Abstract
Since 2014, The Map of Early Modern London (MoEML) has partnered with professors and students
around the world in a unique collaboration between a digital humanities (DH)
project and humanities classrooms. The model we have developed addresses a
sustainability challenge for DH projects, provides professors with a way of
meeting administrative demands for engaged learning, and gives students a
high-stakes research-based learning opportunity with the potential for an
open-access, peer–reviewed publication. The MoEML
Pedagogical Partnership Project emerged from a confluence of problems and
opportunities. One longstanding problem for DH practitioners is project-based:
how do we sustain the projects already begun? Another problem emerges as DH
moves out of the “big tent” and sets up camp in humanities
classrooms at smaller, non-R1 institutions. Also, for scholars not trained in
the technologies that drive many DH projects, crossing the analog-digital divide
might be daunting and discourage them from contributing to DH projects. To
address these challenges, the MoEML Pedagogical
Partnership takes Research-Based Learning (RBL) models and turns them into
high-profile publication opportunities, mobilizing ubiquitous social networking
and communication technologies to connect the project with the new demographic
of student contributors. This essay will highlight how digital projects and
digi-curious professors can collaborate to develop innovative pedagogical
practices that provide projects with content, enliven professors’ pedagogy, and
invite students to acquire scholarly research skills, gain digital literacy, and
engage in an interdisciplinary and international collaboration. We argue that DH
projects can be used innovatively and effectively in the classroom to promote
RBL. At the same time, DH projects–open-access ones in particular–can provide a
home both for humanities research and for the fruits of digital pedagogy across
a wide range of institutional settings.
Introduction
Since 2014,
The Map of Early Modern London has
partnered with professors and students around the world in a unique
collaboration between a digital humanities (DH) project and humanities
classrooms. The model we have developed addresses a sustainability challenge for
DH projects, provides professors with a way of meeting administrative demands
for engaged learning, and gives students a high-stakes research-based learning
opportunity with the potential for an open-access, peer-reviewed publication.
The
MoEML Pedagogical Partnership Project emerged
from a confluence of problems and opportunities. One longstanding problem for DH
practitioners is project-based: how do we sustain the projects already begun?
Another problem emerges as DH moves out of the “big tent” and
sets up camp in humanities classrooms.
[1] A complaint about DH is
that it requires infrastructure and support and is therefore inaccessible to the “‘have-nots’ of the mainstream humanities”
[
Grusin 2014]. Even if newcomers do have the resources to build something new (thereby
adding to the number of projects requiring curation and care), must they do so
in order to be doing DH? Another problem faces potential contributors to DH
projects: crossing the analog-digital divide can be daunting for scholars not
trained in the technologies that drive many DH projects. Projects and
contributors share the need to disseminate and mobilize scholarship. Academic
faculty are increasingly enjoined to publish in open-access fora, which
increases the need for reputable digital venues. We also need to capture the
original work of students, for whom the processes of scholarly publishing
(regardless of medium) can be alienating.
To address these challenges, the MoEML Pedagogical
Partnership takes Research-Based Learning (RBL) models and turns them into
high-profile publication opportunities, mobilizing ubiquitous social networking
and communication technologies to connect the project with the new demographic
of student contributors. For collaborators in classrooms around the world,
MoEML’s challenges become opportunities.
Similarly, challenges in the humanities become opportunities for MoEML. This essay will highlight how digital projects
and digi-curious professors can collaborate to develop innovative pedagogical
practices that provide projects with content, enliven professors’ pedagogy, and
invite students to acquire scholarly research skills, gain digital literacy, and
engage in an interdisciplinary and international collaboration. We argue that DH
projects can be used innovatively and effectively in the classroom to promote
RBL. At the same time, DH projects–open-access ones in particular–can provide a
home both for humanities research and for the fruits of digital pedagogy across
a wide range of institutional settings.
The Problems
DH Project Sustainability
In the seventeen years since
MoEML’s inception
as an intranet pedagogical tool, the project has developed multiple
resources that are far from completion: the first is a descriptive Gazetteer
of over one-thousand streets, sites, administrative units, and other
features; the second is a Library of texts that are crucial to our
understanding of early modern literary London but are rarely anthologized or
have never been edited at all. As the
MoEML
team turned its attention to building the best possible platform–adding a
digital edition of the Agas map with built-in drawing tools, enabling GIS
capabilities, linking to Google Maps, working with other projects to
geolocate their data, and compiling finding aids and bibliographies–the core
resources of the site remained unfinished. This problem is not unique to
MoEML.
[2] Jenstad’s students at the University of
Windsor anticipated as long ago as 2002 that finishing
MoEML would require the world to help. Two prescient students
(Michael Davis and Tara Drouillard) suggested that Jenstad invite
contributions from other classrooms, an idea that she found inspiring but
unachievable in 2002.
Engaged Learning and the Knowledge Mobilization Challenge
DH projects not only need to determine how to sustain themselves, but are
also expected (by funding bodies and university administrators) to make
their work accessible to the wider public. Understandably, public funding
agencies, such as SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council) in
Canada or the NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) in the US, want
scholars to give something back to taxpayers whose money supports their
projects. Digital Humanists might be more comfortable than other humanists
with online, open-access publications, but simply putting research on the
web is not enough. Furthermore, professors of all stripes are increasingly
being asked to mobilize knowledge, make it public, and quantify its impact
while also engaging students in meaningful research. In the twenty years
since the Boyer Commission’s report was published, we have seen calls for
research-intensive courses, capstone courses, and undergraduate research
scholarships across the disciplines and in institutions of all sizes. It has
been imposed by well-meaning administrators on faculty members without (in
some cases) much guidance about how to invite students into the research
process or how to mobilize research for the public good. We are not
accustomed to expecting original research from undergraduate students, even
though we can offer them access to primary texts, archival materials, and
tools that were unimaginable even ten years ago. Even with these new
resources, some of us find it hard to imagine innovative ways to get our
undergraduates involved in an historic research model that has generally
been conducted by lone scholars working in an archive and then writing up
their findings.
