Tagged introductions

Alice in Wonderland sitting in a chair playing with her kitten and a ball of yarn.
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Issue Fifteen

Introduction: Issue Fifteen

Lisa Brundage, Macaulay Honors College, CUNY

Teresa Ober, The Graduate Center, CUNY

Luke Waltzer, The Graduate Center, CUNY

For many, imagining the possibilities of digital technologies, in classrooms and in our lives, conjures up two dystopian extremes: unregulated chaos or constant surveillance. These nightmares are animated by a fear that the digital is something created for us, something we receive rather than construct. Headlines promise us that we are falling into our screens like Alice into the rabbit hole, and we may never emerge from the mind- and reality-bending places we go. This might be true—and perhaps it’s to our benefit. For teachers and scholars, engaging with digital environments need not be a lockstep march toward automation or a devaluation of our profession, but can instead offer chances to examine and revise knowledge and the many frames that shape it, for ourselves and for our students. Using new tools to examine old ideas can create a mutual sense of agency and empathy between participants in teaching and learning.

Games, archives, and assignments require scholars and teachers to consider what end-users should know and what experiences they should have, and also offer many opportunities to reflect upon how knowledge is constructed. Active learning environments draw students and teachers alike into spaces that require trust, attention, reflection, and openness. Decisions should be intentional and purposeful. Commitment to the deep inquiry that these experiences demand invites students to engage with content in generative ways, but also—and very importantly—requires scholars to be in an ongoing, exhilarating, and reflective relationship with the materials they teach and the methods they use. These are not transactional modes of education, but rather approaches that honor the complex ways in which learners can generate knowledge and engage with the disciplines.

The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy has regularly pushed back against the notion that digital technologies are neutral. Our fifteenth issue presents pieces about archives and archive building, games, the pedagogical implications of digital tools, and various elements of digital pedagogy in undergraduate courses. Together they unravel the mystique of digital scholarship and pedagogy while asking practical questions about prior knowledge and assumptions, labor and the dynamics of collaboration, and the challenges of sustainability and corralling institutional support.

Drilling down into tools, environments, and processes, asking how they work and don’t work and where they lead users to and away from— these are all crucial parts of digital scholarship and teaching. The pieces that follow situate the project-based work of interactive technology and pedagogy within the university. They interrogate decisions big and small, weighing how biases may shape how various audiences perceive information. It’s important that this thinking be made explicit to students and to audiences, and these pieces do just that. Such pedagogical work differentiates scholars from entrepreneurs, and open systems from closed ones. It propels teaching away from transactional models of learning, forcing instructors to make the process transparent at every turn. Learning happens not only in the doing of things, but in processing and reflecting upon the why and the how of that doing. The eight pieces that we present in this issue explore different facets of these principles.

In “‘So You Want to Build a Digital Archive?’ A Dialogue on Critical Digital Humanities Graduate Pedagogy,” Bibhushana Poudyal of the University of Texas at El Paso and Laura Gonzales of the University of Florida provide an account of building a digital archive about Nepal, interrogating the role that search engines and algorithms play in how we experience and know the world, and the gaps that they leave. The authors explain the steps and hurdles they needed to negotiate—including platform and materials selection, technical expertise, and user-experience testing—in ways that honor and amplify the local expertise of Kathmandu residents. Their work is an example of digital archiving that espouses a feminist and decolonial agenda and explicitly acknowledges the tensions that underlie all knowledge-creating endeavors.

The need for critically examining how the medium influences the agenda behind digital material is also examined in another piece in this issue. In “Confidence and Critical Thinking Are Differentially Affected by Content Intelligibility and Source Reliability: Implications for Game-Based Learning in Higher Education,” Robert O. Duncan of York College and The Graduate Center, CUNY, presents a study on how the intelligibility of information and reliability of sources influence performance and confidence among participants in a critical-thinking game. The results indicate the more environmentally induced difficulty in reading text, the more critically students engaged with it. The type of information source, however, appeared to be less influential on students’ performance, with little variation between conditions in which participants were or were not told which information was derived from a reliable source. These findings point toward a few practical implications for instruction and game design around information literacy, and help to increase awareness regarding opportunities to teach students how to evaluate the reliability of sources, before critically evaluating and using the information they provide.

While games can be used to promote critical thinking, how digital games are implemented by instructors matters, as well. Cristyne Hébert of the University of Regina and Jennifer Jenson of the University of British Columbia describe nine different strategies for instructors for grade-school students in “Digital Game-Based Pedagogies: Developing Teaching Strategies for Game-Based Learning.” The themes they identify were derived from a content analysis of material collected through observations and interviews conducted during a professional development session for teachers of children in grades 6 to 8. Three general categories of digital game-based strategies are recommended, including those which focus on gameplay, lesson planning and delivery, and how technology is framed within the game. These strategies provide a practical framework for integrating game-based learning into primary and secondary education.

In “Music Making in Scratch: High Floors, Low Ceilings, and Narrow Walls?” William Payne and S. Alex Ruthmann of New York University evaluate how Scratch, a prominent, block-based free programming language used extensively by young learners, both facilitates and frustrates digital music making. They’re hopeful that this approach can become more accessible to the community of learners who engage with computer science through Scratch, but are also concerned that the structural elements of the tool may impede students who want to pursue such a path. They detail these concerns, drawing upon theories of music cognition and coding, and offer concrete suggestions for addressing the shortcomings in the tool that will be of use both to teachers who use Scratch and to software developers building out digital music-making environments.

Taking into account the broader instructional context, particularly for collaborative work, can help educators make a more productive learning experience. “Creating Dynamic Undergraduate Learning Laboratories through Collaboration Between Archives, Libraries, and Digital Humanities,” by Kent Gerber, Charlie Goldberg, and Diana L. Magnuson of Bethel University, presents both a rationale and a procedure for collaborative work between departments and between faculty and students. They detail their process for creating an entry-level Digital Humanities course that taught students both physical and digital archival management, while providing a venue for teachers to grapple with what students needed to learn, and what parts of their own institutional history needed to be prioritized for preservation. They present us with a flexible model for creating fruitful partnerships between departments, centers, and libraries that also centers student learning goals within its structure.

