Robert Stephens and Josh Thumma | Faculty-Undergraduate Collaboration in Digital History at a Public Research University | The History Teacher, 38.4

Faculty-Undergraduate Collaboration in Digital History at a Public Research University

Robert Stephens and Josh Thumma
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

AN ASSISTANT PROFESSOR and an undergraduate student—the authors—set out in August 2003 on a path that was new for both: a collaborative research project in digital history. Together, we planned and researched the content for an online teaching module as part of The Digital History Reader <www.dhr.history.vt.edu>, a project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.¹ Our experiences, we think, offer not only a model of new approaches to pedagogy in digital history but also raise fundamental questions about the nature of undergraduate education at large public research universities. This article, therefore, seeks to explicate the form we adopted, to draw more general conclusions from that experience, and, finally, to raise some basic questions about the possibilities and drawbacks of collaborative work in digital history.

Since the mid-1990s, considerable attention has been paid to reforming undergraduate education at public research universities. At the center of many of these efforts has been the idea that research universities have failed to use their own strengths to their advantage. Rather than focusing on research and involving students in the endeavor to add to the pool of human knowledge, many undergraduate curricula at these institutions have simply attempted to reproduce a liberal arts curriculum, and, it must be noted, are failing badly at it. In a scathing report on undergraduate education at research institutions funded by the Carnegie Foundation, the Boyer commission concluded that:

In a context of increasing stress—declining governmental support, increased costs, mounting outside criticism and growing consumerism from students and their families—universities too often continue to behave with complacency, indifference, or forgetfulness toward that constituency whose support is vital to the academic enterprise. Baccalaureate students are the second-class citizens who are allowed to pay taxes but are barred from voting, the guests at the banquet who pay their share of the tab but are given leftovers.²

For the members of the Boyer commission, the key to solving this inequity was to shift the focus at major research universities toward a new model of undergraduate research. They recommended that, rather than having passive students being fed the wisdom of the ages by lecturing faculty, students should become part of the research mission of faculty members. Like graduate students, undergraduates ought to be given the opportunity to participate in the process of "inquiry, investigation, and discovery that are at the heart of the enterprise" of these institutions.³ We concur with both the criticism of a system that has too often looked upon undergraduates as a burden rather than an asset, and with the notion that undergraduates should be included in the important and stimulating work of knowledge production.

Yet the problems of implementing focused undergraduate research in research universities are myriad. Public universities, in particular, "face significant challenges and issues in developing a culture of undergraduate research that the smaller private universities do not have."⁴ According to Carolyn Ash Merkel, these include, but are not limited to: the size and complexity of public research universities, problems associated with legislative oversight, diverse student bodies with varying needs, frequent lack of direct contact between faculty and students, and large class sizes that place the burden of faculty-student relations on the student.⁵ In order to overcome these substantial barriers to undergraduate research, Merkel argues that research universities must change the culture of the institution as a whole. Administrators must be willing to expend significant resources on promoting and supporting undergraduate research, and faculty must be willing to place more value on undergraduate research and "think creatively about how to bring students into the scholarly community." At the same time, students must understand that opportunities are available to them and be proactive in exploiting those opportunities to the fullest.⁶ Although this seems to be occurring at some public institutions, it appears to us that the culture of research universities has not changed significantly. Indeed, the constant pressure applied by national rankings promote sponsored research (especially scientific or technical research) above all else.

The problem of promoting undergraduate research, we would argue, is particularly pronounced in the liberal arts in general and in history departments in particular. Some of the reasons for these problems are cultural and some structural. The cultural aversion to undergraduate collaboration may be the most difficult to overcome. Many professors feel a certain repugnance toward collaboration of any kind. And many professional historians will profess that history is a "solo sport." Indeed, the solitude of the archive is a significant draw for many historians. Yet we see this excuse as a canard. History is not a "solo sport," historians have always collaborated in various ways; and the breadth, depth, and scope of many projects necessitate collaboration. Misanthropy, we would argue, should not be a valid excuse for excluding undergraduates from serious, scholarly research. Another cultural impediment is the common belief that students must attain a broad base of knowledge during their undergraduate careers before they can actively take part in "doing" history and that "real" historical education begins in the graduate school. We see this as a fundamentally flawed notion; modes of learning need not be sequential. Putting off the difficult work of immersion and interpretation until graduate school encourages undergraduates to accept a facile idea of history as the laundry list of past deeds written in stone. ⁷

