The affordances of web 2.0 technology have challenged many notions of the act of writing itself, from the definition of text to the understanding of audience. Most importantly, digital writing questions the notion of single authorship, opening new possibilities for collaborative, interdisciplinary, and public scholarship. This presentation explores the growth of the public digital humanities movement, as a marriage of the local relevance of civic engagement and the networked possibilities of the digital humanities. Building on a taxonomy of genres and project types, we will explore the “City of Lit”|“Local Heroes” exchange as a case study: a partnership between Monmouth College and the University of Iowa, the project engages undergraduate students in conducting and publishing original local research in the form of multimedia biographies. We will also consider the unique challenges and opportunities of collaborative interdisciplinary research to provide strategies for success and best practices in the public digital humanities.
The guest lecture is an intitiative of Prof. Laura Castor (IKL) and has been organized by the ENCODE-research network.
Our gratitude to the U.S. Norway Fulbright Foundation that funded Prof. Draxler's stay.