The Teaching & Learning Center invites AUP faculty to a talk by David Joseph Wrisley's on the genre of the digital project and its potential for scholarly and pedagogical reflection in the liberal arts institution. From a general discussion of some exemplary projects carried out in small colleges by teams of faculty, students, librarians and technologists, in what might be called the humanities “laboratory” (Lane), he will chart how digital methods can evolve from course-embedded experiments to larger research projects. Wrisley hopes to show that such projects, in both process and product, embody the values of a liberal arts education in the 21st century: a well-rounded education, social and ethical awareness and creative, multidisciplinary synthesis.
Wrisley will discuss in detail two course-embedded digital projects that I carried out with my students in Beirut: Linguistic Landscapes of Beirut and Mapping Beirut Print Culture. As we will see, projects, like the scholars and institutions that embark upon them, grow in stages of increasing digital scholarly complexity (ILiADS). Finally, he will point to some attempts to build “communities of practice” among liberal arts colleges, and the establishment of lab-like commons and other institutional structures that serve as the loci for such project-based local knowledge production.