There was a definite buzz in the room on an otherwise ordinary Friday morning. Faculty, administrators, librarians, and educational technologists had gathered to hear future plans for our university’s classrooms. A communication professor described an assignment in which students reflected on their semester working through issues of race and class by using Comic Life to narrate their experience in short graphic novels. A history instructor explained how the free online tool Storify would help her students connect questions of historical memory with current headlines over the sixteen weeks of her class. A rhetoric professor dreamed aloud about working with students to build a participatory archive that collected popular representations of pregnancy for scholarly annotation, analysis, and remixing. The energy and nature of the conversation were extraordinary. Ideas flowed across disciplinary lines. Librarians pushed humanities professors toward different ways of thinking about archives. Political scientists and foreign language instructors swapped strategies for improving assignments.The setting was the showcase presentations for the Digital Humanities and Social Sciences Institute, a six-week training seminar for faculty on our campus, James Madison University.
