Distance technologies, distant reading, & literary pedagogy

Joint Session between CSDH/SCHN and ACCUTE for Congress 2016

What potential resides in the integration of the digital humanities with distance technologies? How might such an integration facilitate the offering of literature courses online? Although the phenomenon of literature courses delivered entirely or partially with the assistance of web-based technologies has made significant inroads into North American curricula and generated lively debates across social and traditional media, the prospects for teaching literature online still remain uncertain. With the rise in popularity of summer institutes such as DHSI at the University of Victoria, and the recent spread of localized DH institute offerings at Guelph and Dalhousie, the moment seems to have arrived when Canadian institutions might consider how the rise of the digital humanities could contribute to transitioning literature departments toward adopting year-round DH course offerings at the undergraduate and graduate level. How might techniques and technologies of the digital humanities be coupled with literature courses offered online? How productive is the relationship between the practices of “distant reading” and the pedagogy of distance technologies? What kinds of institutional resources are necessary for distance course design and support? What kinds of open-source tools and platforms might be enlisted in such courses? How do we measure the long-term impact of such offerings on enrollments? How do we persuade colleagues and administrators to accept the potential for the move toward dedicated distance course offerings?

Presenters are invited to speak to individual experiences in offering literature courses online, about efforts to collaborate with colleagues and administrators to propose such courses, about revising departmental curricula to accommodate both distance and traditional classroom-based courses, about local capacities to support distance technologies, about inter-departmental, -faculty, and -university collaborations, about blended or hybrid approaches to digital pedagogy, about best practices and emerging technologies, about web-based open-access learning, about for-credit and non-credit MOOCs, or about the history of distance technologies and literary pedagogy. 

Proposals for papers (20 min.) will be accepted until December 1st, 2015 and must be submitted at https://www.conftool.net/csdh-schn-2016/. Abstracts should be between 200 and 400 words and should clearly indicate the paper’s thesis, methodology and conclusions. Queries about submissions for this joint session should be directed to Dean Irvine (dean.irvine@dal.ca).