While learning through digital pedagogy may be a collaborative experience, for the learner it must also enable the pursuit of personally meaningful knowledge construction. In “Teaching with Objects: Individuating Media Archaeology in Digital Studies,” University of Mary Washington’s Zach Whalen details an Introduction to Digital Studies course built around student inquiry into the physical artifacts of digital media. The assignment requires students to intensively research and then creatively present on artifacts they select, situating them in economic, ethical, social, and political histories. Drawing heavily from theories of digital archaeology and positioning students as detectives who define and then pursue their own questions about tools, this project immerses students in thinking about, around, and through the material goods of digital culture. It builds upon claims from other digital studies scholars that the field should do more to uncover and confront the social implications of the digital world.

In addition to analyzing what the learner knows and understands about a digital tool, it may also be just as useful to consider as what the learner does not yet know. Filipa Calado of the Graduate Center, CUNY presents a refreshing look at digital tools for reading in “‘Imagining What We Don’t Know’: Technological Ignorance as Condition for Learning.” Examining both Voyant Tools and Women Writers Online, Calado delves into the ways that these tools force readers into unfamiliar ways of interacting with text. By working carefully with these tools, reader-users are capable of stepping into new pedagogical and epistemological territory, regardless of whether or not the user possesses the technical acumen to control a tool’s source code. Her focus on the pleasure of discovery reminds us of the delight that can come from open exploration in the classroom.

We close the issue with “What Do You Do with 11,000 Blogs? Preserving, Archiving, and Maintaining UMW Blogs—A Case Study.” Angie Kemp of the University of Mary Washington, Lee Skallerup Bessette of Georgetown University, and Kris Shaffer from New Knowledge walk through the process of archiving ten years of activity on a large, university-based publishing platform. The piece demonstrates the range of knowledge, skills, and persistent community and scholarly engagement necessary to ethically and effectively manage an open system that operates at an enterprise scale. Collaboration and transparency is key, and this piece will benefit scholars at any institution who are grappling with how to honor, preserve, and protect the exponentially increasing amount of digital work our students and colleagues produce.

Knowledge construction should be a joyful process. The authors who have contributed to this issue have fully integrated that understanding into their approaches to scholarship, teaching, and preservation work through the use of digital technologies. Students and instructors alike stand to benefit from appreciating the joy that goes into learning, regardless of the choices of digital tools and strategies. It is our hope that this appreciation of the process of knowledge construction benefits the readers of this issue, as well. In the spirit of appreciating knowledge as that which is collaboratively built and generative, we hope that readers of JITP may be inspired to pursue new and innovative digital pedagogical approaches in their teaching and scholarship.

About the Editors

Lisa Brundage is Director of Teaching, Learning, and Technology at Macaulay Honors College at CUNY. She oversees Macaulay’s unique Instructional Technology Fellow program, which provides doctoral candidates with comprehensive training in the digital liberal arts and student-centered pedagogy methods, and pairs them with honors seminar faculty to implement digital projects in their classrooms. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the Graduate Center, CUNY, and is herself an alumna of the Instructional Technology Fellow program. She is chair of the CUNY IT Conference, is a member of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Certificate Program, and teaches Macaulay’s Springboard senior thesis course. She has recently published, with Emily Sherwood and Karen Gregory, in Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and Digital Humanities, edited by Elizabeth Losh and Jacqueline Wernimont.

Teresa Ober is a doctoral candidate in Educational Psychology at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Teresa is interested in the role of executive functions in language and literacy. Her research has focused on the development of cognition and language skills, as well as how technologies, including digital games, can be used to improve learning.

Luke Waltzer is the Director of the Teaching and Learning Center at the Graduate Center, CUNY, where he supports graduate students and faculty in their teaching across the CUNY system, and works on a variety of pedagogical and digital projects. He previously was the founding director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Baruch College. He holds a Ph.D. in History from the Graduate Center, serves as Director of Community Projects for the CUNY Academic Commons, is a faculty member in the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Certificate and MA in Digital Humanities programs, and directs the development of Vocat, an open-source multimedia evaluation and assessment tool. He has contributed essays to Matthew K. Gold’s Debates in the Digital Humanities and, with Thomas Harbison, to Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki’s Writing History in the Digital Age.

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Water-color image of guinea pig conducting archival research.
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Issue Fourteen

Introduction: Teaching & Research with Archives

Danica Savonick, SUNY Cortland

Jojo Karlin, The Graduate Center CUNY

Stephen Klein, The Graduate Center CUNY

From projects like the SNCC Digital Gateway to Colored Conventions, digital technologies are prompting renewed attention to archival research and teaching practices and creating new opportunities for engaging primary sources. At the same time, digital technologies are raising ethical questions about how archives are created, organized, shared, accessed, and preserved. Increased access has coincided with what Wendy Hayden calls “The Archival Turn’s Pedagogical Turn,” as instructors explore how archival encounters can catalyze student-centered, experiential, collaborative, and project-based learning experiences. With this issue, we sought to address several questions: How do scholars locate authoritative information and guarantee continued access in the current media landscape? How do we teach undergraduate students to perform archival research, evaluate digital sources, and even compose and curate their own archives?

As a graduate student researching letter writing, special issue editor Jojo Karlin worked on a digital edition of her grandparents’ wartime overseas correspondence. From this experience, she saw the necessity for contemporary scholars to receive training in efficient and ethical digital asset management, including how to organize digital files and metadata. She realized that conversations about digital archives were occurring among librarians (who often see firsthand the transitions between technologies and the simultaneous organization of analog and digital materials) and among educators who teach with archives and want to leverage new technologies to help students create their own. She wondered how we could bring these conversations together.

As a newly-minted PhD, Danica Savonick recognized that her research on feminist literature and pedagogy was transformed by long hours spent in archives with the syllabi, lesson plans, and assignments of activist educators from previous generations. When performing research on pedagogical archives, what we often encounter is labor: the letters to administrators, budgets, and grant requests (interspersed with grocery lists) that remind us how much unseen work goes into producing the scene of teaching and learning. As she sought to develop similarly transformative archival assignments for her students, she realized how difficult it is to set the stage for a meaningful encounter with primary source documents. She wanted to work on this special issue to learn more about how other teacher-scholars are facilitating archival encounters in their classrooms.

As a former history student, Stephen Klein felt a guilty pleasure for archives even before he decided to become a librarian. Some of his most epiphanic moments of inquiry occurred when combing through archives and discovering a unique primary source that either supported his suspicions or fundamentally altered existing views. Despite maintaining some generalized best practices that he uses in his everyday work-life as a librarian, Stephen is interested in how archiving processes are often specific to the actual, unique objects being archived.

