Mina Loy
Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde is a peer-reviewed, digital, multimedia scholarly book created by students, staff, and faculty at Davidson College, Duquesne University, and the University of Georgia (UGA). The project is the culmination of a five-year collaboration, supported by a generous Digital Humanities Advancement Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as other institutional grants and funding sources.
In your breakout groups
- Scroll down the homepage or use the menus to explore Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde.
- How might this project serve as a model or source of insights for a project you might do or are doing at your institution?
- Use the comment section of this post to share your thoughts and questions.
– The Mina Loy site is beautiful and would be very easy to use and stimulating for undergraduate lit students. As a person looking to replicate a similar project, my questions would be the extent to which designers and other highly skilled individuals would have to be brought on.
– I appreciated the github repository of the WordPress theme and the information about how students participated and successes and problems with peer-review.
– The student projects and exhibits were very impressive and the visual style is something I could see myself replicating for a website on a similar cultural project with lots of visual and textual elements.
We would love it if you tried to use and adapt our DH Scholarship theme! We made it available precisely so that other students and scholars could build their own DH sites without needing designers or other highly skilled individuals. Working with WordPress has a learning curve, so DH scholars need to be willing to learn and experiment, and take advantage of the WordPress community to work through obstacles. But it’s a powerful, relatively easy platform, and we encourage you to give it a try. Let us know if you do!
This is a really interesting DH project, but my primary question is about the use of this project. What’s the impact in the classroom. Specifically, how are students involved and how does this engage them (beyond saying “critical thinking”)? Is this an ongoing project where students will continue to build the knowledge or is it now static? (We read the manifesto quickly.)
This isn’t question about clicks. It’s about articulating engagement.
Our other question was about the open peer review as an experiment — that it didn’t work. How might you envision making changes so that it works (and you’re not pulling in only your network of people to comment)?
The description of student contribution is a little buried in the infrastructure. I wonder if that might be surfaced more apparently?
Thanks for your comments. Pedagogical applications weren’t actually among our primary goals (see the About page in the header menu), though we were committed to including student work on an equal basis with our own. Students were engaged because they got to produce and publish original humanities research, design their own projects, collaborate, and learn digital and project management skills.
The project was designed a limited experiment with an end date, not an ongoing site that will continue to be expanded. We hope it will serve as a model for other projects, and to that end, we share our custom DH Scholarship theme, so that others may use and adapt it and not require extensive technological expertise to do so.
As for open peer review: I wouldn’t say that it didn’t work, because the peer review with our advisory board was very effective. To get a larger public involved in peer review, I would suggest launching a social media campaign and possibly hosting your content on a site like humanities commons, where there’s already a community of practice committed to open peer review. Katherine Fitzpatrick writes wisely about this process and models it with her own scholarship.
Thanks for the comment about foregrounding students’ contribution. We tried to highlight student work on an equal playing field. The New Frequencies projects and Bios are as accessible as our scholarly “book,” The Mina Loy Baedeker. We conducted extensive user testing on the site design, and the problem is that no two users are looking for the same thing! We do offer a site-wide table of contents and a site map in our About the Project page, to help users find what they’re looking for: https://mina-loy.com/about-us/project/ And we appreciate the UX feedback, so we might apply it to future projects. This site, however, is “published,” so the only changes we make will be maintenance related, for as long as we can sustain it.