IML Faculty teach workshop at Digital Humanities Winter Institute

IML faculty members Virginia Kuhn and Vicki Callahan were co-instructors for “Teaching with Multimedia” at the first annual Digital Humanities Winter Institute (DHWI), which was held January 7-11, 2013 at the University of Maryland, College Park. DHWI was hosted by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) and featured an array of special events, lectures, and classes focused on innovations in digital scholarship.

Participants in the “Teaching with Multimedia” class were faculty and graduate students from the U.S. and Canada with a diverse mix of research interests across the humanities. In the intense week-long workshop, participants explored the theoretical as well as practical possibilities for incorporating multimedia projects into their curriculum. Kuhn and Callahan’s recent publication, “Nomadic Archives: Remix and the Drift to Praxis” (Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles, and Politics, ed. Brett D. Hirsh, OpenBook Publishers, 2013), was a guiding text for the session.

Drawing upon specific IML classroom assignments and sample student work for digital argumentation across three distinct contexts, image, audio, and video, the course was designed to help scholars map out clear goals and objectives in research driven media work. The workshop examined project parameters and grading guidelines for multimedia projects of Image+Text Relations, Audio Soundscapes, and Video Remix. In addition, the participants took on the practical challenge of making their own media projects using the three model assignments that had been reviewed. The quality of work produced in this short time by the workshop with these projects served as a testimony to the energy, enthusiasm, hard work, and dedication of the participants.

The workshop concluded by having the participants evaluate the assignments undertaken as well as design their own projects and guidelines. Each class at the DHWI then presented a summary of their course accomplishments in a joint session of all participants with the “Teaching with Multimedia” featuring two video projects made in the workshop.