As co-editors we were delighted (and somewhat shocked) to receive an unprecedented number of submissions for this special issue, roughly 3 to 4 times more than an average JITP issue. Given the abundance of submissions, we added a section called “Views from the Field” to highlight short, praxis-based examples of archival research and teaching in action.

Several of the articles in this issue address how digital technologies are changing how we define, curate, and access archives. In “Crowdsourcing Traumatic History: Understanding the Historial Archive” Kirsti Girdharry analyzes Our Marathon: The Boston Bombing Digital Archive to consider what it means to collaborate with the public in crowdsourcing a digital archive. Girdharry analyzes how the digital impacts our understanding of archives, especially those that aim both to historicize and memorialize recent tragedies. In “Realizing the Past: Charting a Course for Sustainable Instruction and Engagement with Archival Materials Using Augmented and Virtual Reality Technologies” Amanda G. Pellerin, Ximin Mi, and Alison Valk describe the opportunities and limitations that augmented and virtual reality provide for accessing archival objects. While these technologies may help democratize access to archival materials, the authors also consider what might get lost in digitizing a rich three-dimensional object. (And for those interested in similar projects, keep an eye out for the CFP for an upcoming special themed issue of JITP on virtual reality edited by Amanda Licastro and Angel David Nieves.)

The majority of articles in this special issue focus on how “teaching and research with archives,” centers the work of collaboration. As scholars have noted, digital projects require many hands on deck—what Cathy N. Davidson calls “collaboration by difference”—prompting the creation of new academic procedures and protocols like “Guidelines for Evaluating Work in Digital Humanities and Digital Media.” Similarly, teaching with archives requires carefully scaffolded collaborations among faculty, staff, librarians, archivists, and instructional technologists that dispel the mythical notion of the genius scholar toiling away in isolation.

Several of the articles take up collaboration by demonstrating how work across institutions can be mutually beneficial. In “The Space Between Researcher, Object, Institution: Building Collaborative Knowledge with Primary Sources,” Mary Catherine Kinniburgh advocates for graduate-level archival training to support students using primary source research for their dissertations and theses. Kinniburgh discusses the Collaborative Seminar she organized in conjunction with the CUNY Graduate Center Library, the New York Public Library, and others, to generate a community of primary source researchers. While Kinniburgh focuses primarily on the humanities, authors Wendy Wasman, Thomas R. Beatman, Shanon Donnelly, Kathryn M. Flinn, Jeremy Spencer, and Ryan J. Trimbath show how institutional collaborations around archival projects can flourish in the natural sciences as well. In “Branching Out: Using Historical Records to Connect with the Environment,” Wasman et al. analyze the digitized archives of Cleveland naturalist A.B. Williams to show how inter-institutional collaboration can mobilize resources for educational use, from primary school exercises to graduate research.

Another cluster of articles describes collaboration in the context of joint efforts among faculty, students, and archivists to co-create digital archives. In “Digital Paxton: Collaborative Construction with Eighteenth-Century Manuscript Collections,” Will Fenton, Kate Johnson, and Kelly Schmidt describe a collaboration between faculty and students to produce a digital archive as a way of introducing students to concepts of knowledge production and archival construction. Drawing on the Collaborators’ Bill of Rights, they describe an assignment that involved students in knowledge production by contributing to the Digital Paxton project. In “Teaching Colonial Translations Through Archives: From Ink and Quill to XML (Or Not),” Allison Bigelow describes an assignment in which students helped to translate and edit colonial documents from the Early Americas Digital Archive. Through the assignment, “students learn about colonial archives by approaching them as public-facing, meaning-making sites of translation, interpretation, and textual editing, and by remediating print materials from the archives into annotated translations.”

Several articles consider these student-centered archival practices in the context of writing classrooms. In “From Page to Screen and Back Again: Archives-Centered Pedagogy for the 21st Century Writing Classroom,” Elizabeth Davis, Nancee Reeves, and Teresa Saxton analyze how archival research can help students better understand composition as a process of remixing, recontextualizing, collaborating, and curating. Through carefully scaffolded assignments, their students developed an “archives-based composition process” that improved their understanding of the social nature of writing and the material properties of texts, both of which are essential components of twenty-first-century literacies. In “‘Diving Into the Wreck’: (Re)Creating the Archive in the First-Year Writing Classroom” Maxine Krenzel and Daisy Atterbury describe a semester-long peer writing exchange across institutions based on poet Adrienne Rich’s archival teaching materials. With digital file sharing, they dislocate the classroom across campuses and ask, “How can the work that students leave behind inspire and enact its own unique pedagogy?”

Many of these articles consider how archival materials—zines, campus newsletters, correspondence—can help students address important questions about who gets to write history, whose stories are included, and whose are left out. In “Narrating Memory through Rhetorical Reflections: CUNY Students and Their Archives,” Wendy Hayden, María Hernández-Ojeda, and Iris Finkel describe a series of assignments in which undergraduates performed research in physical, institutional archives and shared their findings on digital platforms. In doing so, students became “active agents of generational transmission” who learned about history through the process of contributing to institutional memories. In “Collaboration Adventures with Primary Sources: Exploring Creative and Digital Outputs,” Jennifer Needham and Jeanann Croft Haas analyze the collaborative efforts among University of Pittsburgh librarians and faculty to incorporate the institution’s archival collections into the classroom. Through a series of case studies, Needham and Haas show how archival pedagogy can support an environment of student innovation through the production of what they call “creative outputs,” including websites, blog posts, zines, data sets, and visualizations.

Archives have long been central to feminist, antiracist, and justice-oriented research that recovers the historical contributions of women, people of color, and LGBTQ people. Several articles in this special issue extend this work to the undergraduate classroom. In “Engaging Women’s History through Collaborative Archival Wikipedia Projects,” Ariella Rotramel, Rebecca Parmer, and Rose Oliveira show how archivists, students, and faculty can facilitate knowledge production guided by feminist theory. Together they worked to leverage Wikipedia’s global reach “while struggling with editorial criteria that value objectivity and notoriety.” In “Possibly Impossible; Or, Teaching Undergraduates to Confront Digital and Archival Research Methodologies, Social Media Networking, and Potential Failure,” Rebekah Fitzsimmons and Suzan Alteri analyze an assignment that involved students in recovering the biographies of under-represented women science writers of the 19th century. The authors emphasize the potential and possible failure inherent in original research and found that “[s]tudents felt successful regardless of how much information they located; even [those] with no results reported feeling they had learned a significant amount from the project.” Recovery is also central to the feminist and antiracist projects described in a View by Ken Grossi, Alexia Hudson-Ward, Carol Lasser, Sarah Minion, and Natalia Shevin titled “How a Digital Collaboration at Oberlin College Between Archivists, Faculty, Students and Librarians Found its Muse in Mary Church Terrell, Nineteenth-Century Feminist and Civil Rights Icon.” In this View, the authors describe how faculty, students, and an archivist collaborated to help students co-author digital mini-editions for the Digitizing American Feminisms project.

