SourceLab: Digital Documentary Publishing in the History Classroom

Thanks to smartphones and cameras, we’re all publishers now. Everyone’s a documentarian—our notions of the ‘historical record’ are being transformed by billions of self-published sources—yet humanities curricula often sideline basic instruction in scholarly editing and digital publishing. But students can be developing these skills in history classrooms, helping them become better critics as well as producers of online sources.

This hour-long event took place on Wednesday, December 10, at 4:30 p.m. ET and described the experience at SourceLab, a pilot curriculum in digital documentary editing developed by the Department of History at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. SourceLab presented examples of student work as well as curricular materials, showing how this experience has been scaffolded at Illinois. The panel also included discussion of how this curriculum intersects with graduate training and teaching at the PhD level. The discussion was also part of an effort to develop a working group on digital documentary publishing methods and modules within humanities curricula.

Moderated by Kalani Craig, this AHA Learn event featured Owen Monroe, John Randolph, and Richard Young and was organized with the AHA’s Digital History Working Group. The syllabus discussed in the event can be found here, and the accompanying course bibliography here.