Thinking about DH community (and communities more broadly) as well as choosing readings about this for the course, and reading about different kinds of communities were in DH was sort of perfect while I was at the CCCC conference this week.
The 4 C’s is a huge community of its own that focuses on rhetoric and composition, especially writing pedagogy and how to teach composition better. But, within this community, I realized that 4 C’s members are similar to the communities from the readings this week. Like #transformDH, there is a #4c16. But, at the 4 C’s, there was a lot of talk about Digital Humanities and digital tools, like in the DH community! For example, Dr. Carter pointed out that there is even a map for the PhD in Rhetoric! (So, we have made a visualization of our community!)
During this year’s chair address, Dr. Joyce Locke Carter gave a talk on “Making, Disrupting, Innovating.” During the talk, she pointed out some of the same issues Bethany Nowviskie talks about and Natalia Ceceire about “more hack, less yack.” And, whereas, Dr. Carter did not use these terms per se, still one of her main points was yes, you should learn to code, if what you are trying to make involves code. Like we have talked about in class, while Dr. Carter heavily encouraged everyone to make things and disrupt the norm, still it was not a call for technology for the sake of technology, as Miriam Posner points out: “my job is about the students….In the end, my loyalty isn’t to the digital humanities – it’s to knowledge, and sharing knowledge.” Like Posner states, the talk and the conference has been more about the students.
Still, I was surprised that in this community, like DH, our community of writing and composition has to defend itself and explain why we teach writing (which is nothing new I guess). I was just surprised that our community is feeling threatened by things like dual enrollment and budget cuts, and our response to this is to make things. I’m not saying this is a bad thing, but it is interesting in light of the debates that go on in the community and when these authors are thinking about what makes a DH community. In Dr. Carter’s talk, she also encouraged people in composition to be disruptive just as Miriam Posner talks about in her article, “Here and There: Creating DH Community.”
In addition to the 4 C’s being a long standing community itself with similar issues in the DH community, I also went to a panel on Digital Identity and Community.
While the talk was different from our readings about DH community and Dr. Carter’s talk, still it was an interesting mix of this week’s and last week’s readings since it was really about how students and teachers create digital identities and communities! There was three different panelists. Cassandra Branham from the University of Central Florida talked about veteran students, how they create online identities and what digital communities they take part in. Carie S. Lambert from the University of Texas at Dallas talked about how students in an online class talk about themselves on a discussion board and how they form communities. And, the last speaker, Jeff Naftzinger, whom I thought had the most to do with our class, talked about the digital center at his university and how faculty use the center, have digital assignments, and really how or if the faculty have a digital community. Here is his talk if you are interested: http://cccc.jeffnaftzinger.com/.
Just to sum up, since I’ve rambled on about this conference, he basically talks about if faculty were integrating digital projects into their classrooms like we talked about last week, and he found that many of them were not even though they had a digital center because either A) they did not have experience being taught with digital tools themselves or B) didn’t think that the digital tools were applicable to their lesson plan. While Rhetoric and Composition professors used digital tools quite often, Literature and Creative Writing did not. So, if the teachers had a stronger inter-department community, I think this would have encouraged more use of digital tools. So, it was interesting because here, the lack of community at the university jeopardize the use of the digital in teaching and helping students. I thought this was a good combination of this week’s and last week’s readings, and a good panel to reflect on as we are reflecting on DH communities.
