Contributed by Margaret Smith, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
- Course: Intro to Digital Humanities
- Level: College
- Tool: None
- Other materials: Computer access
As with traditional humanities courses, one of my chief goals in teaching digital history and digital humanities is to equip students to engage critically with both primary and secondary sources. I want them to be able to articulate a digital project’s argument, identify biases and points of view, and put it in conversation with other sources, both print and digital.
To that end, I’ve created this project evaluation worksheet that students use in groups to collaboratively engage with digital projects. I’ve used this both with freshmen in the digital humanities Transdisciplinary Communication course and with upper-level students in my introduction to digital humanities. The selected projects help this assignment to do double duty as a public humanities assignment. Each project is an example of Rapid Response Research and responds to an urgent need. I find rapid response projects to be a great target for project evaluation exercises because 1) since they’re targeting a clear need, they’re often more explicit about articulating their goals, and 2) they help make visible to students how digital humanities tools and methods have applications outside the classroom.
Some good rapid response DH projects:
- Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online, https://www.sucho.org/
- Digital IDs and Smart Cities, https://www.thejustdatalab.com/tools-1/smart-cities-5hdnl
- Barred Business: A Response to the Small Business Administration’s Exclusion of Formerly Incarcerated Business Owners, https://arcg.is/9rG4u
- The COVID-19 Oral History Project, https://covid-19archive.org/s/oralhistory/page/welcome
- Torn Apart/Separados, https://xpmethod.columbia.edu/torn-apart/volume/1/