It is also true that students in large research universities share cultural values that hinder their active participation in their own learning and that they must shoulder some of the responsibility for the lack of collaboration. With the continuing commercialization of higher education and the spread of the ethos of student as consumer, many students arrive at university with the goal of a degree rather than with a passion for inquiry. It is entirely possible, and even common, at large public universities to receive a degree without ever talking to a professor outside of the classroom. It is also entirely possible to earn a degree without ever taking part in a significant research project, even in history departments. In many history departments, no provision for a senior keystone experience exists, and often students never have the opportunity to apply their acquired skills in sustained intellectual inquiry. And it is not just distant professors who are at blame for this. We share the opinion that many students actively and assiduously avoid classes they deem "hard," shun classes with significant writing components, and even actively seek classes tipped by their peers as "easy."

While the cultural impediments are paramount, the structural challenges may prove even more difficult to overcome. Currently, there is very little incentive for either faculty or students to take part in undergraduate research. Although some faculty members support and promote the value of undergraduate research, there are significant disincentives that force faculty members to worry about the costs of supporting undergraduate research. First and foremost, in an atmosphere that values research above all else in deciding on promotion and tenure, any activity that takes time away from research must be carefully considered. Mentoring undergraduates and supervising the individual research projects of students, such as undergraduate theses, carries little weight in the tenure process. While we would like to see incentives that promote not only effective but unselfish undergraduate instruction become a more significant factor in promotion and tenure decisions, we doubt that the emphasis on research, and increasingly on sponsored research, will diminish in the near future.

A more commonplace but nonetheless important factor is the lack of remuneration or compensation in time for undertaking undergraduate research. At our institution and many others, there is no mechanism for rewarding supervision of undergraduate research, which must be taught as an unpaid overload. Merkel suggests that in order to make undergraduate research a part of "normal" university life, there must be institutional financial support for it.⁸ This means rewarding faculty, but it also means rewarding students. Actual archival research is expensive; it often means travel. In order for undergraduate research to be viable, there needs to be some mechanism for support. And while there is some competitive money for students at Virginia Tech to undertake research, particularly in the Honors Program, the possibilities are often poorly advertised. Moreover, these kinds of competitive individual grants only reinforce the idea that undergraduate research ought to be reserved for the exceptional rather than encouraged or even required for all.

Continually rising class sizes act as another structural barrier to undergraduate research. As state legislatures reduce higher education outlays and the "mini baby boom" reaches public campuses, enrollment pressures will continue to ratchet up class sizes. Supervised or collaborative research usually demands smaller groups, though we are convinced that creative ways might be found to incorporate team-based research into larger classes. While faculty on their own have often been central to promoting undergraduate research, all of these structural impediments cannot be overcome "from the bottom up."⁹ Reducing the structural constraints will require leadership from Deans' offices, from Provosts, and from Presidents.¹⁰

After painting a rather gloomy picture, we would like to offer another model that patches some, though not all, of the holes that hinder the implementation of undergraduate research. In creating this model, the key for us was to shift the object and relationship from mentoring to collaboration. We took quite seriously Ronald Dotterer's pedagogical challenge to follow a "collaborative investigative model, one using research done with a mentoring model or done jointly by students and teachers—a new vision portending a major shift in how scholarship in the academy is practiced."¹¹ Instead of a traditional independent study or undergraduate thesis project in which the professor guides and then judges an individual research project undertaken by the student, we followed a model that promoted working together. This is not to say that inequalities did not exist in the relationship; student-teacher collaborations are subject to power relationships similar to other classroom and extracurricular instruction. Yet working together on a project that was still in a nascent state, being open to change, and working in a nontraditional medium, allowed us to sidestep many of the problems a more traditional archive-based project might have raised (i.e. inequality of contextual and historiographical knowledge, idiosyncratic research methods, language barriers, etc.).

