Research Reflection Prompt #3
Due: Sunday, 2 October
Introduction and Context Last week we talked about the direction of post-secondary education and “training” under the GI Bill and how that may, or may not, have been reflected on your campus – in its curriculum, in its mission, in its physical spaces, in its financing education, in the demographics of its student body, etc.
This week, we’ll be meeting with you as teams to discuss your intellectual work so far and your ideas and design for a Digital Humanities project.
In addition, this week’s reading looks at where two authors see an important intersection between the liberal arts and Digital Humanities – in making the research process visible and in trying to think about ourselves and others, to anticipate what we and others need as we structure a narrative, to be “sympathetic” as we research.
As you read the essay 1) gather insights and take notes for your third piece of writing, which will be posted on your blog by Sunday, 2 October; 2) feel free to discuss the insights or questions you have about the “sympathetic research imagination” with your team mate, with your friends and mentors, with your research support network, and with us; and 3) consider how the reading might shape the kinds of questions you use in the interviews you’ll be conducting later this semester – what does liberal arts mean to the people you talk with? What do they think about being part of a process of collecting stories and curating a narrative about your college?
For your third blog post, please discuss:
1) the relationship between what you understand the liberal arts and digital humanities to be (viz., overlaps? irreconcilables? same objectives, different methods? different objectives, same methods, etc.), and
2) how those relationships between the liberals arts and Digital Humanities connect, challenge, or support the research process you’re doing for this COPLAC digital project – a developing, evolving project done in public.
Reading List
Everyone should read “The Sympathetic Research Imagination” (2016).
The Digital Humanities project discussed in the article is Black Liberation 1969.
Another short essay related to this topic of being intentionally “slow” and intentionally “public” is Sheila A. Brennan’s “Public, First” (2016).
There are many book-length histories of American post-secondary education in your campus libraries. And we invite you to read in this material. However, for the purposes of this course, and the intellectual work you are doing this week, we have compiled selected materials that will introduce you to the governmental policies, social trends, and cultural forces that helped to determine the direction of post-secondary education during the past century.
