Guidance for Assignments and Blogging

What follows below is guidance on aspects of all the required assignments for the course. All the due dates for assignments are listed in the Week-by-Week section of the syllabus.

Read Strategically
Throughout all of our readings here you are going to need to read strategically. You need to get what you need out of the book or article; this often does not require readying every word in an article or a book. On how to read for seminars see Miriam Sweeney’s or Larry Cebula’s blog posts. The same is true for digital projects you are going to show and tell, you need to figure out enough of it to talk about it and think about its implications but there is no expectation for you to master the given tool or digital resource.

Course Blogging
We are not simply going to learn about digital history in this course, we are also going to do digital history. That means we need to engage with the public web. To this end, a significant amount of our course communication is going to happen with your public course blog, which will be linked to our course website.

In our first week of class I will show you how to use the blog. These are blog posts, and as such they should not be written like five-page essays. Part of the goal of this assignment is to become familiar with the genre and format of thoughtful blogging. You need to get in, say something interesting, synthesize some thoughts and get out. Ideally briefly summarizing/explaining/showing what the readings or tools say or do, commenting on them or otherwise offering some new insights you think you can add, and then ending with an invitation to discussion. You should think of your posts as mixing the features of a well-composed academic book review and the well-conceived blog post. Read this for a sense of the features of an academic book review. For notes on how to write blog posts see this post.

Each of your posts should be between 500-1200 words. Posts for a given week must be on the web at least 12-hours before class (yes, this means Midnight!).

Do not assume your reader has detailed knowledge of the things you are writing about. One of the goals of the blog is to invite interested third parties into a conversation with our course. If we are doing this right, you can expect comments and dialog with historians, humanists, librarians, archivists, curators, and
bloggers who are not participating in the course as students but who are participating in the public conversation we initiate through the blog.

Your identity and the blog
This is public so one of our first considerations is going to be personal identity. While this is a practical matter it is also, very directly, part of the subject matter of the course. I would encourage you to blog with your real name, it is a good idea for you to start building a web presence for yourself. It has even been suggested that in the emerging interdisciplinary field of digital humanities you can either “be online or be irrelevant.” With that said, many people have good reasons not to use their real names on the web. With that in mind, if you are uncomfortable with sharing your name publicly, you should feel free to use a pseudonym or a handle. If there is a reason that you do not want to share your work on the web, please send me an email or meet with me after class. I feel that this public dialog is an important course goal, but I will of course understand and accommodate anyone that needs a different arrangement.

Keep the conversation going
Posting is not the end of the assignment. After posting you need to foster the discussion you are initiating. When people comment you need to give substantive responses. Try to engage everyone who comments in some fashion and try to use the comments to sustain a conversation you began at the end of your post. Do not hesitate to ask if you would like help with this process or want any advice about how to keep the conversation going.

Commenting is also an assignment
Beyond posting you are expected to contribute substantive comments to a minimum of 2 of your peers’ posts. Your comments should extend and contribute to the conversation. Good comments are an important genre unto themselves. Profhacker’s guidelines for comments for a sense of the kind of comment ecosystem we are trying to produce. Along with that, see this piece on how to write a great blog comment for some suggestions on the format for comments. Comment early so that others have a chance to read them.

The course blog is the required reading we write ourselves
Beyond posting and commenting everyone should skim the blogs before class each week. This is the part of the course readings that we write ourselves and, in all honesty, this is the most important springboard for our in-class discussions. The blog extends the function of classroom, and it is essential that everyone follow and participate in it.