Students: Do These Things Before January 28th!

1. Set up a digital reading journal. This semester, you’ll keep an online reading “journal” (or “map,” or “collage,” or “timeline”) in some sort of digital space: Mural.ly, Tumblr, Twitter, Google Doc, Dipity, Pinterest, Tiki-Toki, Timeline JS (Lindsey or Jenny can show you how this one works!), a Macaulay eportfolio, or whatever platform best suits you. This should be a space separate from any other digital presence you might have, and a platform you find relatively intuitive. It doesn’t necessarily have to have your full name attached, but it should be publicly accessible. Think of it as a combination scrapbook and/or freewriting space. Items to include: quotes from your reading that pique your interest, questions or thoughts you have, related multimedia, related news articles or blog posts, ideas you want to bring up in class, links to yours and others’ posts on the class eportfolio, whatever else seems relevant. (If you have trouble choosing a tool for this assignment, check in with Lindsey or Jenny. Lindsey is also going to do this and has chosen Tumblr, because it feels most “scrapbookish” to her; hers is here.)
2. Mail Lindsey and Jenny your reading journal’s URL.
3. Read an article! Colby should read Katherine Harris on “screwing around” in digital pedagogy, Kerishma should read Jentery Sayers on “tinkering” in the classroom, and Laura should read Matthew Kirschenbaum’s explanation of the digital humanities. (All links are direct to PDFs hosted elsewhere; please let us know if they’re broken.)
4. Write a post on this eportfolio that first explains the core ideas of your assigned article, as best you understand them, and then responds to those core ideas.

Have a wonderful holiday and break, and I look forward to seeing you at our first class on the 28th!

Welcome to the Honors Thesis Colloquium, Spring 2014: Digital Research Methods

This semester of the Honors Thesis Colloquium is designed to expose you to emerging digital research methods in the humanities and social sciences, provide you with the skills to develop a digital project that expands the reach and scope of your thesis research, and encourage you to think critically about public engagement with scholarly research in the 21st century. Using methodologies culled from digital scholarship across the disciplines, we will collectively and broadly re-orient ourselves in relationship to our own research, seeking a more capacious vision of the ways in which our newly acquired expertise might have the greatest impact. We will then consider how your individual thesis projects might not only feed back into the expansion of those scholarly conversations and communities from which they were first derived, but the strategies by which each of you might most effectively bring your work into the public eye. This process of experimentation and discovery will not only mirror current debates in the academy over best research practices in the technological age, it will also hone your own skills as you prepare to take on the postgraduate world.

You can read our class blog by scrolling below! Or you can check out our syllabus, our weekly schedule, and our list of readings for the semester. You can even find out a little bit more about each of us. And if you’re interested in how we got to this point, you can check out our Fall 2013 archive.

Thanks for stopping by!