Please join us on Tuesday, February 21st, 2023 from 5:00 – 6:30 pm Eastern/2:00 – 3:30 pm Pacific for the DEFCon Speaker Series: “Beyond Projecting: Planning DH Course Projects that Work for You,” with Brandon Walsh, Head of Student Programs in the Scholars’ Lab in the University of Virginia Library. His primary research focuses on digital humanities pedagogy, looking at the ways it can reflect and enact infrastructural change in higher education. We’re so excited that Brandon is joining us for this year’s Speaker Series!
Beyond Projecting: Planning DH Course Projects that Work for You
Many instructors include digital projects as the logical final assignments in digital humanities courses. Doing so introduces a host of challenges, however, and it can become all too easy to feel committed to the idea of the digital project in a way that overwhelms our course goals, our students, and ourselves. From a practical standpoint, this workshop will explore ways to manage the logistics of planning for the incorporation of course-long digital projects into teaching. From a theoretical one, this session will examine our reasons for doing so and how better to fit our project plans to our teaching rather than the other way around. The session will be structured as a mix of lecture, discussion, and activities, and participants will come away with a clear sense of next steps for integrating digital projects into their courses. In our limited time, the workshop will aim to deliver a series of tools and activities that participants can take with them to work through as they plan their own courses. Topics covered will likely include learning goals, resource assessment, scaffolding, assignment strategy, and outcomes, all filtered through the lens of project management for teaching and learning.
Bio: Brandon Walsh is Head of Student Programs in the Scholars’ Lab in the University of Virginia Library. Prior to that, he was Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Mellon Digital Humanities Fellow in the Washington and Lee University Library. He received his PhD and MA from the Department of English at the University of Virginia, where he also held fellowships in the Scholars’ Lab and acted as Project Manager of NINES. His primary research focuses on digital humanities pedagogy, looking at the ways it can reflect and enact infrastructural change in higher education. He serves on the editorial board of The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy. He is a regular instructor at HILT, and he has work published or forthcoming with Programming Historian, Insights, the #DLFteach Toolkit 1.0, Pedagogy, Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities, and Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, among others.
Brandon’s 2015 dissertation examined how Anglo-American modernists engaged with new devices for sound recording and the corresponding threats and opportunities that media offered for community, the page, and the embodied voice. His project illustrated the unrecognized extent of the modernist encounter with new technologies of sound by listening closely to audio recordings of modernist works not limited by genre or nation. The project argues for greater dialogue between literary modernism and its audio textual reconfigurations that have unfolded in previous years. Walsh supports a re-evaluation of the terms and provocations of the original print works of sound itself. We are so excited to hear Brandon discuss his dissertation further in his talk!
