Jumping off the Cliff

When I was a graduate student in urban history at Northwestern University in the 1990s, I asked my advisor if I needed to learn SPSS so that I could do statistical analysis. Ever wise, he told me that when I needed it, I would learn it.

I never have learned stats (although with my current monographic research project on the history of block clubs in Chicago, I am edging closer and closer in that direction). But the time has come to learn digital history.

I know that it is time because although my department has no one deeply qualified in digital history, two of my colleagues and I independently came to the conclusion this fall that we have to start teaching it to our students. So I arm wrestled with one of my colleagues for the privilege; we ended up agreeing that I should teach the graduate version in a face-to-face format, and she would teach an online undergraduate course. A third colleague is planning a "digital class," in contrast to a "digital history class" and in contrast to an "online class." I am enough of a novice that I am not even sure what he means by that.

What makes me a "reluctant" digital historian?

I did not set out to be a digital historian, and I am still trying to figure out exactly what that means. When pressed on the topic, I tell people that I am a historian doing a digital project rather than a digital historian. I don't know the code. I am not fascinated by the technology. I am not entirely comfortable with the vocabulary of the digital environment. So far, I have managed to evade teaching online.

But I can see the trajectory of the historical profession. I can see that my students will need the skills that will enable them to operate in the digital world. More importantly, they want to take historical knowledge and ideas to the public through the digital media. Because I have done just enough work in digital history to know what questions to start asking, I have been pushing myself to step up to the plate. And I am excited about learning in this new area.

What are my meager qualifications in digital history?

The most important one is that I am the lead editor for a major online project being built at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee history department: an Encyclopedia of Milwaukee. We expect that this project will appear in print and online in 2017.

Additionally, I wrote an essay for the Writing History in the Digital Age project, edited by Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotski. My essay, "Teaching Wikipedia without Apologies" describes the section of my undergraduate history methods course in which I teach my students to think about the strengths and weaknesses of their favorite reference source.

I also attended the American Historical Association's sessions on Digital History at the 2012 conference in Chicago, the THATCamp associated with the 2012 meeting of the Organization of American Historians in Milwaukee, and have begun keeping my ear to the ground on these issues.

That is all.

Does it matter if I am not deeply qualified?

It was reading about Theresa Huston's Teaching What You Don't Know that really convinced me I should give this a try. Although I have been teaching at the college level since my second year in graduate school in 1993 and have been a regular faculty member at UWM since 1999 (as I like to say, in the last millennium), I have only once taught a course that is the equivalent of one I took (and that course was one that I was a TA for, not an enrolled student). Huston argues that "content novices" have certain pedagogical advantages over "content experts" and that teaching unfamiliar topics is an endemic but unaddressed phenomenon in the American academy. So far she has not addressed my lurking question about whether it is OK to teach graduate courses in fields you don't really know, but I am going to try anyway.

I started this blog to try to track my own learning about digital history in the 14 months before I will step into my own digital history classroom. I hope also that readers will help me along on this journey. And I may even find a way to bring it into the classroom itself, helping my students see that one of the most wondrous things about graduate study is learning how to tackle areas that you--and maybe no one--has explored before.

I may be jumping off the cliff today; but I might also be growing wings.