[3] An
obvious solution to this challenge is to get more scholars involved in RBL
and DH work. How can we reach across to our fellow teachers, especially
those lacking technological skillsets, and invite them to contribute their
expertise to a digital project?
The Solution
For over ten years, Jenstad incubated the idea put forward by her students in
2002. Certain material conditions had to pertain before she could develop the
Pedagogical Partnership she envisioned: grant funding, a team of research
assistants, and a collaborator (McLean-Fiander). But the key impetus to launch
the Partnership came from faculty members outside DH who had been charged with
doing undergraduate research in the classroom and mobilizing student
scholarship. A 2013 exchange on Facebook and email between Peter Herman at San
Diego State University (SDSU) and Jenstad at the University of Victoria (UVic)
catalyzed the transformation of the 2002 Windsor students’ idea into the reality
of
MoEML’s current Pedagogical Partnership. Herman
wrote that he was teaching a very small seminar the following semester that was
supposed to focus on undergraduate research. He wanted to go beyond
Early English Books Online (
EEBO), which he had been using successfully in the undergraduate
classroom [
Herman 2015], and asked Jenstad if she had any
innovative ideas about using
MoEML in some way. The
timing was ideal. With McLean-Fiander having recently joined the
MoEML team, we had conceived the idea of “starting a pilot project whereby we team up with professors in
other locations, supply teaching materials, and have the students contribute
to
MoEML under the close supervision of their
professor on site.” Jenstad wrote to Herman that
We are keen to honour our pedagogical origins while
upholding scholarly standards. We think it’s a win-win-win-win
proposition. MoEML needs contributors and
reviewers. Because MoEML is rapidly growing
beyond my capacity to edit every entry submitted, I need to delegate
some of the work. Your student gets a publication for his/her CV or
graduate school application. You would be credited as “Guest
Editor” and would have an innovative teaching partnership
to add to your teaching dossier.
[Jenstad 2013]
Herman’s response–that the project was “exactly what the administrators around here
[want]”
[
Herman 2013b]–confirmed that such a partnership had the potential to meet a new demand
in academia.
In its current form, the partnership is an innovative, scalable, extensible model
for teachers, student researchers, and digital humanities projects.
MoEML provides teaching materials for the module,
research guidance, and a high-profile publication opportunity for the class.
Professors work closely with students in their classes to produce a publishable
encyclopedia entry, edit an early modern text, and/or learn to transcribe and
encode text.
MoEML gains an edited,
externally-sourced contribution, and builds a base of educated users who may
well contribute in the future. Calling on the crowd is one way to complete large
projects. Managing the crowd and maintaining standards have always been the
challenges, however [
Causer and Wallace 2012]. In this partnership, the
professor functions like the Guest Editor of a journal issue, responsible for
vetting the content before it comes to the
MoEML
team; in this way,
MoEML distributes the management
of the crowd and delegates a certain amount of quality control.
The DH Part of the Solution
Including a MoEML module in a course does not
necessarily involve teaching DH directly, but it can provide DH skills and
model DH values outside a formal DH curriculum. It allows partners to teach
robust research skills while using digital resources and/or writing for the
digital environment. The MoEML module teaches
student participants to write for a different medium (the web). Because we
cite preferentially from open-access resources, students at large
institutions learn to look beyond subscription resources while students from
smaller institutions (without journal and database subscriptions) find that
they are not disadvantaged in the research process. Thus, the partnership
promotes the new models of dissemination pioneered by DH practitioners
(open-access, Creative Commons licensing, new models of peer review) and
brings attention to projects that may not be indexed in library catalogues.
The high visibility of the module invites students to do their best work.
The complexity of the projects demands collaboration, a hallmark of DH.
Different people bring different skills to the table. Some students will be
wizards with certain aspects of technology that may well be daunting for
their professors. Thus, the module compresses and occasionally inverts
hierarchies, another hallmark of both DH work and RBL.
The RBL Part of the Solution
In its 1998 white paper, “Reinventing Undergraduate
Education: A Blueprint for America’s Research Universities,” the
Boyer Commission on Educating Undergraduates in the Research University
recommended that RBL become the model of learning at R1 universities [
Boyer 1998].
[4] RBL entails inviting
students into a community of learners where the instructor and the students
are all pursuing an unanswered question together [
Lambert 2009]
[
Smith and Rust 2011]. The professor is neither the “sage on the stage”
nor the “guide on the side” but a fellow
investigator who offers mentorship to an apprentice investigator. RBL offers
students a high-stakes learning opportunity, gives them tools to ask and
answer legitimate questions, cultivates a spirit of collaboration, and
allows them to take ownership of the knowledge they produce [
Brew 2006]
[
Brew and Jewell 2012]. Model RBL opportunities include lab work,
fieldwork, internships, capstone courses, undergraduate research awards,
research scholarships, and course modules [
Lambert 2009]. RBL
is a natural fit for the Sciences and Social Sciences: disciplines with
teams working in laboratory settings or doing fieldwork regularly [
Walkington et al. 2011]. In the humanities, DH projects and
laboratories have the potential to offer RBL opportunities.
MoEML began in 1999 as an RBL exercise, and has
inspired and hosted further RBL projects since then.
