Assignments will be given letter grades. You will receive written feedback from me on major work via email.
Professional Development in Digital Spaces (25%)
At the beginning of the semester, I’ll ask you to provide some information on your professional (or personal / creative) aspirations as they relate to public history (or History, or your major). Then we’ll come up with a plan designed to document and amplify those interests in online spaces and formats that will resonate with particular audiences.
Some potential work to take up include:
-developing or maintaining a professional voice on social media
-creating or revising a professional web site
-pitching pieces to online publications
-responding to CFPs for conferences
-developing or contributing to online programming
-contributing to an active online public history project
-networking with professionals
etc.
We’ll determine the plan and metrics of evaluation. Work does not have to be entirely new and can intersect with additional classes or research you’ve completed at Northeastern. If you’d like to revise a personal web site or build on a public-facing project you’re already running, that’s fine.
You’ll have the entire semester to complete this work, and you’ll be required to send me at least two emails (one mid-semester, one at the end of the semester) reflecting on this work and its value. You also have the opportunity to scrap or revise initial project plans; just check in with me to give me an update.
Weekly Slack work (25% of final grade)
We’ll use Slack in two ways this semester: to comment on course readings before Tuesday sessions, and to complete relevant asynchronous work after our Tuesday sessions. Prompts will be provided on Slack in relevant channels. This work is generally informal, conversational, speculative, and very much in-progress. Ideally, writing in these spaces may positively impact other Major Assignment work, and you can re-use and revise relevant writing on Slack in that work. Slack work is pass / fail and expected to be completed weekly. That being said, if you miss a week for any reason, you’ll have extra time to make up that work.
Presentation (10% of final grade)
Each student will lead one 20 minute class session on a topic related to our course objectives and topics. Topics and forms of presentations will be pitched to me in advance via email or one-on-one meeting. You have a lot of flexibility in terms of your approach (lecture, case study, conversation, mini-workshop, performance, etc.). We’re doing this in part to de-center my own voice in the course, in part to expand the scope of the course beyond our slate of required readings, and in part to practice and refine your own standing as a vocal authority on matters of public history. As with Slack work, you may end up re-using work presented here in other contexts.
Final Project (40% of final grade; two components)
As we begin the semester, I want you to think about a potential digital public history project that intersects with topics we cover. Project work is an important component of public history, and I’d love to have each of you wrap up the fall with something that you might share or discuss publicly. We’re going to be working with Journal of The Plague Year for a segment of the course, and some of you may decide to take up project work connected to this initiative. We’ll also be talking with Northeastern’s Archives and Special Collections, and you may come across digitized materials here that align with your interests and are presently re-usable by public historians in digital spaces. That being said, your interests in particular topics, forms of collaboration, or kinds of technology might instead lead you to come up with a plan or a prototype for a project to be completed at a later date. Or you might already have a project in mind from previous courses, jobs, or life experiences.
We’ll meet early in the semester to get this project conversation started early. Mid-semester, you’ll be asked to submit a more formal application whose questions are loosely modeled on applications used by the National Endowment for the Humanities and other grant-funding initiatives. We’re adopting this format in part to get you more familiar with these professional contexts and in part because these applications ask public historians to think explicitly about aims, methodologies, ideas of audiences, labor, budgets, and other dimensions of digital project development. The application will also ask you to provide a plan for what you hope to accomplish this semester, and it will request that you specify the “deliverables” to be submitted in December. You will receive written feedback and a letter grade on this application, which is worth 50% of your final project grade. The submitted materials are worth the remaining 50% of your final project grade, and you will receive written feedback and a letter grade on this work as well.
You’ll receive a detailed prompt for this work later in the semester. While the application is a bit formal, you have lots of flexibility regarding subject matter, medium, type of work, and format of work submitted. My hope is that projects we look at throughout the semester offer useful models, but you may also be drawing on models from beyond our course readings.