We want to stress that what made this project successful for both of us was the sense of collaborating on a joint intellectual enterprise, rather than a faculty member merely using an undergraduate for research assistance. Our collaboration was aimed at creating resources for use in the classroom, and because of the nature of the project, having the perspective both of the student and the professor allowed us, we think, to arrive at a better result than either of us working alone could have managed. Indeed, we believe that others will find that pursuing a specifically pedagogical project such as ours rather than more traditional research offers a much greater chance of producing a final product that is both useful to the faculty member and engaging for the student.

The Digital History Reader

The project on which the two of us worked can best be described as a digital, inquiry-based, primary document learning module. It is one part of a much larger project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities that seeks to transform the teaching of primary documents in large survey classes. Named The Digital History Reader, the project is led by a team of nine Virginia Tech faculty members, eight from the Department of History and one from the Department of Teaching and Learning, and includes a number of graduate research assistants and outside evaluators as well as technical and design support.¹² The project responds to the current needs of college and university faculty who teach introductory courses in United States, European, and world history by producing teaching modules they can use to deal with a specific set of intellectual and practical problems they confront in teaching large sections of survey courses. In particular, the modules seek to teach students to read primary documents (in multiple formats) in an asynchronous environment.

While published or faculty created document readers can be useful in teaching how to read documents, large class sizes make it difficult to explain exactly how historians read documents in a way that is meaningful to students.¹³ Furthermore, most document readers, with a few notable exceptions, privilege the written word. Yet it is increasingly clear that teaching media and visual literacy, broadly conceived, will be a central task for all of the liberal arts in the 21st century.¹⁴ Intellectually, the field of history itself is changing to meet this new reality. Increasingly historians are taking part in a "visual turn" in which the primacy of the written word is being challenged by the use of new kinds of sources, particularly in the "new" cultural history.¹⁵ By incorporating both an intellectual interest in nontraditional sources and a focus on teaching critical digital literacy, these modules being created at Virginia Tech promote critical thinking as well as active and inquiry-based learning.

The Digital History Reader addresses the need for content-rich, pedagogically rigorous, intellectually engaging, and flexible digital instructional materials in United States and European history. As stated recently by American Historical Association president Lynn Hunt, the goal in creating multimedia historical projects is to frustrate students "who want quick answers" while rewarding those who recognize the advantages of puzzling out questions and connecting texts, images, and other media into a deeper understanding of the past.¹⁶ Paradoxically, the Digital History Reader uses advanced technology to make students slow down, because, as Samuel Wineburg has noted, it is "students' response in the face of complexity—what they do when they don't know—which holds the key to their continued learning from the world we call the past."¹⁷

Rather than presenting history as a set of disconnected facts (names, dates, and events) that must be "covered" over a semester, these modules provide students with a more sophisticated understanding of how historians interpret the meanings of past events, ideas, mentalities, practices, and relations.¹⁸ Adopting an inquiry-based approach to learning allows the student to assume responsibility for exploring the content of historical materials, identifying the significance of topics, and building connections between evidence and interpretations. More specifically, the modules seek to challenge students to deal with a wide array of primary materials (documents, maps, photographs, songs, and film clips), while being forced to integrate the documents into the larger historical context.

The modules follow a standard format. Each module, accessible from an opening index page, is fully self-contained. Faculty thus have the option of using all the modules or selecting just the ones appropriate for their course structure. All modules follow a similar organizational design that includes a statement of learning objectives, an outline of historical questions students will be asked to consider, contextual historical background information, an "archive" of documents and texts with analytical questions to guide students' understanding, and a self-paced assessment that allows for feedback and evaluation of knowledge.

The Collaboration Process

The specific module that we worked on together focuses on the complex events of 1968. Our collaboration began in the fall semester with a series of meetings to lay out the scope of the project and begin dividing the work. At the outset, Josh Thumma, a senior, had little idea of what would be expected of him, had little background and frankly only a cursory interest in the subject matter he would be researching. In our first meeting we discussed what exactly to focus on and particularly on the importance of nontraditional media. Initially, we settled on a few guiding principles. First, the project would be radically multimedia, and we would focus on being ecumenical in the kinds of sources we would use. Second, we would meet weekly and discuss what each of us had found the previous week. Third, decisions would be made together.