[5]
Reimagining RBL through DH Pedagogy
MoEML stands at the intersection of two distinct
pressures: to provide RBL opportunities and to respond to the impact of the
digital revolution upon humanities research questions. The pedagogical
partnership reimagines the apprentice-researcher model of RBL and the
project-based model of DH. For good reason, RBL tends to happen at R1
institutions and DH tends to happen at places with centres: both are
research and resource intensive. A typical objection to RBL is that it is
difficult to practice in small institutions that do not have extensive
library, technical, or infrastructural resources. Critics have said the same
of DH [
Pannapacker 2013]. The two objections to RBL and DH
have tended to be mutually reinforcing. In UVic’s Maker Lab in the
Humanities (dir. Jentery Sayers), for example, RAs develop Kits for
Culture.
[6] However, such opportunities
are not course-based and depend upon a funded lab for support. At
MoEML, we provide comparable opportunities to
students undertaking Directed Readings (for course credit) or Jamie Cassels
Undergraduate Research Awards (scholarships to conduct original research
with a faculty member). Again, however, these are elite opportunities
predicated on competitive funding, lab/project space, and supervisorial good
will.
Our own project is well supported at UVic by the Humanities Computing and
Media Centre (HCMC), and we have enjoyed generous SSHRC funding (2012-2016).
The pedagogical partnership permits MoEML to
become a virtual lab shared by all our partners. They use our bibliography,
gazetteer, praxis guidelines, encoding protocols, and mapping tools. In
addition, we are available to provide guidance on research agendas. Just as
RBL is usually an instance of a student picking a small aspect of the
researcher’s larger research question, our pedagogical partners and their
students can develop a subset of research questions within the broader
framework of the research questions that MoEML
addresses.
The digital revolution also makes RBL more feasible across a wider range of
institutions. In the humanities, RBL might entail working with primary
materials linked to professors’ research projects. Such materials lend
themselves to digitization, and are, in fact, being digitized at a rapid
rate because they tend to be housed in libraries, which are rightly leading
the charge in digitizing the very kinds of data that humanities scholars
generally analyze (books, letters, records, images, art).
[7]
Our fieldwork used to take place in libraries; now it takes place on the
internet.
MoEML itself provides many
open-access resources but we also point people preferentially to other
open-access resources.
MoEML and the Pedagogical Partnership
Methodology
The MoEML Pedagogical Partnerships make four key
assumptions:
- Research-based learning is now possible at any institution, not just
the former R1 institutions, thanks to the burgeoning of digital
resources, in particular open-access ones.
- Providing students with high-stakes publishing opportunities will
motivate them to produce their best work.
- Their best work is often an original contribution to
scholarship.[8]
- The imperatives of knowledge mobilization and publicly funded
education demand that we capture students’ original
research and share it within and beyond the scholarly community.
Broadly speaking, the
MoEML module has two
phases. The first phase–teaching, assigning, and assessing–occurs during the
term at our partner institutions. As noted by the “Student Collaborators’ Bill of Rights,” a professor who assigns
a
MoEML module “must primarily consider the student’s own
intellectual growth”
[
Di Pressi et al. n.d.] rather than the needs of the project.
MoEML is not involved in the grading, which has to conform to
the partner institution’s assessment standards. Once the Partnership is
established and before the course begins, the project and the professor
discuss the nature of the contribution. The contribution needs to help
students achieve the learning outcomes for the course. In keeping with RBL
practices, the contribution must be relevant to the professor’s own research
questions and expertise. It must also fit the project’s needs; for
MoEML, the pressing needs are encyclopedia
articles for the Placeography, essays on topics of general interest to
MoEML users, and editions of texts for the
Library. The project supplies some teaching materials. During the term, the
students research the assigned topic and write an encyclopedia article or
create an edition under the close supervision of the professor who acts as
an on-site
MoEML Guest Editor.
For our 2014 pilot of the Pedagogical Partnership, we teamed up with Herman
at SDSU and Kathryn R. McPherson at Utah Valley University. Both professors
chose to have the entire class work together to complete a single MoEML Encyclopedia article that needed content:
Herman was assigned the Blackfriars Theatre and McPherson’s the Curtain
Theatre. MoEML provided a blurb about the
Partnership for their syllabi; suggested forms of assessment that had worked
for Jenstad in the past; provided a comprehensive online guide for student
researchers; visited their classes in person and/or by Skype; regularly
checked in with them via email; sent sources; and helped with refining
topics, developing models for group work, and reviewing an early draft (in
Herman’s case).
The second phase–preparing the submission for MoEML publication–occurs after the course is over and grades
are submitted. Not all students want to continue working on a project after
the course is finished (although many have done so), which means that they
will not experience the full cycle of academic feedback, revision, and
publication. Nevertheless, their work is still subject to the peer review
process through the mediation of the professor (credited as “Guest
Editor”), who has to revise the students’ work after the
students have moved on. Depending on the extent of the revisions required,
the Guest Editor may effectively co-author the contribution. Most academic
writing is better because of the suggestions and interventions of peer
reviewers, editors, and copyeditors–people who are often uncredited. MoEML consults the Guest Editor about how credit
should be apportioned and described in contribution metadata. MoEML then reviews, encodes, and publishes the
article.
The Results: A Winning Model?
We hoped that this model would benefit all the participants: the Guest
Editors/professors, the students, and the project.
