National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute at Lane Community College
Digital Humanities at the Community College
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July 13-17, 2015
I was privileged this summer to be on the faculty of a summer institute funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, written by my colleague Anne McGrail. It was my job to introduce digital storytelling to the fellows (as they are called), who came from all over the United States.
There were two projects. The first we accomplished as a group in twenty-four hours. Borrowing an idea I learned from my mentor Alan Levine, I had everyone point their cell phones at an object in the world and spontaneously record how that was a metaphor for what is important to remember about teaching digital humanities.
They e-mailed me their 15 second clips, and I cobbled them together quickly into this video, which was shown on the second day of the institute:
https://vimeo.com/133456507
And then I threw the Really Big Challenge at them:
The rest of the week went by quickly as my project was supposed to be a small part of the overall experience. I’m not sure it turned out that way because the last day was our Film Festival, which I thought was a Very Big Deal, indeed! Just about everyone had done some version of the project, to my pride and joy.
Of course, in the midst of this flurry of intense activity, I had to demo the digital storytelling making process from start to finish. I was asking them to do really rough and ready work–no time for perfectionism or refinements–and I felt I had to (actually was forced to) abide by that maxim. So this is the digital story I made alongside my students and showed to kick off the Film Fest on Friday at the end of the Institute. It’s hard for me to post something with such a rough sound track: I was out in the atrium, holding my cell phone up to my mouth, and what can I say? Those are field conditions!
https://vimeo.com/133727856
A final word of thanks to Anne McGrail for including me on the faculty of this wonderful Institute, and a special thanks to the National Endowment for the Humanities for their generous funding of this project.