Before the semester began, Josh was asked to read two books about the events of 1968 in order to familiarize himself with the basic outlines of the problem so that we would be able to begin in earnest as soon as school began. At the beginning of the fall semester we knew that the module would be about 1968 and that it would have to explore events in several localities, but there had been no decision made as to which cities to focus on. During the first meeting, we agreed that, even though the project was to supplement Western Civilization courses, we would approach the traumas of 1968 as global phenomena. We, therefore, chose to focus on several events in quite different contexts: the Tet offensive in Saigon, the May revolt in Paris, the massacre at Tlatelolco in Mexico City, the Soviet invasion of Prague, and the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Eventually, much later in the semester, the scope of the project became unreasonably large and this led us to drop Saigon, which, in any case, did not tie in well with the themes that emerged from the other local studies. The process of defining the scope and contents of the module was enlightening for both of us. Trying to come to terms with the breadth of the events of 1968 and boil them down to something comprehensible by freshmen born almost two decades after the events took place proved to be a constant battle for both of us. For the student, in particular, by offering a window into how historians go about deciding which stories to tell and how they try to extract cogent themes from the flurry of events, the task proved to be revelatory, forcing him to rethink what he had already learned. After delineating the boundaries of the module, we set to work on digging up interesting documents that would both act as a window onto events and jar students' expectations as well.

The experience over the course of the semester was remarkably consistent. Each week, we would arrive on Friday afternoon with copies of the sources we had found the previous week, go over them, and talk about what each of us thought most important. We would compare the documents each one had uncovered and talk about which sources might work and which would not; and finally we would discuss where to look the following week. We both discovered quite early on film sources would be the most difficult to locate, to manipulate technically (for a number of reasons that need not detain us here), and to obtain copyright permission. We tried a number of avenues, making trips to the library together to look at dusty video laser discs that probably seemed like an excellent idea when they were published but had long since outlived their usefulness. We searched old documentaries filed in the catacombs of the library. We combed the internet for free and commercial services, finding a surprising amount of helpful material much of which had long and tangled strings attached to its use. We discussed content, the problems of bandwidth, as well as student tolerance for length of clips. At the end of the semester, many of these questions had been solved, but several remained and will likely be perennial problems inherent in dealing with moving images rather than more traditional text-based document. Other sources were less of a problem. Ultimately we collected approximately fifty-five documents in a number of media: film clips, TV news reports, audio clips, newspaper articles and editorials, oral histories, statistics, photographs, posters, and cartoons. The process here was significant. This was not a case where a professor gave a research assistant a list of books to fetch from the library. We decided on the themes together; we both made trips to the library; we both found interesting sources; and we both experienced the difficulties and frustrations involved in this kind of multimedia project.

The finished module, which is available at the Digital History Reader site <www.dhr.history.vt.edu>, begins with a short introduction and question to focus the students' reading: "What were the similarities and the differences in the ideas, motivations, and actions of those on both sides of the rebellions of 1968?" The students then are directed to read an approximately 2,500-word narrative that places the events of 1968 in the context of the Cold War and outlines the relevant events in each city. Then, after understanding the context, the students are presented with the evidence section. Made up of approximately a dozen pieces of evidence for each city, this section is the bulk of the module and the real heart of our mission. It asks students to read primary documents in various formats and to come to their own conclusions. In the Paris section, for instance, students are presented with posters and flyers that were posted on the streets, situationist slogans, tracts on the relationship between students and workers, Charles de Gaulle's speech to the nation, and film clips of protests and barricades. The documents on Prague include famous documents, such as the "Two Thousand Words" manifesto and the stern warning of the Warsaw Pact to the Czech government, as well as more ephemeral works, like political cartoons, broadsides both for and against the invasion, and a magazine cover. The kinds of documents for Chicago are similar and include posters, photographs, broadsides, oral histories, depositions, congressional testimony, and film clips.

This wealth of source material is the real value of the Digital History Reader. The project allows teachers to challenge students to think about the variety of sources that help historians draw conclusions about the past, and it forces students to face the bewildering complexity of the historical record and to make choices about interpretation. After reading the evidence, students take a self-test to gauge the knowledge they have gained. The questions consist not only of factual and synthetic questions about the context and evidence, but specific questions about images and symbolism as well. After the quiz, the students read a brief conclusion that takes a telescopic view of the events of 1968, discussing both the lasting effects of the uprisings and the historical dead ends. Finally, since the module is only an introduction to an enormously complex set of events, the students are presented with a bibliography of sources for further reading.