Professors
would get an innovative teaching experience to include on their professional
dossiers. They would be able to engage their students in meaningful
research. Perhaps more importantly, professors who had been tasked with
incorporating digital tools and methods in the classroom would now have a
methodology. They would still be rooted in their own scholarly domain and
subject area as they taught scholarly research skills to their students, but
they would also get to offer their students pathways into digital
scholarship via the
MoEML module. In effect,
the Partnership would offer them one of the “easy ways to dip [their] toe[s] into the field [of
digital scholarship]”
[
Koh 2014]. Furthermore, they would now be free to experiment with classroom
power dynamics, allowing students who might be particularly technologically
savvy to take leadership roles. Indeed,
MoEML
would provide a solution to some of the problems that digital pedagogues
have historically faced.
[9] We hoped that
MoEML could model “the kind of non-hierarchical collaborative work
that bridges the erroneous distinctions drawn between pedagogy and
research”
[
Konkol 2015]. The
Student Collaborators’ Bill of
Rights notes that “At their best, these partnerships are a way for
students to learn new skills and benefit from mentorship, while more
seasoned scholars can learn from junior scholars’ ideas, skills,
subject knowledge, and perspectives”
[
Di Pressi et al. n.d.].
Ideally,
students would learn that they are not only consumers
of knowledge but can also be producers or creators of knowledge [
Konkol 2015]. They would feel part of something that is
bigger than themselves. While mastering scholarly research methods, such as
using online databases, academic journals, and checking and citing sources
properly, they would come to feel like scholars, and the experience would
push them to take their research skills to the next level. Having a venue
like
MoEML would provide them with an audience
to write for and show them that there can be real purpose to scholarly
writing since their work would have a genuine utility for other scholars.
Their work researching for
MoEML would be
formative, especially for those who planned to go on to graduate school with
the intention of entering the profession. They would not only learn more
about the early modern world, but also become better researchers and
collaborators.
Finally, the hope was that the project would acquire vetted
scholarly content that would help to sustain a pedagogical resource used by
thousands around the world. While expanding our content, we could achieve
greater quality assurance by having Guest Editors vet contributions. This
method would also take some of the strain off our in-house editors.
Refinements, Lessons Learned, Improvements
MoEML and partners have tested this model in a
variety of ways: public feedback, extension of the model, and role-switching.
During the pilot term (Spring 2014), we sought feedback from scholars and
potential contributors via demonstrations (most notably at the Shakespeare
Association of America [SAA] Digital Salon), social media (Facebook, Twitter,
and our own on-site News feed), and on-site visits. McLean-Fiander did a
“MoEML Road Show” in
southern California, visiting Herman’s class in person while there. We have
since given conference papers, presented in panel sessions, organized a Modern
Language Association (MLA) panel, and run a workshop at the SAA.
Feedback from Professors[10]
Informal feedback from Pedagogical Partners has been highly or wholly
positive. Amy Tigner at the University of Texas Arlington reported the
following after her graduate students completed the MoEML module: “We have learned so much doing this project and
the students remain excited and engaged. The collaborative aspect has
meant that they have really helped one another, and the overall
documents are better.” Meg Roland of Marylhurst University, whose
undergraduate study abroad students wrote about the London Wall, said that
her students had “become passionate researchers.” Upon starting the
MoEML module, Shannon Kelley of Fairfield
University, also a contributor to this issue of DHQ, wrote, “I am really excited to dig into this project
with my new Shakespeare course, and the administrators at my university
are thrilled too”; after completing the module, she wrote, “I have
only positive things to say.” A happy by-product of the MoEML Partnerships is that we are starting to see
interconnections form between the Pedagogical Partners, who cross-review
each other’s work and who are developing their own collaborations, including
plans to participate on roundtables and panels at future conferences.
Case Studies: Utah Valley University and Washington College
McPherson and another early partner, Kathryn Moncrief at Washington College
(a small private liberal arts college), have reflected at length on their
experiences in public fora, which has helped MoEML identify and implement improvements. Like most new
ventures, the Partnership has room to grow beyond its strong start.
Utah Valley University
McPherson’s experience was key to understanding the strengths and
weaknesses of the pilot Partnership. McPherson’s class at UVU was an
ideal venue for testing the hypothesis that a partnership between a
major DH project and a non-R1 institution could create a research-based
learning opportunity. UVU is a large (30K student), open-enrollment
university that doubles as a community college. Its focus on
“Engaged Learning” was recognized in 2008 with
the official Carnegie designation of “Elective Community
Engagement,” which recognizes collaboration between
institutions of higher education and their larger communities for the
mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge and resources in a context of
partnership and reciprocity. McPherson teaches in a large English
Department with a moderate number of majors (40 faculty and
approximately 500 majors, divided between Literary Studies, Creative
Writing, Writing Studies, and English Education). The Shakespeare course
(ENGL 463R) in which McPherson deployed the MoEML module is required for all Literary Studies and
Creative Writing students, recommended for English Education students,
and typically taken late in junior or during senior year. Class size
varies between 15 and 25 students.
Playing to her own research strengths, as RBL requires, McPherson
designed the course to interrogate “Original
Practices.” The concept of performing Shakespeare
according to original performance practices or under original
performance conditions was variously familiar to UVU students due to the
Grassroots Shakespeare Center, begun in 2009 by two of McPherson’s
former students. The troupe visited McPherson’s class and performed
scenes from
The Taming of the Shrew near
the end of the term. McPherson had students undertake in-class
performance exercises using materials prepared by Ralph Cohen and the
American Shakespeare Center, and made frequent use of comparison clips
of modern films and Shakespeare’s Globe performances. For the Engaged
Learning component of the course, McPherson had her students research
and write an article about the Curtain Theatre for
MoEML. She considered this exercise her first DH project.