Considered together, these articles demonstrate that historical inquiry is thriving. Students nationwide are learning how to access primary source documents and to consider the mechanisms of power that underscore how archives are constructed and accessed. We hope these articles will inspire researchers and educators to try something new or different, and share what they learn from the experience. And we hope you enjoy reading these articles as much as we enjoyed collaborating across time, space, and institutions to edit them.

About the Issue Editors

Danica Savonick is Assistant Professor of English at SUNY Cortland. She holds a PhD in English and a Certificate in American Studies from the CUNY Graduate Center. Danica blogs regularly about pedagogy and social justice and her work has appeared in American Literature, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Modern Fiction Studies, and Hybrid Pedagogy. Her current manuscript, Insurgent Knowledge, analyzes the activist pedagogies of Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Adrienne Rich, and Toni Cade Bambara. Danica serves on the Steering Committee for HASTAC.org and is lead author of “Gender Bias in Academe.”

Jojo Karlin, a PhD candidate in English at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, is dedicated to ideas about books, letters, and communication. As the Manifold Scholarship fellow, she is helping to develop Open Education Resources on the Mellon-funded, open source, hybrid publishing platform. As outreach coordinator for the NEH-funded DH Box, she co-led a course in Web APIs with Python at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute. An actress and an artist, she continually seeks creative ways of engaging the academy and the public, whether through drawing, performance, or posted letter.

Stephen I. Klein, the Digital Services Librarian at the Mina Rees CUNY Graduate School Library, spends much of his work-life behind the scenes insuring that the pulse of the GC’s library systems continue to work seamlessly for library users. He also spends time ‘freaking-out’ about the crisis of how our cultural heritage is quickly disappearing, because of the acceleration of modern ephemera with the advent of the web as one of the central forums for popular conversation and academic scholarship.

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Issue Thirteen

Introduction, Issue Thirteen: The Push and Pull of Our Technological Moment

Laura Wildemann Kane, The University of Tampa

Michelle A. McSweeney, Columbia University

The current technological moment is perhaps best defined by a recent collective and critical awareness of the ways technology shapes our lives and practices both explicitly and implicitly. These technologies are so embedded in our daily practices that they are no longer ‘new’ or ‘surprising’, but commonplace—an assumed facet of modern life. In this moment where we are so deeply entwined with our technologies, it is important to evaluate and reflect on the affordances and challenges of digital technologies in the context of our curriculums, classrooms, and research. Unprecedented access to a wealth of multimodal information about the world has deepened university curricula in ways unimaginable only a decade ago, yet it has also blurred the boundaries of reality, giving rise to a cultural climate in which the very notion of truth has come into question. In his now classic schema on the intellectual and ethical development of college students, William Perry proposed that students evolve from dualistic thinking to multiplicity, then to relativism and, finally, to making commitments to their ideas (Perry 1970). Considered through the lens of this schema, our technological moment is emblematic of a state of relativism, where knowledge, truth, and reality are viewed as relative to the speaker’s own positionality. And it is in this moment, in this climate, that we are asking our students to actively participate in the construction and production of knowledges—a process that realizes the profound power and reach of technology, yet is also in tension with students’ vast access to information and computing power. So, while the majority of students have enough computing power in their pockets to research, create, and publish a variety of media with incredible quality, this power has become overwhelming to some, leading to fractured or distant relationships with others and confusion about what constitutes a reality they can trust, engage with, and contribute to. As the scale of information around the globe increases exponentially, and with it the ease of access to that information, it is our job as educators to guide students as they grapple with the realities of a hyper-connected world—a unique challenge, as many educators are grappling with their place in this new world themselves.

Issue 13 of the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy features a series of articles that can help us, as educators, think through how we utilize the affordances of digital technologies, while also revising our pedagogical practices to respond effectively to the associated challenges. Although Issue 13 is a General Issue and the topics covered by these articles are diverse, they remain centered around three themes: using digital content to broaden and deepen materials for consumption, using digital tools to contextualize relationships and expand communicative methods, and developing digital literacy across the curriculum. Each piece on its own invites the reader to consider digital pedagogies as essential to students’ educational experiences; taken together they highlight the benefits students can derive from engaging critically in both the consumption and production of digital media.

The Issue begins with David Haeselin’s essay, “Beyond the Borders of the Page: Mapping The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” In it, he describes a course in which he invites students to construct maps of both the characters’ and their own lived experiences, drawing on the spatial narrative detailed in Junot Díaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Where the novel draws the reader’s attention to the porousness of national, linguistic, stylistic, and generic borders, the practice of mapping is itself an exercise in drawing and redrawing points, lines, and polygons. In this context, Haeselin argues that the process of map making allows students to engage more deeply in the experiences of Junot Díaz’s characters and, correspondingly, draw connections between the characters’ perspectives and their own. By implementing multi-modal deep mapping projects in undergraduate core curriculum courses, Haeselin invites us to consider the potential of the digital humanities to help students from across institutional disciplines see the world in novel ways.

Kelly Josephs articulates a different perspective concerning the relationship between multi-modal production and the classroom in her article, “Teaching the Digital Caribbean: The Ethics of a Public Pedagogical Experiment.” In this piece, Josephs discusses both the methodology of developing an interdisciplinary course about digital humanities (“The Digital Caribbean,” at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York) as well as the challenges she faced in teaching such a course. By focusing on the ethical considerations of designing this course as well as the impact that a single course can have, Josephs encourages us to reflect on the broader implications of all our teaching, both digital and analogue (a division that is increasingly nonexistent). While both Haeselin’s and Joseph’s articles chronicle interdisciplinary courses, and both draw on digital technologies as a means to enhance students’ experience of the content, Josephs is using these methodologies at the graduate level rather than the undergraduate, and exploring the ethical implications of requiring public-facing work as a part of a graduate education. Josephs invites us to consider how both the collection and production of digital work in an educational setting has broader impact not only for students, but the communities being studied. Throughout the article, she returns to this theme: exploring what it means to “work publicly with graduate-level research on the Caribbean in academia, particularly with students who have set ideas about their own personal and intellectual relationships to both digital technology and the region.”