Reflections on Our Collaboration

Our final product, however, was the outcome of a process that was new to both of us, a process that forced us to re-conceptualize the way we go about our work as professor and student. We differed in the benefits derived from this kind of collaboration and we offer the following comments on our experiences.

As a Student in my final semester as an undergraduate I had entered into the project with reservations. Although a senior, I shared the widespread anomie of students at large state universities, perceiving myself as a number rather than a student. And, frankly, I had little personal interest in "going the extra mile" to create a close relationship with a faculty member. When I agreed to participate, I had no idea what would be expected of me. Although I saw it as an opportunity to do something interesting, I also had little interest in the subject matter I would be asked to research.

Despite these initial concerns, I believe I benefited from the experience in several ways. First, I learned how to do professional research. My previous library research experience had consisted of what amounted to instructor-led scavenger hunts, complete with maps of where to find the poorly hidden booty. I had completed research projects for classes, but most of those had not stretched my prior research knowledge. While I had used the library for previous papers, I had never undertaken research of the scope of this project; likewise, I had never thought about the difficulties inherent in multimedia research. Most of all, the experience forced me to discover the possibilities and limitations of what the library could offer and gave me the confidence to ask questions and uncover hidden answers on my own.

After the initial meeting with the instructor I headed to the library, but my first day was not spent learning about 1968 but rather about the library itself. I had questions I simply could not answer from my previous experience. "Where do I start?" "How do I break this apart so that I can work on small parts of a large research topic?" "Will I have enough time?" I learned quickly just how time consuming it was to look for and through hundreds of documents. I cross-referenced items and tried to squeeze every last thing I could from our relatively small university library. I undertook types of research I had not previously experienced: use of interlibrary loan, reading microfilm and microfiche, paging through newspapers, and the use of various and sundry audiovisual sources. I learned the fundamental lesson that librarians do not always know where everything is; that sometimes you have to roll up your sleeves and dig into the stacks; that the information you seek will not seek you; and that research is about solving specific problems. By the end of the semester, I had learned how to do professional research, something I had learned neither from my historical methods class nor my upper-level courses.

The second benefit I believe I came away with is an increased level of self-confidence. The weekly individual interaction with my instructor (now my collaborator) changed the learning dynamics. The meetings soon shifted from instruction to discussion. I felt that I could express my own opinion, that I could place relative value on documents instead of being told what was important. By discussing the politics involved in historical interpretation and the social and political implications of events, I gained insight not only into the process of historical writing but began to develop my own philosophical stance on history. Most importantly, the experience allowed me, as a student, to peer behind the closed doors of a professor's office and to actually participate in something fundamentally useful, that is, something that will have a life beyond the end of the semester and the distribution of grades. By working on a collaborative project, by feeling as if my input mattered, by being forced to grapple with difficult questions and sources, I gained the knowledge that I could, in fact, become an historian. Indeed, I was working as an historian.

As the Instructor I found the experience extraordinary, and the benefits proved to be both material and, in other ways, quite unexpected. Initially, this project was a child of necessity and curiosity. After receiving the grant and turning to the hard work of transforming an idea into computer code, I quickly realized that in order to develop my vision for the module—which was ultimately far too expansive for its own good—I would need help. My material need for research assistance coincided with a wider move within the university community away from paid research assistance to what we choose to call "the new feudalism" in which students are given academic credit for both research assistance and, more scandalously, for teaching assistance. While politically skeptical of the idea that trading grades for wages provided value to students, I felt that some other model could produce both real research and offer a student a valuable set of skills. After mulling over the possibilities, I approached Josh Thumma because of the aptitude he had shown in a previous class.

I shared the student's trepidation about entering into the arrangement which ensued. My fear rested not so much in the prospect of working intimately with an undergraduate but rather in my own confusion about exactly I wanted to do and my doubts about my ability to provide adequate leadership and guidance to make the collaboration work. Ultimately, this confusion helped the collaborative effort. We listened to each other because neither of us had a concrete idea of what we wanted to get out of it.