The module allowed the students to mobilize new findings from the
discovery and excavation of the Curtain Theatre site in Shoreditch in
summer 2012, which was serendipitous since archeological evidence has
been crucial to Original Practices research. Working in groups,
McPherson’s students addressed five topics: Early Modern Neighborhood
and Site; Theatre Architecture; Playing Companies and People; Repertory
and Writers; and Modern Site and Archaeology. The resulting essay is now
published on the
MoEML site.
[11]
McPherson’s MLA and SAA reports about the MoEML Partnership made specific recommendations. Her
comments targeted the acquisition of research skills, the transition to
collaborative work, and the challenges of writing for a new medium.
MoEML’s actions or comments are
included parenthetically.
- Students at non-elite schools need more support for using
databases such as EEBO. (MoEML has since published a series of
“How-to” guides written by undergraduate
students working with Kristen Abbott Bennett at Stonehill College,
another non-R1 school grappling with digital research tools.[12])
- Students need more than models provided by their reading for
understanding the conventions of scholarly writing. (In response,
MoEML wrote a “Writing for
the Web” guide.)
- Students need to be drilled regarding the thorough use of
documentation and citation, precisely because the stakes are high in
this kind of public scholarship. (MoEML’s citation guide is currently appended to the end of
its style guide; the project make its innovative citation practices
more visible.)
- Precise orientation to citing early modern texts via signature and
gathering needs to be stressed. (MoEML
can take a leading role here by providing links to videos at the
British Library, Folger Shakespeare Library, and elsewhere.)
- A “mid-term draft” should be required to ensure
that students are not procrastinating. (For Herman, the MoEML team performed a mid-term external
review to introduce students to the concept of peer review, although
an external review can complicate the internal assessment process.)
- Conferences outside of class with each team of students would help
to foster collaboration and smooth out any interpersonal issues. (As
we learn to work collaboratively in our discipline generally, we can
all learn from DH.)
Washington College
Moncrief became interested in the way the
MoEML module fosters metaliteracy. Moncrief’s Renaissance
Drama class of twenty junior- and senior-level students worked
collaboratively to write an article on the Rose Theatre for
MoEML; the class was divided into the same
sort of topic groupings as McPherson’s class. Moncrief teamed up with
scholar-librarian Michele Santamaria to write an article about the
metacognitive effects of the
MoEML module.
They detailed “how metaliteracy was intrinsic to the
experience of undergraduate Renaissance Drama students embarking
upon collaborative research, nested within various cooperative
ventures”
[
Santamaria and Moncrief 2015].
[13] They viewed the
MoEML
Partnership as creating “an ideal opportunity” for
the students to improve both digital and social media skills while also
allowing them to develop their independence as scholars, a key to
enhancing their metaliteracy. While only two of the four research teams
appeared to “flourish” in the team setting, the students generally
reported a high level of pride in contributing to
MoEML and expressed a strong belief in the capacity for
undergraduates to engage in meaningful research. Santamaria and Moncrief
reported that the students “came to see themselves as authors of
information,” and they concluded that “learners benefit tremendously from
collaborative, research-based learning that depends on them
working across several domains of metaliteracy”
[
Santamaria and Moncrief 2015].
Student feedback
We sought student feedback via an end-of-term anonymous assessment, modelled
on the UVic Course Experience Survey and an instrument designed by the UVic
Learning and Teaching Centre.
[14] We used a Likert Scale to invite students to strongly
disagree, disagree, remain neutral, agree, or strongly agree with various
statements.
[15] The results
bear out many of our expectations. Among 51 respondents from four different
undergraduate classes comprised primarily of third and fourth-year English
majors, students by and large thought that the process made them a “better
researcher”” (4.31/5). Students also deeply believed that “all
undergraduates should have the opportunity to engage in similar,
high-stakes research” (4.33/5). They sometimes struggled to choose
among and deploy sources, even though a comprehensive research guide for
students is provided on the
MoEML site.
Students reported that using the “
MoEML Guide for Student Researchers”
[16]
both challenged them and enriched their experience, rating its helpfulness
at 3.65 out of 5.
All in all, students reported a high level of pride: 4.63 out of 5 said they
were “proud to contribute to a widely used online scholarly resource.”
One student reported that “My favorite thing about the MoEML module was how it […] engaged our class
in legitimate literary research while making use of cutting edge
technology! Old books and new computers: it’s the future.” Another
said the best part of the module was “the satisfaction of accomplishing
this daunting project. I can accomplish much more than I thought I
could.” They reported that the MoEML
module encouraged them to think about “proper research terms, primary
sources, and research engines,”
“which sources are more valuable,”
“the importance of historicising,” and “how to bring these important
aspects of culture and academia into modern conversation and consumption
[via] the internet!” They learned to consider the “validity of
information, how to pare down the abundance of it, and how to cross
check sources.”
When asked in what “specific ways did you grow and develop as a
researcher?” students revealed the following:
- “I learned to be more organized and work with a group of people that
have different strengths and weaknesses. I learned how to find
information that is useful.”;
- “I got into the habit of keeping research notes [which] helped with
my thesis work”;
- “I learned […] how to do real research [and how to]
examin[e] the text in deep, meaningful ways using historical context
and intensive reasoning and logic. These important lessons have
carried into aspects of my life I have never considered!”
When asked to reflect on how the MoEML module
might be useful for them when applying for a job or graduate school, one
respondent said, “I have experience in participating in a
‘Digital Humanities project’ which was successful
and allowed people to work and interact w[ith] one another
digitally.” Another student who worked as a research assistant with
MoEML during the Partnership reported that
“There is something completely inspiring and motivating in knowing
that my work is being accessed, assessed, and cited by students and
researchers worldwide.”
