Collaborative Insights through Digital Annotation: A Workshop
January 23, 2015 8:30 am – 5:00pm
MIT Building 66, Room 110
Instructors and students in the humanities and the liberal arts increasingly work in an electronically supported and extended world of multimedia texts. Digital archives, online media repositories, and new tools for creating digital content have not only changed the way students interact with cultural content, they have also radically changed the landscape within which learning can take place. Digital content has broken down the barriers separating traditional learning environments such as the solitary scholar, the library, and the classroom. Access to digitally based knowledge and cultural content with opportunities for new learning environments requires instructors to reevaluate their existing pedagogical methods and their roles in the classroom. Instructors are faced with the challenge of how to respond to this shift, how to innovate and redesign their roles and curricula.
In this workshop, we investigate one possible solution to this challenge: digital annotation. Digital annotation brings the long humanistic tradition of annotation, one of John Unsworth’s “scholarly primitives,” into contemporary electronic media. Within a digital learning environment, annotation allows for a new form of interactive reading, one that can seamlessly transition between traditional forms of solitary highlighting or note taking to collaborative close reading or shared discussions about particular passages. Participants in this workshop will discuss the opportunities digital annotation tools create for new forms of social engagement with the text, for students to share ideas, interpretations, references, sources, adaptations, or other related media with peers and other readers that significantly change the way students acquire and produce knowledge.
The keynote speaker will be John Bryant, Professor of English at Hofstra University. Professor Bryant received his BA, MA, and PhD from the University of Chicago and is the author of several books and over 60 articles on Melville, related writers of the nineteenth-century, scholarly editing, and digital scholarship. In 2013, he was appointed Director of Hofstra’s new Digital Research Center.
To view video from the workshop, including the John Bryant’s keynote presentation and both panels, please visit here.
