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

Abstract

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 , a project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.' 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