Revising the definition of undergraduate work: Re:Humanities, a National, Undergraduate Symposium

Reflections from the First Undergraduate National Symposium on digital media. Organized by students at Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges, Re: Humanities was a two-day symposium featuring presentations by undergraduate scholars interested in the effects of digital media on academia.

What does undergraduate scholarship look like? Until I learned about the digital humanities, I thought it was an 8-10 page paper that would never breach the boundaries of the classroom.

undergraduate work (n):  a paper which consists of summarizing and filtering 

                                              theoretical articles, while supporting claims with textual 

                                               evidence

In short, I viewed my role as an interim one, marking time until I got to do real research, real work in graduate school.  However, once I attended the Bi-College conference Digital Archivalism, in the spring of 2009, I began to alter my definition. Professors presented on research with undergraduates as they curated documents and created digital archives. In these collaborations, the classroom extended to the library and the internet. I began to rethink my opportunities as an undergraduate and expand them to include research that could be used in this new classroom. 

What I lacked was a network of students doing innovative undergraduate digital research and projects, with whom to discuss and share work. Re:Humanities (aka Regarding Humanities) was born. Thanks to the Bryn Mawr Digital Humanities Fund and Hurford Humanities Center at Haverford the opportunity arose to create the Re:Humanities working group led by Evan McGongagill (BMC), Jessie Taylor (HC),  Aaron Weitz (HC), and myself to plan this symposium. 

We were able to work closely with professors Katherine Rowe (BMC English) and Laura McGrane (HC English) as well as with James Weissinger (Associate Director of the Hurford Humanities Center).  We hosted a program of two keynote speakers Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Director of Media Studies, from Pomona College and Amanda French, THATCamp coordinator, from the Center for History and New Media as well as undergraduates from around the country to showcase their digital research.

At Re:Humanities, the students who attended were thinking across platforms. Their research ran the gamut from Michael Suen, a student at Middlebury College, who presented an original video essay on authenticity and narrative structure in the popular television series The Wire to Gabriela Arias, from Hamilton, who discussed her work on Soweto 76, a three-dimensional archive mapping multi-media representations of the Apartheid in South Africa ( http://www.soweto76archive.org/). (A full list of participants and their projects can be found at:  http://news.haverford.edu/blogs/rehumanities/participants/). 

 The impact of this kind of research extends far beyond a semester and calls for a revised definition of undergraduate labor at  liberal arts institutions.

undergraduate work  (n):  the culmination of collaborative and independent research 

                                               resulting in a curative and analytic project

                                         (v):  to interrogate boundaries, text, and media through 

                                             theory, experience, and reflection

The two day symposium sparked much dialogue and many examinations of the pedagogical experiences that lead us to this work.  For example, Anna Levine (Swathmore) posed: why dont we have more classes that teach us the process of experimenting rather than focusing on the end product?  While Aaron Weitz (Haverford) interrogated the frame of critical thinking as he wondered if good thought came from knowledge and experience, or thought-training.  Evan Donahue (Brown)  asked how we can bridge the disciplinary differences between social science approaches and humanist approaches? He offered a valuable caution, noting that as statistical scientists turn to literary texts, they tend to bring with them an "armchair humanism" -- that often neglects the critical and interpretive interests that matter most to humanists.

During my own presentation I posed the question, why do we, as readers, undervalue the labor of reading, as compared to other kinds of academic labor such as writing? Now, I would like pose a similar question: why do we, as undergraduate humanists, undervalue our own scholarly labor; why not take it more seriously and aim for significant impact outside the classroom, not just inside it, as students do in the Sciences and in the Arts? 

For more information, check out the Re:Humanities website: www.haverford.edu/rehumanities