At the Bard Graduate Center where I run the Digital Media Lab we have been experimenting with a wide array of digital applications for the study of material culture. We have had thesis-level digital-born projects, are working with digital interactives in gallery spaces, are using wikis as course software, have a NEH funded startup grant for a mult-year faculty project, and are experimenting with 3D printing and scanning and the question of the representation of materiality in a digital age. I would like to propose a session for anyone interested in the use of digital technology in the study of material culture, epistemological questions that digital technology raises about material culture, 3D printing and scanning, museums and technology, or any other related questions. Some people at TCNY may have attended THATCamp Museums NYC that we hosted in the Spring and I see this session as possibly a bridge between those two events

I’m interested in discussing a topic that dovetails nicely into sessions that others have proposed: exploring DH-enabled alternatives to the long-form researched argument in undergraduate courses.  In a Spring course (cross-listed as English and Environmental Studies) I’ll be working with my upper-division students on a wiki and a handmade book.  Advice from those who have developed short- or medium-form research assignments using DH tools and platforms would be immensely helpful.

How can blogs best be incorporated into the college classroom and can they build a bridge with the broader online community?  Jane Carr and I have been considering this question while launching a new blog, Archive Notebook, where we share and write about our unused archival research in hopes of fostering productive discussion with other scholars. In the longer term, we aim to make this forum a pedagogic tool that will facilitate qualitative crowd-sourcing within and beyond the university, the institutional archive, and other traditional repositories. We are in the early stages of our own work on these topics and would love to share ideas about digital collecting, curating, and archiving as scholars and with students. We are currently using a Tumblr format but we welcome discussion of other tools and interfaces as well ideas on how to maximize engagement with formats like our own.

Topics might include:

• Thinking critically about the “commons” online – how to share public resources and participate in a collaborative cultural sphere
• Evaluating the efficacy of standard academic blogging practices within existing institutional frameworks
• Probing the line between documentation and analysis in digital writing. How can we — and our students — become skilled at the art of description as well as critical evaluation
• How we can build audiences and learn how to be better audiences online? What sorts of users tend to be rewarded within the digital commons?
• How can we continue to explore the relationship between the visual and the verbal? What exercises might facilitate various forms of new media literacy?
• How do we teach archive-related digital writing while remaining mindful of the distinction between material archives and born-digital data?