Devil in The Digital: Ambivalent Results in an Object‐Based Teaching Course

Abstract

In 2013, I piloted a course in which students used Webbased tools to explore underdocumented collections of Himalayan materials at Yale University. Through classbased research and contextualization, I set students the goal of augmenting existing metadata and designing media-rich, virtual tours of the collections that could be incorporated into the sparse catalogue holdings held within the library system. The process was experimental and had mixed results, as this article documents. The class provided an opportunity for undergraduate students from any discipline to work with objects and primary materials, requiring them to evaluate different sources of information, value, and legitimacy. Learning outcomes were nontraditional and intentionally underscripted. The collaborative and hands-on approaches toward digitization that de-emphasized the authority of the instructor were unsettling to some students. [digital humanities, mobile classroom, critical pedagogy, material culture, Himalaya] From Collections to ConnectionsWhat can students unfamiliar with the histories and provenance of a set of apparently unrelated objects held by a university contribute to the knowledge and understanding of these objects? How can objectbased teaching and the application of digital tools in the classroom foster a learning environment that is socially relevant and culturally engaged with an afterlife beyond the semester? Finally, what structures and protocols can be set in place to help make such courses sustainable over time?These were some of the questions that motivated me to pilot a new course in the fall of 2013 at Yale University. During my three years in New Haven, I had been surprised by two features of the institutional landscape in which I was working. First, while students were on the whole extremely motivated and driven, they were quite traditional in their expectations of learning outcomes and classroom hierarchy.Analytical and discursive writing assignments were still the norm and were generated for an instructor to review and evaluate. It seemed a shame that such effort was destined solely for my inbox, and I wanted to experiment with creating a more connective, longerlasting, and less text-driven classroom. I had been inspired by recent work that focused on emergent pedagogies in the digital humanities (see Hirsch 2012) and the opportunities provided by digitally mediated and more collaborative learning environments.Second, Yale University was home to considerable collections from and about the Himalayas, a region in which I had worked for over 20 years. While most of these collections had been donated by collectors and alumni, others had been purchased with acquisition budgets made possible by a large endowment. From art to archives, publications to personal correspondence, and manuscripts to religious artifacts, Yale's Himalayan holdings were located across the university landscape in libraries, galleries, archives, and museums. As intriguing as the diversity and richness of the collections was the discovery th...