It was a pleasure to meet you all last night! I am really looking forward to learning with this group (and to experimenting with ways to encourage equitable, multi-modal participation while not leaning too heavily on breakout rooms). I see several people have joined our commons group, and almost everyone has gotten in to Zotero. If you need help with either of those, please email me and I’ll do my best to facilitate. If you haven’t joined our group already, please do so as soon as possible, as we’ll be walling in our garden (changing the privacy settings to “visible to this group only) this week, so folks can blog comfortably, and you won’t be able to see the site if you’re not a member. Of course, if you’d rather blog on your own site (because you prefer to be fully open, or pseudonymous, or want to keep your writing centralized and under your control), please join our group anyway (for the updates) and send me a link to where you’ll be blogging so I can add it to our site. And if for some reason, you prefer the early 2000s feel and function of Blackboard, let me know and I’ll set up the blog there ;o) For this week, please try to write two blog posts by Sunday night– an introduction and goal-setting post (we’ll look back at these at the middle and end of the course), and your first weekly response blog post. If you prefer, you are welcome to combine both posts into one.

As promised, I have separated our readings for Week 2 into those I’d like you to prioritize and those that are stretch goals (for you to peruse if you have time and/or interest, but it’s okay if you don’t get to them). They are tagged as such in the Zotero library (you can search by tag “priority” or “stretch” to find them), and I’ve also separated them out on our course schedule page if you prefer to find the pieces yourself. This week’s readings will hopefully give us a bit of a common platform from which we can jump into discussions of what we mean by politics, what we mean by digital humanities, and some of what these two things might have to do with each other. I had a hard time choosing which pieces to prioritize, so I’m looking forward to seeing what you all think and write about them. There will of course be things I missed (due to space constraints or the limits of my own thinking) in making these selections- one possibility for a blog post for this (or any future) week might be identifying gaps. This is, of course, just a an idea- the topics of your posts are up to you.

Finally, as I was reviewing an article submission for a journal today, I realized I did not have an academic integrity/AI policy on our syllabus, so I’ve added one at the end. The short version is “please don’t use AI to do your work in this class, and I’m open to discussing and maybe even the idea of possibly evolving if you want to talk about it.”

That’s it for the moment. If you have any questions, please feel free to send a message through our group, email me directly, or ask a question on a comment on any course document- I am here to support you doing your best learning and work.