What the project learned
Due to the rapid uptake of the Partnership,
MoEML found itself with more contributions in the workflow than
the team could process quickly. At the time of writing (January 2016),
MoEML has had sixteen Pedagogical Partners
from four countries and a variety of institutions.
[17] The project has published thirteen articles, with
five more in draft at the encoding stage, and a further 28 assigned or in
revisions. Research assistants in Victoria invested time checking facts,
tagging people, places, dates, and sources, finding images, and sometimes
performing further research. As
MoEML moves
forward with future Partnerships, the project team must use its limited
resources wisely. To this end,
MoEML has
already implemented and continues to work on a series of “fixes.” The new
Teaching splash page
[18] on the site
provides partners with a clear overview of their role, the module,
MoEML’s submission criteria, and the resources
available to Guest Editors and students on and off site.
MoEML now insists that contributions from
Partnerships include project-specific identifiers for people, places, and dates.
[19]
Making such identifications are part of the critical work to be done by the
researcher; in many cases,
MoEML RAs would have
to replicate the research to make the identification. Pedagogical
Partnerships have helpfully shown where our contributor guidelines needed
expansion and clearer organization; it remains to be seen if students would
benefit from customized guidelines pitched at their level.
MoEML needs to fine-tune the peer-review process
so that the work is spread out across a wider range of reviewers. When its
current grant funding comes to an end in April 2016,
MoEML will need to assess the viability of the Partnerships.
Without funding, the project can still support a few experienced partners.
Even with renewed grant funding,
MoEML will
move to a competitive application model. Word-of-mouth alone has brought
more partners than
MoEML can accommodate,
although advertising via a CFP site and various discipline-specific
listservs and websites would be an obvious course of action when the process
becomes competitive.
What We All Learned/Ethical Matters
Partnerships do not always result in publishable content for the project.
Some submissions did not meet the standard for publication, a decision
usually taken by the Guest Editor but sometimes deferred to the project
team. Not all students want to contribute. Janni Aragon,
Director of Technology Integrated Learning at UVic, attended one of MoEML’s workshops and pointed out that students
need an “out.” As teachers, we cannot require students to
share their work in public fora. They may have personal or professional
reasons for wanting their work in the course to be a terminal exercise seen
only by the professor. Partners need be aware of ethical implications and
legal regulations at their home institutions. They may need to have students
sign waivers. They may need to have alternative assignments ready for
students who do not wish to participate. Whether or not the work results in
a publishable contribution, the partnership is a pedagogical success because
the students have developed highly mobile skills in research, writing, and
sometimes encoding.
We all became acutely aware of the mismatch between the speedy passage of
students through courses and the significantly less speedy pace of scholarly
publication. Professors had to remain in contact with students for months
after the end of the course; students were understandably impatient with the
process or simply not available to participate in post-course revisions.
Scholars are used to the longer timelines of published research. For the
professors, this work is part of their research and/or teaching portfolios;
they are willing to put in time to bring the project to completion. For
students who are not going on to graduate studies or becoming academics,
there is little incentive to continue working on the MoEML contribution. However, students who stay in the academy
or who go on to higher level training see their work for the MoEML partnership as a launchpad to a next-level
independent study.
The working conditions of contingent academics affected the partnership. A
number of our partners have been limited-term or adjunct instructors (Frost,
Bennett). Contingent faculty are often less able to propose DH or RBL
courses, may have limited access to institutional resources, and are
unlikely to have a lab space or dedicated technical support. Opening up our
project to contingent faculty means we open up their opportunities to
participate in DH research. Given the challenges they face in career
continuity, we can provide a permanent and visible home for their work. Such
partners seem to be gaining recognition for their participation in our
partnership. Because they are actively on the job market most of the time,
it becomes incumbent on us to fast-track the work they and their students
do.
Expanding and Extending the Model
The model is extensible to various pedagogical settings and other types of
assignments. Some partners have had their students collectively write a
single article on a place of major significance. Until the playhouses have
all been written up, those locations will be popular choices for teachers of
Renaissance Drama; Herman chose the Blackfriars, McPherson the Curtain,
Moncrief the Rose, Bishop the Theatre, Donna Woodford-Gormley the Globe,
Kirilka Stavreva Middle Temple Hall, and so on. Woodford-Gormley and
Stavreva spread the work across two classes in subsequent terms, thus making
two groups of students
de facto collaborators across time and
courses. Other partners, especially those with graduate students, have
assigned smaller topics to individual students; Briony Frost’s MA students
at the University of Exeter each tackled one location along a processional
route, and Tigner’s graduate students contributed multiple individual essays
on waterside locations for a course on “Shakespeare and
Early Modern Urban/Rural Nature.” Ian MacInnes at Albion College
placed two summer research scholarship students with
MoEML in Summer 2015; one student, Kate Casebeer, elected to
encode her own contribution using the
MoEML
Praxis guidelines normally used only by our internal team members. Roland at
Marylhurst University worked a module on London Wall into a Study Abroad
course, where her students traced the route of the Roman-era wall during
their trip.
[20]
Encyclopedia articles are not the only types of assignments
MoEML can accommodate. One of Tracey Hill’s
students at Bath Spa University transcribed a pageant book for the anthology
of mayoral shows. For Jennifer Drouin’s graduate-level Digital Humanities
course at the University of Alabama,
MoEML
designed an Encoding Partnership whereby students encoded proclamations for
the Library as part of their introduction to the Text Encoding Initiative
(TEI). Jenstad is currently experimenting with partnering up two classes in
different locations to try double-keying diplomatic transcriptions, in an
effort to teach descriptive bibliography, transcription, and encoding via an
international partnership.
