This session introduces an NEH-funded project, Literature in Context: An Open Anthology of Literature in English 1400-1925. Available through any web browser or mobile device, LiC offers teachers free, reliable, citable (and even printable!) digital texts for classroom use, potentially replacing many British or American literature print anthologies. Unlike many print-based OERs, LiC also makes use of the interactive affordances of a digital platform: searchability, images, multimedia, collaborative annotation, dynamic mapping, social networking, and multiple reading options. We'll work with session attendees to create custom anthologies developed from database resources and demonstrate how and why we work with students as visible collaborators on a project that's at once an OER and a large-scale digital humanities project. By editing texts for inclusion in an infinitely-expandable resource, student collaborators learn how this work intersects with the construction of knowledge as a practice.
Attendees of this session will be able to:- Identify the significant issues with OERs in humanities fields, particularly those that retain the legacy of their origins in print
- Identify the affordances of born-digital resources
- Understand central aspects of the fraught relationship between OER and DH
- Begin to collaborate with students on the build-out of Literature in Context
- Create personalized, theme-driven digital anthologies from Literature in Context for use in the teaching of British and American literature
