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DHUM 5000 Final Project: Syllabus Bronwyn Olstein

About my project: For my final project, I created a Digital Humanities course syllabus for high school students. My high school was structured by trimesters, and in our junior and senior year, we had the option to take trimester elective courses. I shaped this syllabus to work as a trimester elective course similar to how my high school ran things. A lot of inspiration for this course came from Chapter 4: “Postcolonial Digital Pedagogy” from Risam’s New Digital Worlds. I wanted to attempt to decolonize the way DH is often thought of through including content from creators outside of the U.S. This includes Thandiwe Muriu, a photographer from Kenya, Mounir Fatmi, a Moroccan-born artist, Sabato Visconti, a Brazilian artist and photographer, and Nisha Susan, an Indian writer. The class is structured so that it is primarily collaborative, with students often working in small groups with each other. Throughout the class, students will be taught how to use video and photo editing platforms, and expected to create two creative projects using skills from the digital platforms that are taught. I wanted the class have an exploratory and discussion structure rather than lecture. I think that students learn best through being given the chance to guide their own learning. Some days, students are given an entire class to just play around with a platform and learn through experimentation. I wanted the material that is studied to be primarily creative content. To me, I find creative projects the most enjoyable and assessable mediums of critical analysis.

Course Objectives and Assignments

This course will guide students in thinking critically about the technological world, and develop a textual and visual literacy. Visual literacy is especially important because we live in a world that is predominately image-based. How can we learn to critically interpret an image, rather than passively view it? Students will also gain skills in how to use different mediums to create various types of digital work. We will have weekly workshops on how to use these mediums.

Journal: In class every week, students will be responding to questions through a journal. This journal can be kept in either a physical or digital format, and entries can be recorded in whatever way works best for the students. This means entries can be written, audibly recorded, drawn, photographed, videotaped, or in another medium that the student feels is suitable. The journal should function as a useful tool for the student to track their ideas, and knowledge that they’ve learned or expanded on throughout the course. In the fourth week of class, journals will be turned in as a check-in to see where the student is at. Complete journals must be turned in at the end of the course. This is the one project in the class that will be worked on individually rather than collaboratively, although class time will be given for students to work on individual entries with each other, so that they have others to bounce ideas and thoughts off of.

Midterm Project: This will be done collaboratively in groups of 2 or 3. Students will research one of the topics that we’ve discussed so far in class and create a presentation on it. This presentation should be done creatively though one of the mediums we’ve learned in class so far, or a medium we haven’t learned that they know of and want to experiment with. The presentation should teach us about the topic, why the students chose the topic to present on, and why it is important to teach us about. Presentations should be about 3-5 minutes long.

Final Project: This will be done collaboratively in groups of 2 or 3. Students can do deeper research into a topic we’ve discussed in class, or a topic that they feel is related to DH that we haven’t gone over in class. Through one of the creative mediums we’ve learned to use, or one that they want to explore or have used before which we haven’t touched on in class, they should create a 5-10 minute presentation on their chosen topic. This presentation should be creative, and not just a PowerPoint or written paper. They should include elements which both textually or verbally and visually teach us about their chosen topic.

Week 1: What is Digital Humanities?

  • Monday:
  • Introduction, syllabus review
  • Journal Entry 1: What do you think Digital Humanities is?
  • In-class discussion of what students think DH is.
  • Wednesday:
  • Show Thandiwe Muriu images: students will break into small groups to discuss each image (images shown here). After each discussion, we will have a large group discussion.

Homework: Download Photoshop Express onto your computer or phone. Take a photo of a piece of tech that you use weekly.

  • Friday:
  • Workshop: Photoshop Express.
  • After lesson, students will spend rest of class experimenting with the application with the photo that they took for homework.

