Overview

The assessments in this course are divided into two main categories each worth 50% of your grade: weekly assessments and a semester-long project with specific milestones.

Setting the Foundation: Flexibility, Commitments, and Intellectual Journeys

What does it mean to do “assignments” or be assessed as a graduate student? Ideally this question wouldn’t matter, and you enrolled in this course with a deep passion for digital humanities research, so grading would be of minimal concern. In reality, we know that grades have enormous influence in both how we have been taught to value ourselves and in turn how society often values us. While I cannot wave a magic wand and restructure society, I do want to address this situation explicitly for a few reasons.

First, we are still in a global pandemic that has affected all of us, but not in equal ways. I address policies for what should happen if you or myself contract COVID-19 in Policies, but fundamentally no course is worth jeopardizing anyone’s health over (whether physical or mental). While meeting remotely mitigates some of our risk, the fact is that teaching and learning is fundamentally different in a COVID world.

That being said, while this may all sound very depressing, I firmly believe we have an opportunity to build a more equitable and supportive learning environment even in these circumstances. But this requires some ground rules and (re)setting of our foundations when it comes to this course.

First, I hope that we can all approach this course as an experiment in learning where flexibility and patience is prioritized. Such a perspective does not mean that we don’t have deadlines or expectations, but rather we acknowledge that we are all coming into this course with differing levels of expertise, responsibilities, and bandwidth. Rather than erasing these differences, we will strive to accommodate them as much as possible.”

But to have this flexibility, we also want to make sure that we are committed to doing our best in this course. Otherwise, we lose this rare opportunity to think collectively and grow intellectually. So, how do we balance these goals–flexibility and commitment—-in an increasingly unpredictable world? Historically, this is where grades and deadlines would come in. While I do have to submit grades for you, I want to emphasize that this course is about your individual intellectual development and journey. Therefore, I will try to make all expectations for grading as transparent as possible, and also ask you to reflect on your intellectual journey during the course. This approach might sound very handwavy, but I have found students at the graduate level are often too hard on themselves rather than too lenient (though it can happen). So to try and mitigate this tendency we will be doing a form of grading called consultative or specifications grading, which I discuss in the Grading section , but also want to emphasize an important adage that I hope you remember throughout the course: comparison is the thief of joy.

The reason I want to emphasize this point is that rather than compare yourselves to each other, I hope that you can focus on your individual growth during the semester and see each other as colleagues to learn from, instead of competition. Some of you will already be in this mindset. However, I find that this shift from undergraduate to graduate education is crucial. Hopefully, this reminder is helpful.