[21]
MoEML has a prospective Partnership in 3D
modelling for which the project will supply ground surveys and architectural
information, and the Pedagogical Partner will teach students to interpret
the surveys and use Blender and/or Google Sketch-Up to create models of some
buildings in London;
MoEML will then embed the
models in Encyclopedia pages.
[22]
Participants in our workshops have given valuable feedback wondering aloud or
in writing how to implement such a partnership for their own projects, embed
such a module in a course, or seek out other projects with whom to partner.
We would like to see further expansion of this model not necessarily by
growth at
MoEML but via uptake by other
projects. A key limitation on
MoEML’s expansion
of the Pedagogical Partnership is the availability of grant-funding, since
project team members check, encode, and upload content in-house, essentially
functioning as a publisher without the infrastructure of a university press.
Other digital projects with different types of content, different content
management models, and registration tools (e.g., the capacity to capture
data via web interfaces, or to register contributors as Wiki users) may be
able to accommodate more contributors. Jenstad tested the extensibility of
the Encoding Partnership by having her graduate course on “Textual Studies
and Methods of Research” partner with the
Database of
Victorian Periodical Poetry, run by UVic professor Alison
Chapman.
[23]
Students transcribed poems from digital surrogates, followed the project’s
guidelines, and downloaded an encoding package prepared by the project’s
programmer. Many projects need help with transcriptions, markup, updating
bibliographies, reviewing, collecting and entering data, writing
encyclopedia entries, surfacing and describing materials, and creating
finding aids. Data created by one project might be available for
visualization or analysis by another project or using another tool, with the
results potentially augmenting what is already available on the project’s
site. Projects in need of such help might consider pedagogical partnerships
like ours.
Professors looking for real opportunities for their students might consider
asking projects if contributions would be welcome. We suggest that such
professors look for projects with a “Contribute” link
and/or Contributor Guidelines, an irregular publication cycle (i.e., one not
locked into “Issues” or “Releases”), a
variety of roles that students can perform, evidence of past student
contributions (although this evidence is not essential, since a project may
never have thought of mobilizing student scholarship), and, of course, a
digital presence. It helps to know a colleague on the project (as Herman
knew Jenstad). One possible pitch is to say “Would you be willing to
consider contributions from students if I were to vet them first?”
Above all, it is important that the project provide an opportunity for
students to exercise skills that they would need to learn in the course
anyway. If students need to learn palaeography, then a manuscript
transcription project or letters project (such as Early
Modern Manuscripts Online or Early Modern
Letters Online) could be an appropriate project partner.
Inspired by their experience as Partners with MoEML, McPherson and Moncrief have implemented a Pedagogical
Partnership in their new edition of Shakespeare’s Life
and Times (SLT 2.0) for the
Internet Shakespeare Editions–an ideal scenario that has mainly Junior
students writing for Freshmen, Sophomores, and Juniors.
To make such partnerships work, everyone has to benefit. We suggest that a
Project needs the following:
- a clearly identified contribution (as opposed to an offer to
help);
- reassurance that the partnership will not result in additional work
for the project, or a sense that the project’s investment will pay off
in terms of a wider user base, stakeholders who care about its content,
and a future highly qualified contributor; and
- a mechanism for ensuring quality. The last of these is no trifling
matter. Ideally, quality control would come in the shape of a digital
curator or gatekeeper.
Potential Pedagogical Partners (i.e., the professors who
function as Guest Editors) need some or all of the following:
- suggestions for possible contributions that will serve the learning
objectives of the course and fill current gaps in the project’s
structure;
- a module with clear boundaries that will fit inside the context of a
course structure;
- teaching and management tips;
- guidelines for the students to follow when writing and submitting
their contributions;
- research guidelines;
- assessment rubrics;
- full credit for their work on the site;
- an institutional letter of support; and
- a reminder to check their university’s regulations about ethics and
disclaimers.
Students need:
- credit in the form of their name appearing on the page or linked from
it;
- ample guidance from the professor;
- the feeling that they are making a valuable contribution;
- thorough explanations of how to do new things;
- opportunities to share their expertise; and
- an “out” should they wish not to publish their
work.[24]
While the MoEML Pedagogical Partnership model
has room for improvement, it has been successful thus far because all
parties have benefitted from the experience.
Public Humanities
MoEML’s Pedagogical Partnership also reaches
beyond the classroom and builds an expansive scholarly community created by
what Lanclos and White call “Resident practices”:
Networked practices [...] provide an opportunity for
individuals to make their identity broadly visible without the
mediation of traditional publishers or their institution. These
modes of online engagement have been described as Resident in that
they involve the individual being present, or residing, to a certain
extent online. This is in contrast to Visitor modes of engagement
where the individual leaves no online social trace. These new,
Resident, forms of agency and online participation are repositioning
institutions within a larger, more open, knowledge production
landscape. Individuals are increasingly aware, via the opportunities
provided by Resident practices on the web, that they do not have to
sacrifice as much personal agency to the institution to gain
professional credibility as they might have done in a pre-Web
era.
[Lanclos and White 2015]
MoEML engages in this kind of Resident practice
by opening up research communities and allowing students to reside in and
contribute to a scholarly, digital space where their research can be and has
been accessed by scholars and the interested public alike. Because the
Partnership acknowledges the capacity of students, with proper guidance, to
perform rigorous and original research, and because it publishes this work
on an accessible, public platform, it captures research that might not
otherwise see the light of day simply because it was conducted by an
undergraduate student.