The theme of exploring one’s intellectual relationship with digital technology continues in Trevor Hoag’s article, “From Addiction to Connection: Questioning the Rhetoric of Drugs in Relation to Student Technology-Use,” where Hoag discusses how educators, unsure of how to describe students’ relation to technology, typically employ the rhetorics of drugs and addiction by claiming their students are “hooked” on technology. This assessment prompts educators to adopt restrictive in-class device-use policies and creates an environment where technology is seen as an impediment to critical thinking. In an effort to dispel some of these negative assessments, Hoag asks his students to describe themselves and their relation to different media platforms. While some students did describe themselves as “addicts,” many students highlighted the importance of connection in their lives in terms that reflected a healthier attitude about the use of technology. Hoag suggests that, at the very least, students and teachers need to work together to create a new narrative around technology use in the classroom that captures these alternative assessments.

In a similar vein, the article, “Video Essays and Virtual Animals: An Approach to Teaching Multimodal Composition and Digital Literacy” by Christina Colvin explores how the design of social media platforms and video games influence one’s understanding of the world by persuading players to act in certain ways during gameplay. Colvin assigns students a video essay project that requires them to analyze how video games represent nonhuman animals. The project asks students to engage with the architectural designs of video games to recognize how they are constructed to achieve certain rhetorical ends by representing (in this case) nonhuman animals as related to players in particular ways. Through the recognition that game design can encourage players to adopt certain behaviors and understandings, students begin to understand that other artifacts, including texts, are constructed to achieve rhetorical ends as well. As such, immersive technology can be used to enhance the classroom experience for students.

If immersive technology can be used to improve students’ classroom experiences, it can also be used to improve students’ written work. In “Using Digital Rhetoric in a Multimodal Assignment to Disrupt Traditional Academic Writing Conventions in a First-Year Writing Classroom,” Melanie Gagich suggests that educators use digital rhetoric as an analytic tool to critique traditional writing assignments. She argues that students’ anxiety about writing academically for college audiences results from students framing it as “writing to the teacher.” This construction of a particular kind of audience hinders students’ abilities to write academically. Gagich argues that using digital rhetoric as a framework creates an environment for multimodal composition practices, and this new environment provides opportunities for students to engage with “real” audiences. Structuring assignments this way, Gagich argues, promotes student agency and teaches them how to effectively integrate rhetorical strategies that connect with real audiences.

Building on this theme, Stadler and McDermott highlight the importance of information literacy as a key outcome of higher education and writing instruction. In their article, “Advancing Information Literacy in a Semester-Long Library Instruction Course: A Case Study,” they investigate the efficacy of explicitly teaching Information Literacy (IL) through teaching internet research strategies at the lower undergraduate level. Where they argue that IL is a critical component of higher education, and a central tenet of librarianship, they also acknowledge that instruction in IL and internet research is often implied rather than explicit in higher education. Drawing on their experiences in teaching such a course at LaGuardia Community College and using ePortfolio as the primary platform for student production of work, they highlight both the successes and the challenges of teaching IL. This piece serves as both a guide and a reflection on the importance of IL in a quickly changing and evolving world.

Taken together, these articles invite us to consider the ways that we can prepare students for the technological moment they have inherited. The enterprise of education is grappling with a constantly evolving technological landscape that mirrors society’s larger struggle to balance the benefits of technological innovation with the challenges such rapid innovation poses. With this in mind, as well as with the recognition that there are ethical implications to the kinds of technology we employ inside and outside of the classroom, this issue of JITP presents an opportunity for each of us as educators to share our knowledge and experiences with the goal of refining our pedagogical practices to reflect the needs of our current techno-cultural realities. So, as we define and redefine the relationships between technology, the classroom, and the societies in which these structures exist more broadly, we take these essays as an opportunity to iterate on the methods that shape not only our classrooms and students, but the societies and global publics we enter into every day.

Bibliography

Perry, William G., Jr. 1970. Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years: A Scheme. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.

About the Authors

Laura Wildemann Kane is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at The University of Tampa. Her research focuses upon issues central to Social & Political Philosophy, Ethics, and Feminist Philosophy. She is primarily interested in how different conceptions of the family affect the relationship between the family and the state, and the responsibility both institutions have to provide care for citizens. She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy and a certificate in Interactive Technology and Pedagogy from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2017.

Michelle A. McSweeney is a Research Scholar in the Center for Spatial Research at Columbia University. She is the author of The Pragmatics of Texting: Making Meaning in Messages (Routledge 2018), and co-host of the podcast, Subtext. Her research focuses on digital writing in romantic relationships, particularly how we establish intimacy and trust through text messaging. She received her Ph.D. in Linguistics and a certificate in Interactive Technology and Pedagogy from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2016.

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Issue Twelve

Introduction: Re-viewing Digital Technologies and Art History

Kimon Keramidas, New York University

Ellen Prokop, Frick Art Reference Library

 

A widespread opinion within the academic community is that art historians have been left behind by the digital turn in the humanities (see Greenhalgh 2004, Zorich 2012, and the essay by Elizabeth Honig in this issue). According to many researchers and educators, the field of digital art history (DAH) — that is, the application of computational tools and analytical techniques to art-historical research questions — has not fulfilled its potential and remains a marginal branch of the discipline (Zorich 2012, 6). As Benjamin Zweig has argued, however, the assumption that art history has lagged behind other humanities disciplines in employing digital technologies is not entirely correct. In a 2015 article, he documents a selection of pioneering DAH projects, initiatives that emerged as early as the 1970s. Examples include the 1983 collaboration between the Getty Trust and the Architectural Drawings Advisory Group to produce a cataloging standard for digitized drawings that would allow scholars to search across all electronic repositories of works on paper as well as manipulate this information in ways that could stimulate new views of the material and thus, new research questions. The ambitious MORELLI project, launched in the mid 1980s by William Vaughan, a professor of art history at Birkbeck, University of London, is another example of an early DAH project. MORELLI, named for the nineteenth-century Italian connoisseur Giovanni Morelli who developed a system of identifying an artist’s “hand” by means of the close examination of a few key details that the artist executes consistently, was a pattern recognition tool that sought to classify and evaluate the formal qualities of images (Zweig 2015).

