Over the past year we’ve all heard the call (often on social media) to avoid complacency in the current political environment. Whether one agrees that the foundations of our democracy and the freedoms it protects are threatened or not, it seems prudent in the face of some of the stated and unstated goals of the incoming administration and its supporters, to think carefully about how we will react to threats to civil liberties.

According to FiveThirtyEight, one of the best indicators for how people voted in the presidential election was education. So while there is undoubtedly value in educating our students about how to be better citizens, reaching beyond the academy seems more important than ever. Digital tools and methods allow us means to do just that. But what role should historians, digital and otherwise, play in promoting the pursuit of truth, liberty, and justice? What actions should we be taking, individually or collectively, to prevent or respond to moves to curtail legitimate and vital knowledge production and information propagation?

I’m proposing that we discuss how historians, digital humanists, librarians, and others within the academy—who I would argue have a claim to understanding of how societies have dealt with this in the past—should act and react to actions and words that promote division and antipathy. In particular how can we reach beyond the academy and our classrooms in these efforts?

And finally, I am aware that there are partisan elements to this view of the direction in which our country seems to be going. I don’t want to presume that everyone necessarily agrees with me, so I would be more than happy for this session to encourage respectful debate and discussion about this complex problem.

This proposal is for a discussion and brainstorming session on the meanings of data in the humanities (and specifically history). As Miriam Posner has pointed out, most humanities scholars do not think of their work with sources as “extracting features in order to analyze them” but rather see the source material as something to “dive into … like a pool” so as to “understand it from within” (Posner 2015). Yet digitization has created tons of text that could potentially be, and to some extent is being, mined, from government reports to literature. How, then, do we combine the humanities impulse to understand our sources from within with the possibilities of processing and analyzing them en masse?

The idea in the session is to engage participants in a discussion about the kinds of sources they routinely deal with and the ways in which those sources could be thought of as repositories of “data” – conceptualized preliminarily as extracting some kind of information that is somehow different from the kind of understanding achieved through reading the sources one by one. It might be topic modeling a set of texts, creating a social network from connections they reveal, examining the kinds of language used… But rather than focusing on the tool, I’d like to focus on how historians and other humanities scholars conceptualize, or might conceptualize, “data” within their sources.

The last decade has seen a large proliferation of online archives, giving more researchers more access to more primary sources than ever before. At the same time, researchers often are no longer physically handling materials, and are instead relying on digital facsimiles. While this shift has opened exciting new areas of research, it has also changed how the concept of “primary sources” is first presented to undergraduate students.

This talk session would focus on pedagogies for introducing primary sources to new undergraduate researchers. For instance, should such an introduction still include bringing materials into class or arranging a visit to a library’s special collections? Or is viewing a scanned document enough of an experience? In the event physically handling materials isn’t possible, what alternatives exist for giving students a better understanding of what it means for something to be an “artifact”?

EDIT (8:00 PM, Jan 3): Unfortunately I will need to withdraw this session or pass it off to someone else. My flight has been delayed and I will not make it to Denver until at least 3 pm tomorrow (Jan 4). If someone else likes the idea and wants to take it up, let me know! Happy to collaborate/send some ideas your way to help this conversation happen.

This could be a teach, talk, or play session – or some combination of all three, depending on what’s most useful.

Teach: In summer 2016, I participated in Hybrid Pedagogy‘s Teaching with Twitter online course (led by Jesse Stommel) and my students and I used Twitter as a tool in a World Civilizations course during the Fall 2016 semester. If an intro to teaching with Twitter would be useful, I’d love to share what it took to get started, how I worked Twitter into the class, and how students responded to the inclusion of Twitter in the class.

Talk: Discuss pros/cons/potential uses of Twitter together. A chance to brainstorm how Twitter can support pedagogy and class/student goals, what rules might need to govern Twitter in the classroom, and how issues like accessibility, student privacy, and cyberbullying can come up when using Twitter.

Play: Set up “disposable” Twitter accounts for anyone without an account then play around. “Play” could include a Twitter chat online, setting up Tweetdeck, composing Twitter essays, or mining Twitter for hashtags and accounts that might be useful to us as teachers/professionals.

For any of the above options, it would be useful for participants to have access to a phone, tablet, or laptop with internet access.

The past year has brought us many examples of the need for students (well, for the public), to be able to evaluate sources, to identify how and why knowledge is produced in all of its many media and forms, and to suggest the ways in which verifiable, authoritative sources can be produced using the tools of scholars.

The focus of Digital History and Digital Humanities on consumption, analysis, and production of knowledge in many digital forms allows practitioners and novices to address and help demonstrate to students and the public how digital production works and why we should be skeptical of it.

That’s not a simple process however.  As Mike Caulfield of Washington State University, Vancouver, has been writing lately (such as in “Yes, Digital Literacy. But Which One?“), curriculum for information literacy is not new, but that such programs are not sufficiently grounded in either specific content areas or the structures of the Web to keep up with the blizzard of problematic content.  And as my colleague at UMW, Kris Shaffer, has noted in a recent article (“Truthy Lies and Surreal Truths: A Plea for Critical Digital Literacies“) the issue isn’t just misinformed content, but intentional misleading content.  As he notes,  “The future of digital culture ― yours, mine, and ours ― depends on how well we learn to use the media that have infiltrated, amplified, distracted, enriched, and complicated our lives.”

So, I propose a session in which we talk about strategies to address issues of Digital Fluency (or Fluencies) at our schools and in our departments, to share existing resources on Digital and Information Fluency, and to describe what an idealized curriculum would address.