Medieval Digital Research Lab: A Pilot Upper-Division Course

Cohort: 2018
Fellow: Daniel Birkholz

The idea for this pilot course grows directly out of departmental and university goals to increase opportunities for Experiential Learning and for new technology exposure in the Humanities; and to involve more undergraduate students in original faculty research. Scheduled to launch in Spring Semester 2021, my pilot “Medieval Digital Research Lab” also responds to an ongoing need to better integrate teaching/learning and research efforts of faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students in one unit on campus, with those in other academic units as well as specialist university staff (e.g. the University Libraries’ Digital Scholarship Team). Finally, my PTF initiative helps connect various local UT-Austin’s take-holders with a larger intellectual and professional community, through linkages with external institutions (for example, Hereford Cathedral Library, which holds many of the original Latin documents my project builds upon; and the Traveler’s Lab, a medieval geography focused “Digital Research Hub hosted at Wesleyan University). The vertically-integrated “Digital Research Lab” model that my project has developed provides different orders of professional payoff for undergraduate student researchers; for graduate student content specialists and project managers; and for faculty lead-investigators. Team-based, project-oriented, research + teaching hybrid models of this sort are widespread in the sciences and social sciences. But teaching and performing research in this hands-on, digital workshop manner presents challenges when being adapted to suit the curricular and scholarly research goals of an English Department, Medieval Studies Program or other humanities unit.