Looking for Whitman: the Poetry of Place in the Life and Work of Walt Whitman

This Level 1 Digital Humanities project, " Looking for Whitman: The Poetry of Place in the Life and Work of Walt Whitman," will engage faculty and students at four academic institutions--New York City College of Technology; New York University; University of Mary Washington; and Rutgers University, Camden--in a concurrent, connected, semester-long inquiry into the relationship of Whitman's poetry to local geography and history. Each class will explore the interrelationship between a specific locale and a particular phase of the poet's work. Utilizing open-source tools to connect classrooms, the interdisciplinary project will create a collaborative, online space in which students can participate in a dynamic, social, web based learning environment. In its conception and articulation, this project reflects the central themes of Whitman's work: democracy, diversity, and connectedness

Looking For Whitman: The Poetry of Place in the Life and Work of Walt Whitman - Level 2

This project engages faculty and students at four universities--New York City College of Technology (CUNY), New York University, University of Mary Washington, and Rutgers University-Camden--in a concurrent, connected, semester-long inquiry into the relationship of Whitman's poetry to local geography and history. Each class will explore the relationship between its specific locale and a particular phase of the poet's work. Utilizing open-source tools to connect college classes from multiple institutions, the interdisciplinary project breaks down traditional institutional walls as it creates a collaborative online space in which students can participate in a dynamic, social, web-based learning environment. In its conception and in its dissemination, this project expands the traditional bounds of classroom and institutional space. In doing so, it reflects the central themes of Whitman's career: democracy, diversity, openness, and connectedness

Beyond Friending: BuddyPress and the Social, Networked, Open-Source Classroom

Classrooms have always been networks, of a sort, with professors and students forming an interlaced series of nodes that take shape over the course of a semester, but tools like BuddyPress and WordPress can make those networks more open, more porous, and more varied. In very useful ways, the classroom-as-social-network can help create engaging spaces for learning in which students are more connected to one another, to their professors, and to the wider world

Digital Humanities

Published in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media and Textuality, this chapter takes stock of the field of digital humanities as it existed in 2014

The Syllabus as a Shared Negotiation

The process of negotiation can do more than improve the syllabus--it can bring students into a critical relationship with the course itself and acknowledge them as stakeholders in the learning process

Issues of Labor, Credit, and Care in Peer-to-Peer Review Processes

This talk focuses on peer review models, considering issues of labor and credit within them. It then turns to the ethos of care to discuss how peer-to-peer review processes can be structure with care to ensure that participant labor is valued. The talk ends with a focus on the nature of the labor in peer-to-peer review, arguing that it is ultimately collective, community-focused labor and should be treated and valued as such

Introduction to The State of the Syllabus Special Edition

Positioning the syllabus as a key artifact in the modern academy, one that encapsulates many elements of intellectual, scholarly, social, cultural, political, and institutional contexts in which it is enmeshed, we offer in this special issue of Syllabus a set of provocations on the syllabus and its many roles. Including perspectives from full-time and part-time faculty, graduate students, and librarians, the issue offers a multifaceted take on how the syllabus is presently used and might be reimagined

Network + Publication + Ecosystem: Curating Digital Pedagogy, Fostering Community

We are excited to share our work on Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities (DPiH), which was published on the Humanities Commons in 2020 by the Modern Language Association after almost a decade of work. DPiH is a large-scale scholarly project that presents the stuff of teaching (syllabi, assignments, and resources) through a curated set of keywords such as “Poetry,” “Disability,” “Queer,” and “Annotation,” among many others. For each keyword, a curator or set of curators has selected and annotated ten pedagogical artifacts; created a curator’s selection statement; and presented a list of related resources. With a lengthy introduction to DPiH that historicizes and contextualizes the project, the edited collection, as a whole, presents a broad array of pedagogical practices that engage technology and offer concrete resources to faculty who would like to expand their existing teaching practices. In this piece, we would like to consider how the project, in its design and implementation, challenges existing ideas about scholarship, pedagogy, and our shared ecosystem of scholarly communication

The CUNY Academic Commons: Fostering Faculty Use of the Social Web

This paper analyzes the implementation of an academic social network that connects faculty members, administrators, and graduate students in a multi-campus university system. Part of a new generation of university-sponsored virtual spaces that foreground social networking, the CUNY Academic Commons has fostered a growing community of members who use the site to collaborate with colleagues across the system. This paper describes the processes involved in creating the site and offers guidance to institutions considering similar projects

Curating Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities

This is the published introduction to the born-digital, open-access, peer-reviewed Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities. More a rationale and scholarly study of both Digital Pedagogy and DPiH in general, this introduces articulates the uses, theory, rationale about digital pedagogy as it has been shaped in U.S. institutions since the explosion of Digital Humanities in 2009. As a separate field now, Digital Pedagogy is built on the generosity of its practitioners, but saving the stuff of teaching and pedagogy is difficult. The introduction historicizes this now-published project, its open peer review process, and its development in the early years (starting in 2010) in addition to offering multiple pathways into using DPiH for both experienced practitioners and anyone curious about how to use the 500+ pedagogical artifacts among the 59 keywords. By defining "digital pedagogy," articulating the 5 key concepts that surfaced with the creation of this project, and discussing potential obstacles about engaging in Digital Pedagogy (including an enumerated step-by-step process for getting started in using Digital Pedagogy strategies), this introduction invites all levels of engagement. In addition, the introduction provides an analysis of the types of content, contributors, and curators as well as early network analysis about the connections among all of the keywords, curators, and the shared pedagogical artifacts. Finally, the authors assess the project's infrastructure, open access, and open peer review publishing process over the 10 years it took to bring this project to fruition, luckily, right at the moment that all higher education institutions were forced to grapple with a sudden move to online learning during March 2020. The concluding sections discuss the shifting role of "published" and "publisher" with this born-digital project and considers the use of new forms of infrastructure for a scholarly work that values pedagogy above all else