Since Raja Adal, Assistant Professor of History, is currently researching in Japan, we communicated electronically about his plans to use his Graduate Faculty Summer Stipend for Curricular Innovation for his course “Digital and Critical Approaches to Asian History.”
Dr. Adal hopes this course will be the first of a bi-annual History course on Asia: “the fact that it's about Asia is important, in that it provides graduates students working on Asia from throughout the university with a course in their regional specialty.” In addition to History students, Dr. Adal hopes his course will attract students in East Asian Languages and Literature, Art History, Anthropology, Communication, and more.
Additionally, this is “also one of a small number of graduate courses in the History department that engages with digital computing, in terms of searching for digital content, thinking about what it can and can't do, using tools to analyze it, and integrating it within our work on History.” So, his course will also interest students in the graduate certificate in Digital Studies and Methods “and others interesting in digital methods.”
Dr. Adal is “very excited to teach students about the multiplicity of forms that archives can come in and what each form reveals about the topic as well as what it hides. For example, the text of a letter tells us certain things about a particular topic, but an image tells us something else. A digital analysis of thousands of letters can tell us something else still. So texts, images, and large-scale digital analysis can help us to approach the same topic from different perspectives, and each of these perspectives is synergetic with the other ones, meaning that it provides something that the others don't provide.”
Finally, we talked about the Humanities Engage grant overall:
“Developing a new course takes lots of time and effort. But integrating digital archives and digital methods takes even more time, because it means familiarizing oneself with, first, countless providers of digital content whose number has exploded in recent years. Second, analyzing these archives is difficult in that it often requires learning new software tools. Teaching these tools efficiently, without taking too much time away from the more analytical and critical aspects of the course, requires being very well prepared. The Humanities Engage grant makes it possible to put considerable resources in terms of time and effort in preparing this for my graduate students, and this is exciting. It also means that graduate students are introduced to cutting-edge methods for finding and using sources, and to critical thinking about these methods, which is necessary if we are going to use them effectively.”
This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity
Michele Krugh, PhD
Project Coordinator, Humanities Engage
March 17, 2020
Learn about all the Graduate Faculty Summer Stipend for Curricular Innovation awards and about Dr. Adal's curricular development experience.