Digital Humanities Introduction (Week 1)

Since our first digital humanities mini-seminar meeting, I’ve been thinking more about my goals for this seminar as well as the readings that we completed. Most interesting to me is the idea of using digital media to allow my students to create projects that will showcase their understanding of our class subject matter and their writing skills but will also provide a path beyond the traditional means of sharing in an English course (essays). Perhaps this is the reason I am most interested in crowd sourced art projects. As I was constructing my revised ENG 110 course this term, I came upon a TED Talk by artist and programmer Aaron Koblin (http://www.aaronkoblin.com). One of Koblin’s projects is a crowd sourced video of Johnny Cash’s “Ain’t No Grave” where contributors each created one black and white frame. The end product is a flip-bookish video that manages to capture the life and struggles of Johnny Cash as well as the homage paid by his fans. This is the type of project that I would like to construct although I know it is not where I will start. I want to build something that allows individual student contributions to be valued on their own but also as a whole. I do not yet have a clear vision, but I look forward to learning about tools that will inspire me and help me move down this path.