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Hack-a-thon: Design a DH/Multimodal Degree Program

Categories:

Collaboration, Digital Literacy, Libraries, Teaching

October 20, 2012

by Roger Whitson

In this hack-a-thon, I suggest we design our own digital humanities undergraduate/graduate degree curriculum. There are many emerging programs that offer something like digital humanities (WSU’s Digital Technology and Culture and WSU-Vancouver’s Creative Media and Digital Culture, Marylhurst’s online/hybrid DH program, Georgia Tech’s Multimodal Communication program, FSU’s Histories of Text Technologies program, UCLA’s Digital Humanities program, U of Victoria’s DH program, N. Katherine Hayles’s call for Comparative Media Studies in her new book How We Think) that we can draw on. Some questions:

  1. What should students learn in a DH program? What sorts of jobs should we be preparing them for?
  2. To what degree should such programs be interdisciplinary?
  3. What sorts of basic courses should we offer?
  4. What is digital literacy and how would we teach it across the curriculum?
  5. To what degree should the curriculum be online? F2f? hybrid?
  6. Should only T/T professors teach the courses? or should there be a wider variety of professionals? (People in the tech field? Lecturers/Adjuncts? Librarians? #altac professionals?)
  7. How should we integrate the values of building and collaboration into the curriculum? How can programs be practical yet also retain the traditional values of a humanities education? (i.e. the critical/historical/theoretical/social contexts that have guided humanities instruction for decades).
  8. Could DH programs offer collaboration between undergraduate and graduate degree programs? What would this look like?
  9. How should such programs interact with the wider community around the University?
  10. To what degree should such programs collaborate with different kinds of institutions? State schools? Liberal Arts College? Technical Institutions?

 

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About the author

Roger Whitson

I graduated in 2008 with a Ph.D. in English at the University of Florida. Since then, I held a Brittain Fellowship at the Georgia Institute of Technology, as an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at Emory University's Digital Scholarship Commons (DiSC), and finally, as an Assistant Professor of 19th Century British and Anglophone Literature at Washington State University. I'm primarily interested in scholarly publishing and social media, especially the ways they connect with the teaching and scholarship of Romantic British poet/artist William Blake. I'm also really interested in visual rhetoric, multimodal composition, digital pedagogy, and comics and graphic novels. I have a HUGE passion for THATCamp, having attended SE last March, Prime in June, and Pedagogy in October. I also wrote a little bit on "Why I Love THATCamp" (http://bit.ly/o6h3Lw).

1 comment

  1. kathiberens

    October 20, 2012 at 5:23 pm (UTC 0) Link to this comment

    This is really important. I’d love to see if we could draft a list of shared best characterstics/best practices. Hayles’ comparative media studies might be one way to integrate into pre-existing programs.

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