialization process of the documents for the virtual exhibition gives them the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the problems raised by curation and enhancement of content. Besides acquiring skills in libraries and information sciences and producing an innovative and gratifying project, the outcomes of this course for students also consist in the discovery of documents that are most often unknown. By making this past accessible to everyone through this digital library, they build a more intimate relationship with the history of their city and they increase their personal feeling of belonging to a community.