According to Matthew G. Kirschenbaum and Doug Reside, “The ‘challenge’ of the born digital is thus at least as much  social as it is technological.  New textual forms require new  work habits, new training, new tools, new practices, and new instincts.”

This session examines ENG 3817 Digital Archives, a course I teach at UCF to undergraduates.  The course examines the development and function of digital “representation” from a practical “hands on” perspective.  In focusing on the creation, management, and preservation of electronic texts and images as it relates to personal and public archive practices, students gain experience with image scanning, Optical Character Recognition use, text-encoding processes, and other skills. They also study platform delivery, interface usability, copyright laws, and metadata creation by using Omeka, an open source web-publishing platform, as part of a course project. In addition to understanding how metadata is used with electronic records, they  examine the “Wayback Machine” and the basics of “web archiving” efforts to preserve what is on the Internet.

I would like to use my course as a springboard for discussion of similar courses at other institutions and of how to foster a digital humanities curriculum in general.