American Studiesat the Digital Crossroads

Digital Scholarship and Publication Professionalization and Formal Training Scholarship in the Cultural Disciplines and

the Digital

Conversation-to-Date: Three Threads

American Studiesat the Digital Crossroads

KEYWORDS Online• Collaborative in design and execution

– Network of 64 scholars

– Dialogue across analytical frameworks

• Keywords in American Studies and cultural studies: as the vocabulary changes, so should the means through which we track their usage and the knowledge projects they enable.

• “Keywords” themselves are reflective of new media and digital environments: metadata, search terms, and tags.

Translation into a new medium of the blank pages at the back of Raymond Williams’s Keywords

KEYWORDS Online

The main website: keywords.nyupress.org Our blog: depts.washington.edu/forums Our wiki:

depts.washington.edu/keywords/wiki

Our Three Locations

keywords_bloghosts discussion around keyword-related events

keywords_wikitargets classes and working groups

keywords_website

… keywords from the book

updates to all three sites—and new features …

… student-produced keywords from the

wiki… and resources for

instructors:syllabi

assignmentsinstructor chat

touring the collaboratory

touring the collaboratory

touring the collaboratory

touring the collaboratory

Synthetic essays that track and cohesively narrate keyword usage across course texts.

+ Final Products (1)

touring the collaboratory

Multi-layered essays that parse keyword-usage by course texts and offer deep content by linking across the wiki and other online resources

+ Final Products (2)

touring the collaboratory

Archive of course texts paired with student analysis tuned to multiple meanings of course keyword(s)

+ Final Products (3)

wikis in the classroom

• 360° Visibility

• Different Modalities of Course Dialogue

• Pushing the Classroom beyond Class Walls

• Direct Engagement with Keyword-Formation

• Critical Awareness of Public Knowledge

• New Kinds of Collaboration and Knowledge Production

ad-hoc grad student

survey50 respondents:

• Institutions: UW, Fordham, Brown, UT Austin, Michigan, Florida State, Duke, George Mason, MIT, Case Western, SMU

• (Inter)disciplines: English, Rhet/Comp, American Studies, History, Anthropology, Special Education, Communications and Media Studies, Philosophy

What digital technologies have you been trained in?

Where did you learn your digital technology skills?

Additional Question: If you use digital technologies in the classroom, do you feel that your department recognizes and rewards your efforts to teach students these new literacies? • No: 67 %• Yes: 33%