Unfortunately, these and similar initiatives did not fulfill their potential. Issues of funding, sustainability, archiving and access, copyright, and technological barriers ensured that what few gains were made were quickly undermined. In short, art historians faced challenges sourcing the software, maintaining and supporting collaborations and staff, and building and maintaining the datasets necessary for sustained intellectual engagement with DAH. As these early projects foundered, the field of literary studies advanced in the digital humanities — and with good reason. When the dataset is a text that can be scanned, when the “catalog” — in this case, the set of words included in that text — is readable across all platforms, it is easier to explore research questions using widely available digital tools, such as topic modeling and word embeddings. Unfortunately, these tools are not as useful for art historians, unless they want to analyze the oeuvre of an art historian, critic, or the writings of an important art-historical figure. Such an approach could be useful, but what about working with images? Isn’t that what art history is about?

This is one of the reasons why there remains anxiety among art historians that they have fallen behind their academic peers: art history is different. What defines art history is the study of the visual. Thus, the tools used and methodologies developed for DAH should support visual analysis and learning. Unfortunately, in the rush toward working digitally, many art historians and museum professionals have enthusiastically borrowed theoretical models and technical terms from disciplines and sub-disciplines such as literary theory, computer science, and cultural analytics without careful consideration as to how these methods and terms function within the specificities of the field of art history. Equally troubling is how many art historians have adopted a software developed for other disciplines and industries without due appreciation of how it structures data and thus might privilege certain information and promote certain trends (see Jaskot and Van der Graff 2017). In short, art historians require different tools — such as image-recognition software — tools that allow them to search, organize, catalog, and investigate images effectively, and few tools that fulfill these needs are available. Fortunately, with recent advances in the fields of computer vision and Artificial Intelligence, this will change. The future is looking bright.

But what about the present? Despite the challenges outlined above, we would argue that it is still possible for art historians to benefit from embracing existing current digital tools and computational techniques. As the essays in this special issue attest, there is a place in the discipline right now for the digital.

The issue begins with Alison Langmead’s analysis of art history’s longstanding engagement with image-based reproductions and how these “significant remediations” have affected the development of the discipline. Far from being marginalized by the digital turn, she argues for art history’s central role in the digital humanities as a model for the “mindful” adoption of technology. The discipline, she concludes, “can offer objective lessons on the risks of taking both the technical and social affordances of [digital] tools for granted” and thus, may promote awareness of how technologies impact the research process.

The remaining essays are divided into two groups that analyze DAH at work in the art gallery and the university. C. Richard Johnson, Jr. and William A. Sethares’s “Hunting for Weave Matches: Computation in Art Scholarship” outlines the pioneering application of signal processing to a traditional technique of painting analysis — thread counting. Determining the weave density of the canvas support of a painting offers conservators crucial technical information as well as useful clues regarding the painting’s origin and approximate date of execution. Manual techniques for thread counting, however, are time-consuming and laborious. Johnson, a professor of engineering at Cornell University, realized that this process could be automated by means of algorithmic analysis of x-rays of paintings. Using this method, the canvas supports of different paintings may be matched. These matches suggest that the paintings may have originated from the same bolt of cloth, a discovery that in turn suggests the paintings were in the same place at one point in their history. In their article, the authors outline the procedure for comparing possible weave matches in full, stage by stage, providing increased understanding of this ground-breaking technique and offering a model for future collaborations between art historians and scientists.

“Animated Shadows on Virtual Stone: Ancient Sundials in a Gallery Setting” by Sebastian Heath, Rachel Herschman, and Christine Roughan describes the use of animated displays at a 2016–2017 exhibition held at New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW). The exhibition introduced audiences to more than one hundred time-tracking devices from Greco-Roman antiquity. To illustrate how ancient audiences experienced these devices, the organizers formed collaborations across multiple departments, including the work of graduate students, to develop a series of 3D animations using the open-source animated suite Blender. The resulting digital surrogates were cost-effective and highly informative, not only helping the public to understand how the objects on display functioned but also showing examples that could not be included in the exhibition due to size or location. Happily, these “exhibits” will enjoy an afterlife on the journal’s site.

Appropriately, many of the articles in this issue examine the use of digital tools and new methodologies in the classroom. Elizabeth Honig provides an honest and enlightening analysis of two courses she designed that disrupt the art history lecture, the cornerstone of art-historical instruction. As she notes, transitioning from the lecture format, reliant on the projection of images in a darkened room as well as the instructor’s expertise, to an interactive model that requires students to engage with data collection, digital technologies, and each other is not a simple process. Professors of art history will have to gain new skills in computer science and statistics; what will be more difficult is learning to embrace the serendipitous encounters, unplanned epiphanies, and failures of project-based learning. The professor “cannot control either process or outcomes” as in a lecture course, Honig observes. Reworking the traditional art history class, however, will ultimately enable students to develop new skills in critical analysis and knowledge production.

“3D Modeling in the Urban Classroom: Using Photogrammetry for the Study of Historic Architecture in Coral Gables, Florida” presents an additional, highly innovative approach to rehabilitating the traditional art history course. Instead of focusing on the formal qualities and construction history of the architectural monuments in lectures and emphasizing art-historical research and writing in assignments, Karen Mathews, Assistant Professor of Art and Art History at the University of Miami, and her team seize the opportunity to teach students about data collection and curation, collaboration, online exhibitions, digital tools and storytelling, and public art history as well. The materials, textual and visual, that are produced during the semester are published on an interactive website, a project that not only increases the students’ but also the public’s engagement, creating “bridges between the university and the community around it [and] promoting awareness of cultural heritage sites and their preservation.” The authors’ thorough explanation of their process generously allows other educators to investigate this innovative pedagogical paradigm.

