Welcome

Welcome to HUMAN 2DH3 Creative, Collaborative, Critical: Approaches to Digital Scholarship.

This course provides students with an overview of digital scholarship research methods and tools with a special focus on forms of digital storytelling. Through a series of theoretical discussions, lectures, and hands-on workshops, students are introduced to a variety of digital storytelling tools and asked to critically consider how various forms of digital storytelling impact how we connect to our past, present, and future, as well as to local and global communities. Additionally, students are tasked with creating two major digital storytelling projects: a podcast, and then a final project using a digital storytelling tool of their choosing (such as an interactive map, a walking tour, a hypertext, and multimedia story, a podcast, a site-specific virtual experience, etc.).

These opportunities for digital project-based learning not only help students develop technical skills, but also cultivate collaboration, digital project management, risk taking, experimentation, and innovation.

Covid-19: Home Stories

In the 2021 and 2022 iterations of the course students were asked to create short podcasts on the topic of COVID-19 Home Stories. Very broadly, “home stories” referred to the idea of our lives at home during the pandemic. For many of us, our home spaces changed considerably during this time. They began to serve multiple purposes (work, school, leisure, social time, family time) and met (or didn’t meet) multiple needs. For some, the pandemic pulled us closer together. For others, it held us further part with the inability to see partners, family, friends, loved ones, or relatives.

This assignment was an opportunity for students to tell a story about where they were (physically, mentally, emotionally, or some combination of the three) during this moment of extreme global and local change.

Home or Hybrid

In 2022 students could choose between two themes: Home or Hybrid.

“Home” asked students to consider how their experience of home space changed during COVID-19. The limits put on our living spaces during lockdown forced us to question our assumptions of how we think about space and the spaces we, or other people in our communities, can or can’t access on a regular basis. For some of us, the idea of home became a launching pad to talk about somewhere else, another place we identify as home, real or imagined.

“Hybrid” asked students to think about the period of time where cities moved towards reopening. As we began to balance online and in-person work, learning, and social environments we saw an increased flexibility, but also increased challenges in navigating what it meant to “go back.” What does it mean to occupy hybrid spaces/lives/identities? How has the pandemic shaped our thinking about hybridity in general?

Podcasts

The resulting podcasts were a mix of personal stories some deeply moving, others hilarious, each uniquely documenting the struggles, sorrows, little joys, lost opportunities, and newfound connections experienced during this time.

Here you will find a selection of student work from both 2021 and 2022. Enjoy!

Listen to the Podcasts

Credits

The student work shared on this site was reproduced, with permission, from assignments submitted during the 2021 and 2022 versions of HUMAN 2DH3: Creative, Collaborative, Critical: Approaches to Digital Scholarship taught at McMaster University by Dr. Amanda Montague.

Images used throughout the site were sourced from unsplash.com.