This blog is part of a collection of blogs created in the digital humanities seminar, “Public Access and the Liberal Arts:  A Narrative History.”  A link to the home blog for the course can be found on the right-hand side of the blog, under the title “blogroll.”  Here’s the course description:

This digital humanities project will collect and publish stories that capture the identities, cultures, histories, and environments related to a public liberal arts education. The context for this research will be the 1944 G.I. Bill and public access to higher education and, later, increasing public access to the liberal arts. Similar to the Story Corps project started in 2003, the course will offer undergraduate students enrolled in the course the opportunity to build an online resource that chronicles the stories and life experiences of students, alumni, staff and faculty—a digital resource that captures the history and the prospects of the public liberal arts. As designers and editors of these digital archives, students will deepen their own sense of place in higher education by making visible the history of the liberal arts at the institution in which they are studying. Two-person teams enrolled at COPLAC campuses will 1) build an online archive of oral histories by alumni, faculty, staff and current student 2) employ digital tools to produce a layered, web-based narrative that includes audio and video stories, images, maps and documentary evidence of their home campus and 3) collaborate with faculty mentors to integrate their web site projects with a main COPLAC site to make visible the story of the public liberal arts. COPLAC Storytelling will serve as a digital resource for current students, alumni, educators, administrators, development and admission offices, historians, archivists, and the wider public.