Two articles in this special issue focus on Pre-Columbian topics; this may not be coincidental but instead indicative of how specialists of non-Western cultures have often been critical of conventional research methods and pedagogical strategies and are more willing to explore novel approaches in their scholarship and instruction. Ellen Hoobler’s article, produced in collaboration with three of her students, presents an additional example of how 3D modeling can offer increased understanding of the material past. Hoobler’s original plan was to expand on her dissertation research examining the tombs of Monte Albán in Oaxaca, Mexico, built by the Zapotec peoples in ca. 500 BCE–850 CE, by producing an interactive model of one of these tombs, including all of its contents. During the course of two summers, her team created dozens of 3D models, visualizations, and videos as well as a website documenting their work. While the completion of her original vision proved a much more difficult process than anticipated, the experience of Hoobler and her students yields instructive insight into issues of collaboration, sustainability, funding, and community engagement. Hoobler notes that perhaps the most important lessons her students gained from this DAH project were the “byproducts” of their contributions: increased skills in visual analysis and archival research as well as a deeper comprehension of the process of contextualization.

Outlining the incorporation of DAH methods and tools into a Pre-Columbian art history survey course, Lauren G. Kilroy-Ewbank’s essay expands on several of the themes developed throughout this special issue, including the instructive byproducts of the student-centered DAH project. The centerpiece of her course is the creation of a collaborative online exhibition using Omeka, a popular open-source content management system for the production of online exhibitions, focused on the Mixtec Codex Zouche-Nuttall (ca. 1450). The assignment requires students to source and annotate images, create metadata, and assess online resources as well as undertake traditional art-historical research; it also encourages students to consider issues of digital visual culture, digital storytelling, and the possibilities of public art history. Like Honig and Hoobler, Kilroy-Ewbank finds that student engagement with DAH is not always a straightforward process. Yet, she argues, students receive valuable lessons regarding responsibility, both to their team and the discipline, from the experience. Helpfully, Kilroy-Ewbank includes her course syllabus as an appendix, making it easy for similar-minded pedagogues to integrate these types of assignment in their own classrooms successfully.

The issue concludes with two non-peer-reviewed pieces that record experiences of working within the field of DAH. John B. Henry documents his evolving research on David Wojnarowicz and how information resources created by the Artist Archives Project that guide researchers through the collections held by New York University’s Fales Library and Special Collections affected his understanding of the artist. Henry argues that this tool not only facilitates research but also offers the opportunity for additional knowledge creation through the incorporation of online comments and the institution of an online community. More than a digitized collection, it is in effect an “ambitious project in digital art history” that offers new models for academic study.

Finally, Naraelle Hohensee presents her 360-degree video of Seattle’s Olmsted Brothers-designed Volunteer Park (1904–1910), an educational resource that offers an immersive environmental experience as well as presentations of historical documentation. Her literal exploration of this public space fuses design history with urban studies and offers an embodied understanding of the site, thus — like many of the DAH projects introduced in this issue — providing increased comprehension of how people interact with the built environment. The result is both an informative and entertaining mediation on the designers’ accomplishment and a subtle analysis of the evolving role of the historian in the digital age that raises questions regarding the use of digital storytelling in the academy and across cultural institutions.

Technology that allows art historians to work with images rapidly and effectively will be available in the near future, and art historians must take an active role in determining how this technology is developed. After all, who better than art historians to direct these advancements? Or, as Kilroy-Ewbank observes: “Art historians (and our students) are […] positioned to think critically about digital visuality and analyze how digital visual environments encode ideas.” Art historians should remain alert to these new developments in computer vision, stay informed, and, when possible, collaborate with technologists, computer scientists, and other digital humanists to ensure that these professionals and their projects benefit from their expertise. In this way art historians will once again become significant contributors to the digital humanities.

Bibliography

Greenhalgh, Michael. 2004. “Art History.” In A Companion to Digital Humanities, edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth, 31–45. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. DOI: 10.1002/9780470999875.ch3.

Jaskot, Paul B., and Ivo van der Graaff. 2017. “Historical Journals as Digital Sources: Mapping Architecture in Germany, 1914–24.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 76, no. 4 (December): 483-505. DOI: 10.1525/jsah.2017.76.4.483.

Zorich, Diane. 2012. Transitioning to a Digital World: Art History, Its Research Centers, and Digital Scholarship. New York: Samuel H. Kress Foundation. http://www.kressfoundation.org/research/transitioning_to_a_digital_world/.

Zweig, Benjamin. 2015. “Forgotten Genealogies: Brief Reflections of the History of Digital Art History.” International Journal for Digital Art History 1. DOI: 10.11588/dah.2015.1.21633.

About the Authors

Kimon Keramidas is Associate Director and Clinical Assistant Professor in NYU’s Center for Experimental Humanities and Adjunct Assistant Professor for the CUNY Graduate Center Doctoral Certificate in Interactive Technology and Pedagogy. Kimon is one of the founding member’s of The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, as well as being a founding member of NYCDH.org, co-director of OutHistory.org and co-investigator of History Moves. Kimon has worked extensively on digital exhibitions, and is currently co-curating an exhibition for the Freer|Sackler Asian Art Galleries of the Smithsonian Institute on the Sogdians, a middle ages mercantile culture from Central Asia. His most recent project is The Interface Experience, a multi-platform exhibition which included a physical exhibition, web application, and award-winning catalog for the Bard Graduate Center. Kimon’s web site @kimonizer

Ellen Prokop is the Associate Head of Research and a member of the Digital Art History Lab at the Frick Art Reference Library, New York, and Adjunct Professor of Art History at Hunter College, City University of New York. She was the lead author and editor of Art History in Digital Dimensions: A Report on the Proceedings of the Symposium (2017), and has published several articles and essays on Spanish art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including most recently a chapter in El Greco Comes to America: The Discovery of a Modern Old Master(2017). Please contact her at prokop@frick.org

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Issue Eleven

Introduction

Matthew K. Gold, The Graduate Center, CUNY

sava saheli singh, New York University

Welcome to Issue Eleven of the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy (JITP). In the ten issues that have been published since Issue One of JITP appeared in 2012, the journal has continuously probed the nexus of pedagogical experimentation and theories of technology in a variety of long-form and short-form formats. In doing so, the journal has co-evolved with the academic fields that it explores and has become an important space for scholars to discuss their work in and around the classroom. Issue Eleven continues this trend as we look forward to the next ten issues of JITP.

As a non-themed issue of the journal, Issue Eleven presents a typically broad set of topics, concerns, and approaches. Among the five articles in this issue are two that take stock of, and offer re-evaluations of, the field of digital humanities (DH) — one a set of personalized reflections on the origins of the field, and the other a quantitative survey of DH programs. The three other articles published in this issue use multiple perspectives to test our understanding of common classroom practices, such as online instruction, employing tools like Google Drive, and using online research journals. Across all of these pieces lies a common interest in experimenting with new methods, as well as a practice of subjecting those methods to rigorous evaluation and sustained critical reflection.

