The Humanities Student as Digital Archivist: Pedagogical Opportunities in the Our Americas Archive Partnership

The Humanities Student as Digital Archivist: Pedagogical Opportunities in the Our Americas Archive Partnership

Digital humanities

Rice University’s “Our America’s Archive Partnership,” (OAAP), is an aggregation of diverse resources chronicling the history and culture of the Americas. In this article, Rice University professor, Melissa Bailar, discusses the scholarly and technical benefits that students and faculty receive as participants in this digital archiving project. She attributes enhanced technical skills, teaching, and the abilities to critique and conduct scholarly research to the hands-on experience of digitizing texts and developing the archive’s structure. Undergraduate and graduate students work alongside librarians, humanities scholars, and computer programmers, thereby fostering an interdisciplinary and collaborative atmosphere. This environment also supports the diverse content and contributions made by the sponsoring institutions including the University of Maryland, the Instituto Mora, and Rice University. Sensitivity to cultural differences and provenance of a particular collection is incorporated, for example, in the search fields, visual representation, and interface designed for that collection. In addition to fostering shared knowledge across disciplines, the OAAP maximizes an individual’s potential for expertise and scholarly recognition. By adopting the “craftwork” model, participants conduct both the transcription and encoding of texts and therefore, become more perceptive of context and historical and cultural nuance. Allowing individual researchers to gain a holistic perspective and accumulating knowledge facilitates enhanced scholarship. Bailar observes that the participating students and scholars are “shaping future research resources” as a result of both collaboration and individual research.

Bailar, Melissa

Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy

2100-04-01

Polk, Victoria

New Jersey City University

Online article

Bailar, Melissa. "The Humanities Student as Digital Archivist: Pedagogical Opportunities in the Our Americas Archive Partnership', Transformations: The Journal Of Inclusive Scholarship And Pedagogy." Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy Vol. XXII, No. 1. (Spring/Summer 2011). web.njcu.edu/sites/transformations