During the semester you will engage in online annotation and dialogue over one of our readings. We will use the tool hypothes.is in order to do our annotations and exchanges. I will distribute a sign-up sheet, and you will be able to sign up for the one you want to annotate.
Besides our annotation exercise, we will build a common vocabulary sheet together using Google Docs. If I’m doing my job right, you will be exposed to a large number of new technical terms and concepts this semester. Sometimes it’s hard to keep track of them all. The shared glossary will help us keep track of them, and will become the foundation for a pop quiz at some surprise point during the semester.
This course requires us to be present for each other. You will lead discussion once during the semester. You will be responsible for the readings and the discussion questions.
Being present to each other, though, doesn’t necessarily mean speaking during seminar. You really don’t have to if you don’t feel like it outside of that one class where you will lead discussion. What’s the point of requiring you to? That said, it is important that we are there for each other, helping each other out, doing our part, asking questions when we don’t understand something, answering them when we do. For the duration of the semester we are a collective, the team we have—Yankees or Bad News Bears, we are what we got.
In this exercise you will choose a public digital humanities project and write a brief review. Before you embark on your own final project, we must first learn to develop some vocabulary together to help us evaluate the quality of a project. In this midterm exercise you will practice just that. Akin to a book review or book report, the review will allow you to look at an existing digital scholarship project in depth and provide us with your evalutation of it.
Working with a small team of your peers, you will build a relatively simple digital humanities project together. In the process of doing so you will practice many of the skills you will learn during studio hours this semester, and experience the ins and outs of working with others on a shared research project. This assignment will be contract graded.