For me, the benefits were twofold. The first consists of the purely material. Because we worked together, we were able to collect a deep and diverse group of sources in a relatively short period of time. Although the research was shared, the work that my student put in cut the time investment substantially. Time, as any assistant professor attempting to earn tenure can attest, is the most valuable asset. Although time may be ephemeral, this was a specific material gain from the collaboration. It must be stressed, however, that the collaboration included no monetary compensation. The project was treated as independent study and taught as a voluntary overload. Furthermore, there is little experience and little evidence that work on "digital history" will be given substantial weight in tenure and promotion decisions. I realized that even at universities at the cutting-edge of history and computing such as George Mason, it is still unclear how new forms of scholarship and presentation will affect these career-defining decisions.

The intellectual benefits of the collaboration for me were invaluable. The lengthy discussions about sources and approach continually made me reevaluate the process of teaching students to read sources. My collaborator's questions and insights into the contextual knowledge of students forced me to constantly justify why particular sources should be utilized and to rethink how to effectively present clear contextual narrative without "giving away" too much information. It became evident that students needed to be coaxed into figuring out what the sources mean. Yet they needed enough contextualization, notes on symbolic content, and tips on reading the sources in order not to become frustrated. Perhaps more significantly, the substantial discussions with my collaborator about interpretation made me reassess how to introduce students to the actual work of historians. The experience convinced me that we need to draw back the curtain and show undergraduates the wizard manning the controls. We need to do a better job not only of introducing undergraduates to historiographical debate but also of allowing them to actively take part in that debate. We need to convince students that the work of historians is not the production of the past but interpretation.

We both agree that the intellectual project that we undertook was a success. We would now like to turn to the broad conclusions we drew from our experience, and then we will present a number of reservations we both still share about the possibility of replicating and expanding our experience.

Conclusions

First, we agree that the kind of undergraduate research model promoted by the Boyer commission for public research universities has significant merit. The model of lecture and recitation drawn from the 19th century when paper was scarce and expensive makes little sense in the digital age. Lecturing to students two or three times a week no longer offers an efficient and effective means for promoting learning. In history, in particular, it promotes a static view of the past in which "the truth" is transferred from master to pupil.¹⁹ This, we believe, leads to complacency and a lack of investment in learning. Students in the 21st century, we would argue, need to be more intimately involved in the creation of something more lasting than a report card. Indeed, one of the most significant lessons from our experience is that the incentive of creating a product that would have an afterlife made for effective student learning.

Second, the model of collaboration we undertook proved to be the most important aspect of the project's success. If the project had devolved into merely research assistance, the end result would have been significantly diminished. We both believe that the collaboration allowed us to engage in intellectually stimulating discussions, to uncover more than we would have been able to separately, and led to results we had not anticipated. Although hierarchy was implicit in our relationship, our attempts to diminish the gap improved our experience.

Third, we both think that the nature of the project—a pedagogical project in digital history—played a significant role in our success. The project was explicitly pedagogical rather than basic historical research. This meant that a student collaborator added an insight that would have been lacking without his participation. It, in a sense, leveled the playing field. The fact that we were involved in a digital history project had a similar effect. Because our project—and indeed this kind of project—was and still is in its infancy, there were few preconceptions and few limitations. We literally knew neither what we wanted to do nor exactly what we could do when we started. Had this been a project aimed at producing a traditional historical monograph, there would have been considerably more structure and a greater imbalance in knowledge and power. Indeed, the demands and possibilities of the digital medium allow both a breadth of imagination and a freedom to experiment that would be unthinkable in a more traditional format. This being the case, we would argue that both because of the possibilities and the enormous effort required to undertake digital projects, this kind of collaboration is particularly suited to the medium.

While our experience was overwhelmingly positive, we have some reservations about the possibilities of the model. First, the conclusions of the Boyer Commission call for the broad adoption of undergraduate research; indeed, Ronald Dotterer calls it the "pedagogy of the twenty-first century."²⁰ It hard to believe that such a fundamental restructuring of undergraduate education will occur. Although there are certainly movements and support for introducing "active learning" into the curriculum, this often fails to overcome the basic facts of overcrowded classrooms and the tenacity of tradition.

