The Digital Public Humanities in Theory and Practice
Digital on the Street
The value of building an infrastructure that gives all citizens access to the human record and the opportunity to participate in its creation and use is enormous."
John Unsworth
This course will examine the intersections and encounters between two new strains of work in the Humanities: Public Humanities and Digital Humanities. While the latter focuses particularly on the ways in which digital technology can assist students of the arts and humanities in understanding the traditional subjects of their study, it is, like the Public Humanities, very much about engagement with the public sphere, and the communication of humanistic knowledge and perspectives. How can Digital Humanities help enable such public engagement? And how can Public Humanities inform the practices of digital humanists?
The course will have three components: a theoretical, classroom-
based examination of the theoretical intersections of Public and Digital Humanities, a praxis and technology component in which the students learn to use a multimedia story-building tool, and finally a community service learning component in which the students interact with elementary students to help them tell their own "stories" digitally, by means of a linked and networked "storybook" that is produced collaboratively by both course participants and the elementary school students.
Instructor: Mark McDayter
§1. Public and Digital
New ways of represent- ing our scholarship — integrating text, image, sound, and video — are emerg- ing, as are new ways of dissemi- nating it to ever broader publics."
Kathleen Woodward
§2. The Storybook
We want [students] to see and understand the persuasive power of technology and media, especially the power that flies beneath most people's radars."
Jason Ohler
§3. On the Street
Service learning is a powerful educational experience where interest collides with information, values are formed, and action emerges."
David Sawyer
Week 7 — Introduction to Service Learning. Meeting the Students.
Weeks 8-12 — Field Work.
Week 13 — Course Wrap-up and Reflection.
Resources
[A]s with new information technologies, public scholarship can radically redefine who finds, owns, and gives knowledge."
Teresa Mangum