Initial digital narrative (5%) Students will write a digital literacy narrative at the beginning of term. It should include the strategies they currently employ in their daily and academic lives for content creation, social interaction, data manipulation and analysis. This will make up a page on the student’s own web hosting site. It will be revised both at midterm and at the end of the term and assessed for growth and reflection, and will be child pages to the original narrative.
Blog roll (30%) There will be short writing assignments approximately every other week (7 total, #0-#6; I drop the worst grade–you must do #6). The format for this will be a blog, a key form of 21st-century public writing. They will be either reflective pieces on a conceptual issue that has arisen in class or a report or review about a project or experiment carried out. The main issue here is to learn to communicate ideas in an open forum and to develop a voice for research blogging. Students will learn how to install an instance of WordPress.org and to choose a theme appropriate to representing embedded digital materials. Students choose at the end of the term if you keep your blog or if you delete it. See http://hosting.nyu.edu for more details.
Participation (10%) I expect active participation from all students and non-students in the course. This course will require experimentation with new digital environments and a willingness to try and fail. Between the course meetings, students may have to investigate a problem to learn how to do it themselves— taking initiative will be rewarded. In addition, we come to the course with different skills and helping out fellow students and fostering a collaborative spirit in the classroom will be rewarded. A laptop will be essential for almost every session. Participation will be assessed by the extent to which the students have prepared for in-class discussion and are ready to address the thought questions found in this syllabus.
Project portfolio (45%) Over the course of the term, we will engage in project-based learning. Each student will carry out one individual mini-project using the ideas and methods we have covered in class and will design (but not carry out) a larger project based on humanities data interesting to them. The mini project will be experimental and necessarily small in scope, but will require reflective analysis and contextualization. We will begin to work on these around the midterm and continue through the semester. The personal project will be worth 30% and the project plan 15%.
Zotero bibliography (10%) Each student will build a bibliography on a topic in digital humanities of particular interest to them. This bibliography will be hosted in the cloud version of Zotero and will be open to the world. A blog posting should accompany the bibliography at the end of the term summarizing major elements of the bibliography.
Around the midterm, students will have the opportunity to collectively renegotiate the assessment breakdown, if they so desire.