Another pedagogical resource that often remains hidden is the course
syllabus. The
MoEML teaching resource page
shares a number of course syllabi from our Partners so that other
instructors might benefit from those who have gone before them. The teaching
page includes a series of “How-to Guides,” including the “Student
Research Guide,”
“How to Write for the Web,” and guides for using various digital
resources (the latter writing by Bennett’s students at Stonehill College).
Upon learning of the
MoEML Pedagogical
Partnership, Josh Magsam of
The Shakespeare
Standard reported: “It’s wonderful to see a strong commitment to
sharing teaching resources and partnering with other instructors to
enhance awareness of the project. I think joint projects and
crowd-sourced projects such as this–hybrid pedagogy, if you
will–represent some of the most vital and critical teaching work
being done in the field”
[
Magsam 2014].
MoEML fosters a scholarly community beyond the
individual classroom, too. Our Partner, Roland, recently wrote to tell us
that she took her students to a seniors’ center (at the Provost’s request)
so that they could talk about their work on the
MoEML project. One of the senior citizens was a retired Blue
Badge Guide from London. She asked to read the class’s article on London
Wall and ended up catching a few errors and making a number of helpful
suggestions to improve the content. As Roland put it, “what a great surprise that was to have her be an
additional reader; [... it] just shows the value of getting this
kind of work out into the community”
[
Roland 2016].
Conclusion
The editors of this issue of DHQ generously invoked
the MoEML Pedagogical Partnership in their call for
papers. Having been held up as a model of critical skills development, we would
like to conclude by reflecting on the extent to which our Partnerships engage in
what DHQ issue editors Murphy and Smith
characterized as “a multidimensional reimagining of where undergrads sit in
the field” and how we “conceive of their [students’] role in the
shifting knowledge economies produced by digital scholarship.” In
producing digital content, our partnering students develop the usual critical
skills of English majors but also begin thinking about other things, such as
platforms, infrastructures, and how knowledge is made. The Partnership teaches
students to be highly aware users of (i.e., Visitors to) digital resources (both
subscription and open-access). At the same time, it lowers the technological
barriers that often stand between humanities scholars in general (students and
faculty alike) and the digital projects created largely by so-called digital
humanists. The Partnership enables students to see themselves as producers of
digital resources and to become Residents of the digital terrain. We
democratize DH when we open up this subject position to students. The digital
space can welcome student contributors simply because it casts a bigger net
around original research; opening up MoEML pages to
students does not mean taking away publishing opportunities from others. The
biggest impediment to publishing student work is time–time spent on peer review,
copyediting, and the additional demands of encoding. The MoEML team and the Guest Editors can invest this time in student
learning because the benefits are mutual.
The Partnership expands the range of possibilities for doing DH. We can invite
students into a project like MoEML without hiring
them as Research Assistants. They do not have to apprentice as RAs, nor do they
have to acquire encoding or programming skills. In fact, working digitally does
not mean only (or even necessarily) digitizing, encoding, or programming. It
includes thinking critically about the impact of medium upon readership, the
ways we convey information, the types of sources we use, and how we connect to
the larger web of knowledge (by citation and/or links). Putting XML:ids into
submissions demands that students think about concepts that have been driven by
and are required by new forms of digital scholarship. Quoting a toponym from a
source is not enough; students have to think about what that toponym represents
and point to a stable, shared reference point. They become implicitly aware of
the need for authority names, linked open data, and identifiers (DOIs, XML:ids,
and URIs). They start to think about humanities research findings as data and
information as a network. At the same time, the Partnership does not preclude
opportunities to acquire skills in digital mapping and text encoding if students
wish. Professors and students who are technologically savvy or willing to learn
can adjust the module to teach various combinations of DH skills and research
skills.
A lot of what we do in the academy is scaffolded learning that builds towards the
masterpiece–the complete work that demands mastery of all the skills required of
a particular scholarly output. The capstone project, the MA thesis, and the PhD
dissertation are the traditional forms of the masterpiece. Like RBL, MoEML’s Partnership asks the undergraduate to produce
a masterpiece earlier in the game. The student works with others to take a
research problem to its logical conclusion, which is published in an environment
where the answer reaches a readership beyond the instructor in the course. The
sheer scope of the user-base of an open-access digital project is highly
motivating to the student. The scholarly injunctions become immediate and
pressing: to be exhaustive, to acknowledge prior and current voices in the
scholarly conversation, to consult all available sources of information, to use
many types of sources outside their home libraries and home disciplines, and to
master the form and richness required for the venue.
We began this paper talking about how the MoEML
Partnership emerged from “a confluence of problems and opportunities.”
While Pedagogical Partnerships are not, in the long run, an efficient way of
generating content for MoEML, the project has
benefitted tremendously from the influx of fresh voices, the growing community
of students and professors who have a digital “Residence” in
MoEML, the corrections they have made to
neighbouring pages, their suggestions for new places, and their feedback on the
Contributor Guidelines. The Guest Editors have welcomed the opportunity to
embrace a new pedagogy that meets new institutional demands, brings high-profile
attention to their institutions, and engages students in scholarly publication.
Many of the Partners have been featured in their campus magazines and local
media, which has, in turn, been good for the project. The full benefit to the
students remains to be seen. It is certain that some of them found the prospect
of producing publishable work daunting at the outset, and ultimately not all the
articles were publishable (which is a reality of academic life). The model will
be truly successful if it becomes a habitual way that students interact with and
improve the digital resources we all use in our scholarly lives. We fully expect
to see many of them stake a greater claim in the digital sphere in the years
ahead.
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