We are especially troubled when we ask whether our experience can be replicated because it required a one-on-one relationship. Even if there is the impetus for reform along the lines of undergraduate research, we see no possibility that undergraduate education will become dominated by individualized instruction. If only for financial reasons, it will not happen. The problem of scalability was an object of frequent discussion while we were writing this article. We think there is some possibility of increasing the scale of collaborative undergraduate research, especially in digital history projects. Both pedagogical digital history projects like ours and large digital research projects such as Virtual Jamestown or The Valley of the Shadow require an enormous amount of labor, much of which has come from graduate students. We see little reason why undergraduates could not be integrated into this kind of project, though we are uncertain of the outcome. Would the collaborative aspect be jettisoned in these larger projects? Would undergraduates simply become proletarians of the digital history world putting out piecework for grades? We simply do not have answers these questions.

Our final reservation stems from our realization that the adoption of widespread faculty-undergraduate collaboration will require a transformation in the way both faculty and students approach their jobs. At public research universities, the historical profession is still dominated by the monograph appearing in print. There has been little movement toward giving full recognition to other forms of publication, though the e-Guttenberg initiative has been one prominent example.²¹

The traditions of the historical field also tend to reduce collaboration. While the sciences move more and more to a model with multiple authors, with differing levels of credit, single-authored works continue to be the norm in history. Often this culture even mystifies the scholarly process as research assistants, graduate students, and even undergraduates are relegated to the footnotes instead of the header. As David Lancy has pointed out, in order for undergraduate research to work as a model, participants must be recognized for their valuable work.²² Perhaps the profession ought to think about the applicability of the science model with principal investigators and multiple authors.

It is also fair to ask, as liberal education is increasingly replaced by job training at research universities, whether, given the opportunity to engage in collaborative research, many undergraduate history majors would accept the challenge. We suspect most would decline, choosing instead to take an "easier" course. Even given proper incentives, such as publications, we think apathy would remain a significant barrier.

While we consider these reservations to be significant, we believe that faculty-student collaboration in digital history offers value to both faculty and students. Perhaps history departments could institute a cognate of the "laboratory" requirement in the sciences. Unlike traditional methodology courses that teach individual research skills, the "history lab" would focus on larger collaborative projects that produce a "publishable" product for the web or some other outlet.²³ Daniel Ringrose argues that this kind of "laboratory" course is particularly important if we are to demand or encourage students to undertake digital history.²⁴ Yet there are as yet few faculty members with the expertise to supervise significant work in digital formats. This, we suspect, will change, though the process may be long and arduous. For students, we see the advantage as twofold. First, by actively working with a faculty member on a project—rather than on an individual research project—students take part in the intellectual life of the discipline; they actively see how historians wrestle with issues of interpretation. Second, we believe that the possibility of being able to make a difference or mark, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, on the professional world would make a difference precisely because it offers them something more long-lasting than a report card; they earn something tangible that will remain theirs even after they graduate. While instituting a laboratory opportunity for students faces several stumbling blocks, we see this as a possible answer to the difficult problems of scalability and student commitment.

Notes

^1. The Digital History Reader has received generous funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences and the Department of History at Virginia Tech.

^2. Boyer Commission on Educating Undergraduates in the Research University, Reinventing Undergraduate Education: a blueprint for America's Research Universities (Stony Brook, New York: SUNY at Stony Brook for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1998), 37.

^3. Boyer Commission, 9.

^4. Carolyn Ash Merkel, "Undergraduate Research at Research Universities," New Directions for Teaching and Learning no. 93 (Spring 2003): 43.

^5. Merkel, 43–44.

^6. Merkel, 43–44.

^7. A report sponsored by the Milken Family Foundation argues that this kind of learning is a remnant of the factory age and that new models of constructivist cognition show that learning is more effective by direct contact with content. New instructional technologies foster this kind of learning by encouraging, "learning in authentic contexts, collaboration and external supports, and the use of multiple primary source materials and resources, as well as textbooks." Kathleen Fulton, "Learning in a digital age: insights into the issue," Technological Horizons in Education Journal 25 no. 7 (1998): 62.

