Foundations of Comparison

Abstract

To teach one’s students by drawing on information from one’s field site is to bring two “homes” into contact with one another: the home of one’s classroom with one’s students and the home of a field site filled with friends and “fictive family”. It means helping two different home communities translate and understand one another, bringing into sharper relief the challenges of translating that teaching—and fieldwork—perpetually entail. Creating an online pedagogical tool based on one’s field site brings all of these issues into focus, as one also manages the spatial and temporal variances inherent in many digital humanities projects.