Weekend homework: Read pages 1-10 of “Hard Mary” by Sofia Samatar

Week 2: Artificial Intelligence

  • Monday:
  • Journal Entry 3: What are your thoughts on AI? Is it human? How did our weekend reading shape your understanding of this?
  • Class discussion of journal entry questions and Samatar reading.
  • Wednesday:
  • Workshop: AI chatbot- in groups, experiment with an AI chatbot
  • Friday:
  • Journal Entry 4: What did you encounter during the workshop yesterday?
  • Class discussion of workshop experience.

Weekend Homework: Download WeVideo. If there is tech in your home that your consider to be outdated, take a video of it. If you don’t have this, then take a video of something else. The video only has to be a minute or two and can be something such as a pet, nature, food, etc.

Week 3: “Outdated” Tech

  • Monday:
  • Workshop: WeVideo- students will spend class time experimenting with the platform using the video they captured for homework
  • Wednesday:
  • Analyses of Mounir Fatmi’s artwork (shown here and linked below)- for each piece, students will work in small groups and critically discuss what they think each piece is communicating and why.
  • Why does he choose to use “outdated” tech?
  • Small group discussion will be followed by full class discussion
Skyline
The Impossible Union
  • Friday:
  • Journal Entry 5: What does archaic technology look like to you?
  • Workshop: Research- work in small groups doing research on an archaic piece of technology- is it still used? For what purposes? Where does outdated tech go?

Weekend Homework: Work on midterm project.

Mounir Fatmi instillation video

Week 4: Midterm Week

  • Monday:
  • Free time to work on project with group.
  • Wednesday:
  • Project presentations
  • Friday:
  • Project Presentations
  • Journal Entry 6: Write about your thoughts on the presentations. What new knowledge was gained or expanded on? Did any of these presentations shape or change your understanding of a concept?

Week 5: Race to Space

  • Monday:
  • Journal Entry 7: What are your thoughts on Mars colonization? Is it good or bad?
  • Read passage from Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler together
  • Adding on to journal entry 7, have your thoughts on Mars colonization changed after reading Butler’s passage? Why or why not?

Homework: come into class with an article or video about the modern day Mars mission/ space travel

  • Wednesday:
  • Journal Entry 8: What is your article or video about? How did Butler’s reading shape your view of the information in it?
  • Small and large group discussion
  • Friday:
  • Workshop: Voyant- Working in groups, using the article you found or the Parable passage, copy and past your text into Voyant and experiment with it. What do you find?

Weekend Homework: Read “Opening the Anthropocene Archives” by James Lee, write down any questions you have.

Week 6: Anthropocene

  • Monday:
  • In small groups, discuss the article we read for homework. Try to summarize it and jot down important concepts.
  • Discussion of article and anthropocene
  • Wednesday:
  • Sabato Visconti: Anthropocene Beach glitch art
  • Journal Entry 9: Choose an image from Visconti’s Anthropocene Beach collection. What do you think this image communicates about the Anthropocene? How does the image guide your understanding of it?
  • Friday:
  • Workshop: Glitch Art- students will spend class experimenting with glitch art using PhotoMosh

Weekend Homwork: Read “Mindful” from The women who forgot to invent facebook and other stories by Nisha Susan (pg. 198-204)

Week 7: Social Media and Apps

  • Monday:
  • Journal Entry 10: Can you relate to Rhea’s interactions with the Chill app and Instagram? Why or why not?
  • Class discussion of reading

Homework: Read “The Age of Instagram Face” by Jia Tolentino

  • Wednesday:
  • Journal Entry 11: What is a “cyborgian look”?
  • Class discussion of reading
  • Friday:
  • This class will be dedicated to going over whatever application we learned about in class that students feel like they need more time with or another lesson on (i.e. WeVideo, Photoshop Express)

Week 8: Finals

  • Monday:
  • Free time to work on final project with group mates and ask me about any questions.
  • Wednesday:
  • Final project presentations.
  • Friday:
  • Final project presentations.
  • Journals due.

Credits:

Created with images by patiwat - "a human hand touching with digital hand, digital transformation concept" • geralt - "artificial intelligence robot ai"