Assignments that allow students to conduct original research for publication in humanities-focused digital repositories help make classroom learning concrete. And since public-facing projects serve the larger scholarly community, student participants can recognize themselves as valued members of that community. Yet, as Ian F. MacInnes rightly observes in his tips for for “Building Community in Online Classes,” it can sometimes take years for these contributions to see the light of day. The delay is due to the time and labor required for peer-review and copyediting. Student contributions often need a lot of both. Moreover, because these tasks frequently fall upon professors, some may be discouraged from offering such opportunities at all.
One solution is to make contributions to major digital humanities sites the subject of collaboration across multiple courses and semesters. Such collaboration in undergraduate research has a force multiplying effect. It makes the work of peer-review and editing visible, and it underscores the value of contributions at each stage of the publication process.
An Embarrassment of Riches
In my experience working with The Map of Early Modern London, a DH project featuring seven interoperable databases, and directing the Kit Marlowe Project, a student-generated digital repository for studying early modern literature, I frequently found myself overwhelmed by the volume of student-generated content. All of it required extensive fact-checking and editorial work. This problem came to a head as I prepared to launch the Kit Marlowe Project at the 2018 Shakespeare Association of America (SAA) Annual Meeting. I needed to review students’ TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) encoding projects and web exhibits. And I had roughly twenty-five encyclopaedia entries that were enthusiastically long-winded and sometimes slipped into pure conjecture. Their bibliographies also needed additional work. The students’ contributions represented great effort but were clearly not ready for publication.
Initially, I took on the job of checking and copy-editing myself. Alas, I soon realized the process was unsustainable. But what if we extended project collaboration beyond a single semester?
A Solution Benefits Project–and Students
In Spring 2018, prior to the (SAA) meeting, I tested this hypothesis. I created assignments that asked students to fact-check and copyedit previous students’ bibliography, encyclopaedia, and personography entries (the latter linked to our TEI-encoding projects). I assigned content to students in subsequent semesters to fact-check and copyedit. Students’ metacognitive reflections following this experiment revealed powerful learning outcomes (“Students Reflect on ‘Dangerous Knowledge’”). They found some elements of these assignments tedious in the early stages. But they ultimately recognized that strong research is a process requiring persistence and attention to detail. I have since formalized the process of force-multiplying collaboration, re-assigning student submissions to subsequent classes, or the current project intern. Students who initially create content receive credit on the site as contributors for their term, and tagged in entries with their later editors.
This practice helps students recognize the labor involved in the publication pipeline and their role in it. They are not involved in what David Wiley has called “disposable assignments,” single-use tasks that are graded and thrown away (“What is Open Pedagogy?”). Rather, they are “renewable” ones, defined by Open Education Group as those that “provide students with opportunities to engage in meaningful work, add value to the world, and provide a foundation for future students to learn from and build upon” (“DOER, Designing with OER”). Force-multiplying collaboration in undergraduate research provides the foundation for their peers to learn from and build upon. At the same time, it recognizes their contributions’ value to the larger scholarly community.
