Writing & Digital Presence

Writing & Digital Presence

Writing in the Digital Humanities

Scholarship in the Digital Humanities is not only digital, but open and collaborative, and expressed in a wide variety of media. In this course you will produce content in a range of media – you will engage in critical discussions both in class, online in the 'confines' of the Blackboard LMS, and publicly in social media – websites, twitter and blogs. Types of work which you will produce during the courses, which will build towards final assessments, will include:

1. Twitter and other short form writing to express ideas concisely;
2. Discussion posts in forums where you exchange ideas about core readings and issues with other students in a few paragraphs;
3. Blog posts where you reflect on and refine ideas to present them for public discussion;
4. Presentations using tools such as Powerpoint and Prezi to integrate text and visual presentations of ideas;
5. Conference posters and infographics to present information and ideas visually;
6. Podcasts, both audio and video.

Across this range of 'writing' you will demonstrate developing ability to:

1. Locate relevant sources and critically evaluate the worth of various sources;
2. Monitor the flow of digital discourse on topics relevant to the course;
3. Make sense of the information, and extract key points through reading summaries, abstracts, mind maps, tweets of key points etc.;
4. Plan digital 'writing' by producing plans and drafts for essays, presentations, podcasts etc.;
5. Participate in peer review and helpful critique of the plans and drafts of colleagues;
6. Produce final pieces of work of an appropriate quality for masters level work and ready for public presentation.

This will be challenging, but it will be exciting and by the end of the process you will be able to respond flexibly to the opportunities of the digital age.

Digital Presence

Developing and maintaining a professional public digital presence is an important part of the Digital Humanities. During this course you will “walk the walk” of engaging with social media, online writing and publishing, collaborative work online, and by the end of the course – and hopefully much sooner – it is expected that you will demonstrate your ability to do this at a professional standard.

This will require you to have accounts on several social network sites, and you need to consider some issues about this:

1. Your social media interaction and digital presence, where they relate to coursework and interaction with staff and other members of our learning community, should at all times be professional, polite and respectful.
2. You may want to keep your your digital footprints separate and distinct – you may want to maintain division between personal online activity, experimental online work during the course where you try out new tools, and your professional digital footprint.
3. You may therefore decide to maintain 2 or 3 different accounts on some services
4. You will need to consider account names, screen names and passwords for all of these. You want these to be easy to remember, and secure. All will need to come back to an email account for signup and password recovery.

All of this can be organised and tracked on one page, if you have a system and are careful.