A Reflection on Digital Humanities Projects

32 Comments / Digital Humanities / By admin

As I reflect on some of the digital projects that have been done, one question that comes to mind is, what is the goal of doing a digital project? These projects require significant time commitment, money and hard work and people do not develop them for fun. Having fun doing a project is great, but fun is not always the primary objective of a project. Some of the projects I looked at and the interviews I watched, had the goal of teaching historical thinking and writing. This is a worthy goal as we encounter a phenomenon today where people want to connect with their history and yet have difficulty grasping it because for a long time, history has been taught in many places as the recalling of past events, dates, places and people. Students who went through this kind of historical instruction have the tendency to see history as boring and also as being black or white. Challenging students to think historically enables them to have a better appreciation of history and all its complexities.

As I set out to develop a class that focuses on development issues in Africa, my objective is to help my students develop historical thinking and to be able to apply this thinking as they analyze the impact of development schemes/ projects in Africa. Erin Bush’s interview helped tremendously to guide me on how to structure this class. I find her approach of dividing the class into four modules of three weeks each very helpful. Each of my four modules would represent a major development scheme that has been implemented in Africa. The first week of each module focusing on primary sources, the second week on the context in which the sources were created and the third week on how other historians have looked at the sources. Given that half of my students are from international studies and some of them would be involved in the practice of development, I am planning to assign an activity weekly in which they can begin to put together the building blocks in designing their own development project that if given the opportunity, would want to implement.

One of the challenges that the projects of other students I reviewed faced and one that I might potentially face is that the conceptualization of the project might be bigger than what I may be able to reasonably do within the time frame. Given that this is the first time I am teaching this class in this format, I am conscious of how many primary and secondary source materials I should introduce to the students. My goal is to have the students spend more time on the analysis of the primary sources. This is where quality of sources is going to be better than quantity. I had originally intended to have them look at more primary sources and write more analytical papers for me. I am changing that approach after watching the interviews. I do not want students to be consumed by the amount of papers they have to write and I do not want to be consumed by the amount of grading I have to do. We want to devote more time thinking through the primary sources, their context and how other historians have looked at them.

I have two challenges. The first is on the platform to use in building out the class. I am conflicted between Omeka and WordPress. My knowledge of WordPress is superior to Omeka but it seems to me that Omeka might be better in the delivery of the class. The second challenge I have is that this Fall Semester, I am actually going to teach this class In a physical classroom. I am not sure how to integrate an online component to the class, so that the students can work both online and in class.