I’ve been spending the last couple of days at the undergraduate conference on the digital humanities at Swarthmore College, getting a feel for what might be possible at the undergraduate level. Yesterday’s keynote by Alexandra Juhaz, whose book Learning from YouTube created a splash a couple of years ago, emphasized that in our writing now we have to write in an environment in which we know people will be distracted, and it may not be a feasible goal to overcome their distraction. Her own work is trying to account for what that might mean for multimedia writing, for either scholars or undergraduates. What does it mean to write for the distracted and know that they will remain distracted. I don’t quite have my brain around that rhetorical situation yet.

I’ve especially been excited to see the real world possibilities for digital humanities project and imagining the kinds of things our undergraduates might do. My colleague John Fea over at The way of Improvement Leads Home directed my attention to a great new digital history site by one of our graduates from Messiah College, Devin Manzullo-Thomas on the history of Brethren in Christ and evangelicals. Devin’s now a graduate student in digital history at Temple. I’d love to see our undergraduates working with our faculty on a project like this