^8. Merkel, 42.

^9. Joyce Kinkead, "Learning through Inquiry: An Overview of Undergraduate Research," New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 93 (Spring 2003): 9.

^10. For a discussion of the role of administrators in promoting undergraduate research see Merkel, 42–43.

^11. Ronald L. Dotterer, "Student-Faculty Collaborations, Undergraduate Research, and Collaboration as an Administrative Model," New Directions for Teaching and Learning no. 90 (Summer 2002): 81–82.

^12. E. Thomas Ewing leads the Digital History Reader. Other members include Mark Barrow, Haward Farrar, David Hicks, Kathleen Jones, Marian Mollin, Amy Nelson, Daniel Thorp, Jane Lehr, and Edward Watson as well as the author.

^13. M. Anne Britt and Cindy Aglinskas argue that students have particular difficulty contextualizing primary documents and that computer-based tutorials can be especially helpful in overcoming this problem, "Improving Students' Ability to Identify and Use Source Material," Cognition and Instruction 20 no. 4 (2002): 485–522.

^14. For a discussion of "information" and "digital" literacy see David Bawden, "Information and Digital Literacies: A Review of Concepts," Journal of Documentation 57, no. 2 (2001): 218–259, and Paul Glister, Digital Literacy (New York: Wiley, 1997); on the importance of teaching visual literacy, see Maria Avgerinou and John Ericson, "A review of the concept of Visual Literacy," British Journal of Educational Technology 28 (1997): 280–291, and Mary Burns and Danny Martinez, "Visual Literacy—Visual Imagery and the Art of Persuasion—Teaching the Hidden Meaning of Images," Learning and Leading with Technology: the ISTE journal of educational technology practice and policy 29, no. 6 (2002): 32–35; for a discussion of the growing importance of visual literacy in history see, Peter Burke, "Picturing History," History Today (April 2001): 22–23; on teaching media literacy, see Gretchen Schwarz, "Renewing Teaching through Media Literacy," Kappa Delta Pi Record 37 (Fall 2000): 8–29; for a specific discussion of the importance of teaching visual literacy for moving images (film and television) see John E. O'Connor, "Reading, Writing, and Critical Viewing: Coordinating Skill Development in History Learning," The History Teacher 34, no. 2 (2001): 183 192.

^15. Burke, 22.

^16. Lynn Hunt, "What I Learned Doing a Multimedia Project on the French Revolution," Perspectives online (Summer 2002) <http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2002/summer/theat.copy>.

^17. Samuel Wineburg, "Reading Abraham Lincoln: An Expert/Expert Study in the Interpretation of Historical Texts," Cognitive Science 22, no. 2 (1998): 319–346. See also his essay collection, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts. Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Philadelphia, 2001). A similar point is made by Dominick LaCapra, who argues the advantages of having students allow themselves time to linger and learn from the these "textualized remainders of the past." Dominick LaCapra, Rethinking intellectual history: Texts, contexts, language (Ithaca, 1983), 27.

^18. For the prediction that "the coverage model survey course as we know it today will disappear completely from our curricula," see T. Mills Kelly, "For Better or Worse? The Marriage of the Web and the Classroom," Journal of the Association of History and Computing 3, no. 2 (August 2000) <http://mccl.pacificu.edu/JAHC/JAHCIII2/ARTICLES/kelly.html>.

^19. For a cogent critique of university teaching in history departments, see David Pace, "The Amateur in the Operating Room: History and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning," The American Historical Review 109 (2004): 1171–1192.

^20. Dotterer, 81.

^21. Kate Wittenberg, "Publishing History—Digital Technology and Historical Scholarship: A Publishing Experiment," Perspectives: newsletter of the American Historical Association 40, no. 5 (2002): 41–43.

^22. David F. Lancy, "What One Faculty Member Does to Promote Undergraduate Research," New Directions in Teaching and Learning, 93 (Spring 2003): 87–92.

^23. For a discussion of a successful example of this kind of collaboration in anthropology see Lancy, 88–89.

^24. Daniel M. Ringrose, "Beyond Amusement: Reflections on Multimedia, Pedagogy and Digital Literacy in the History Seminar," The History Teacher 34, no. 2 (2001): 223–224.

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