Geneseo English profs win award for digital humanities project

The National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE) has awarded its October 2010 Community Contribution Award to two projects: The Early Novels Database at Swarthmore College and English 170: The Practice of Criticism at SUNY Geneseo.

English 170: The Practice of Criticism is a collaboration among four Geneseo professors — Schacht, Doggett, Woidat, and Paku — teaching Geneseo’s course of the same name.

Students in the four sections are engaging in online conversation about several “big questions” raised by literary criticism as an enterprise. They’re also working together to annotate a baker’s dozen of short poems.

For their part, the four faculty members have gone out on a limb by recording brief audio commentaries on Yeats’s poem “Easter, 1916” in order to give their students a feel for the questions that critics typically ask of poetry.

Schacht, Doggett, Woidat, and Paku plan to publish a case study of their project in Academic Commons in April, 2011 under the theme “Digital Humanities and the Undergraduate.”

English 170: The Practice of Criticism lives in the SUNY Geneseo wiki.