Our issue begins with two pieces that focus on the past, present, and future of the digital humanities, with particular attention to the place of digital pedagogy within it. In “Confessions of a Premature Digital Humanist,” Stephen Brier offers a strong rebuttal to the prevailing origin story of the digital humanities, which typically focuses on the literary concordance work of Father Roberto Busa. Arguing that existing narratives of DH place too much emphasis on early work in digital literary studies and computational linguistics, Brier provides a personal account of his own DH work in the field of history. Brier’s work situates the emergence of some of the most well-known digital humanities centers, such as the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media and the American Social History Project, within a broader account of the use of technology in historical research over the last fifty years. We believe that Brier’s account will become essential historiographical reading within the fields of digital history and digital humanities.

In “A Survey of Digital Humanities Programs,” Chris Alen Sula, S. E. Hackney, and Phillip Cunningham aim to assess the current state of the digital humanities by exploring existing degree and certificate programs in DH. By analyzing the field through the ways it is taught and instantiated in credit-bearing programs, the authors provide a snapshot of DH as seen through its pedagogical activities. Using the TaDiRAH framework to describe the kinds of work undertaken in DH courses and programs, the authors explore differences between DH programs as they have been formed across geographical, institutional, and disciplinary boundaries. In addition to providing analysis and visualization of various elements of the survey, the authors have shared their data in an associated Github repository as a resource for future scholars. We encourage anyone experimenting with this dataset in the future to let us know by leaving comments on the article.

In “Practicing Digital Literacy in the Liberal Arts: A Qualitative Analysis of Students’ Online Research Journals,” Jennifer Jarson and Lora Taub-Pervizpour reflect upon the research journals they have employed in an undergraduate media-studies course titled “New Information Technologies.” Tracing the development of the course assignments over a number of years, the authors describe the metacognitive benefits of online journal-keeping for students and then embark upon an effort to collect and analyze the types of ways that students engaged the journal-writing practice. As Jarson and Taub-Pervizpour take readers through their data, they demonstrate what data literacy looks like for undergraduate students and describe ways that instructors can best support them in that work.

As the title suggests, in “A Constructivist Approach to Teaching Media Studies Using Google Drive,” Chris Harwood and Alison Mann outline how constructivist learning theories have informed their design of a Grade 11 Media Studies unit. Taking us through their unit plan, the authors illustrate how each activity is informed by theory and put into practice using the Google Online Learning Environment (GOLE). They are careful to show how their design of the unit supports constructive collective learning, while also stressing the importance of iterating on the unit design based on careful evaluation to ensure that theory and GOLE come together to create the most beneficial learning space for students. This article is a useful resource for teachers and instructional designers who want to be integrate technology into their courses in thoughtful and theory-informed ways that support student learning.

As a great complement to Harwood and Mann’s piece, Karyna Pryiomka brings a fresh approach to blended learning in her article, “Care, Convenience, and Interactivity: Exploring Student Values in a Blended Learning First-Year Composition Course.” She presents the results of an ethnographic study in which she evaluated blended learning through the framework of care, encouraging us to include the experiences of non-traditional colleges students when designing blended learning. Through surveys and an analysis of interviews with students, coursework, and the instructor’s teaching journal, she identifies how “care” manifested itself through the course. Pryiomka shows that focus on instructor feedback, interactions with students, and allowing students flexibility in expressing themselves can ensure that students feel cared for, thus increasing the likelihood of their success. Based on these findings, she provides advice on how to thoughtfully design blended learning environments to ensure that digital tools are used thoughtfully to support care rather than replace it.

Taken together, these articles offer cogent reflections and guidance on current practices in digital pedagogy, as well as reflections on the larger import and contexts of those practices. And as always, we invite readers to engage with the articles and authors in the comments.

It is with gratitude and sadness that we note several shifts in our editorial collective with the publication of this issue. We say goodbye to several longstanding members of our collective: Stephen Brier (co-editor of Issue Six), Kiersten Greene (co-editor of Issue Six), Amanda Gould, Andrew Lucchesi (editor of Issue Eight), Carlos Hernandez (co-editor of Issue Nine), and Tyler Fox (co-editor of Issue Nine). This issue also marks Laura Kane’s last as our tireless and gifted Managing Editor, though she will be continuing on as a member of the editorial collective. We thank all of these EC members and editors for their dedicated service to the journal and wish them every success in the years ahead.

Even as we say goodbye some members of our journal, we are delighted to welcome some new voices to the Editorial Collective: Lisa Brundage, Jojo Karlin, Anke Geertsma, and Christy Pottroff, and our new managing editor, Alessandro Zammataro. We look forward to working with you!

We want to acknowledge our gratitude to those who helped bring Issue Eleven to fruition, including Jojo Karlin, who served as Associate Editor, Managing Editor Laura Kane, lead stager Luke Waltzer, and the copyediting and staging teams. We are very grateful for your hard work.

Finally, we want to send a special note of gratitude to Stephen Brier, founder of the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy doctoral certificate program at the CUNY Graduate Center and the driving force behind the creation of JITP. Steve’s vision of the academy has always placed pedagogy at the center of scholarly activity, even as pedagogical activities have been overlooked or diminished by the profession at large. But Steve, a labor historian and — as he calls himself in the article that appears as part of this issue — a “premature digital humanist,” has always advocated for a particular version of pedagogical practice that advances egalitarian principles and shared practice, along with a passionate commitment to public education. We have an editorial collective, and not an editorial directorship, because of Steve’s formative experiences in founding the Radical History Review; he has passed on those values of collective endeavor to our own journal, and we are a strong collective because of it. commitment to JITP and to shared labor practices was evident in his contributions to the journal: from co-editing Issue Six to serving as our most rigorous copyeditor, Steve pitched in at every opportunity and at every level of the journal’s work. Though we will miss him, we are very glad to publish a piece by him in this issue that — like Steve’s entire career — represents an important, necessary, and vital contribution to the scholarly record.

About the Authors

Matthew K. Gold is Associate Professor of English and Digital Humanities at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

sava saheli singh just completed her PhD in Educational Communication and Technology from NYU. The title of her dissertation is “Academic Twitter: Pushing the Boundaries of Traditional Scholarship”, which represents her interest in the use of social media in higher education.
You can find her on Twitter @savasavasava.

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