Digital Literacy and Undergraduate Humanities Research

Several years ago, as the Managing Editor of Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, I requested permission to publish images of King Lear and Cordelia for Susan Allen Ford’s essay, “‘The Eye of Anguish’: Images of Cordelia in the Long Eighteenth Century.” I was so inspired by the paintings and engravings that she was writing about that I shared the published article and images with my students and started thinking about how I could incorporate more artistic appropriations of Shakespeare’s work into my classroom pedagogy and students’ assignments. As a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Georgia, I had a couple of students, mainly art majors, who took me up on the suggestion that they should research artistic adaptations of Shakespeare’s work. However, in my second year as an Assistant Professor at Wingate University, I decided to require my students to work with digital image collections in order to provide students with the opportunity to examine archival collections of Shakespeare’s work without having to travel.

Like most small, private universities, Wingate University’s library does not have as many resources as a large research university, but this fact has its benefits. In overseeing students’ research projects, I have noticed that many of my students at Wingate are more accustomed to asking for help from their professors or librarians if they are having trouble finding sources. These students also learn that they must start research for their projects in advance because oftentimes they will need to use InterLibrary loan for books and articles in order to complete projects. Yet this learning process sometimes occurs through some stressful last-minute experiences when students realize that they should have listened to the librarian or professor when he or she recommended that they should start research early. Other students realize too late that, even if they get the books in advance, they may not be able to change their topics if they wait until the week or day before to open the books and write the paper. As their teacher, I want my students to learn to start researching earlier, without watching them experience the regret of not starting early enough. After all, my concern is that they spend their time sifting through and acquiring good sources, reading the criticism, and writing the paper, not scrambling to find sources at the last minute. I realized, however, after my first year that many of my students, regardless of their year or experience and despite orientations with knowledgeable library staff, needed more guidance when it came to discerning reputable sources and reference material from material that was more for a general audience. They also needed more experience in working with specialized databases and open-access material.

In his article on Shakespeare and pedagogy in the classroom, Bruce Avery writes that “a lot of professors don’t know Jack” (135). Jack, according to Avery, is the average media-consumed, millennial college student who needs a professor to use more active learning strategies to help him to understand, speak, and write about Shakespeare’s language and performance (135–36). While my essay focuses on independent research and writing instead of close reading and comprehension, a similar problem appears when students and faculty talk about research methods. In discussing research databases with their students, professors may jokingly acknowledge that they, like their students, Google and use Wikipedia for quick answers to general questions. But a professor feels confident in discerning the difference between reliable and unreliable information and sources. Students often nod in serious agreement with the professor when he or she solemnly changes tone to warn them about making sure that Google sources are reputable, but this warning often causes a different outcome than inspiring a queue of students to march dutifully over to the library stacks. Our students thrive on finding articles and books when Googling and searching user-friendly databases, but once the database is more complex or the answer to a question proves to be unavailable on Google, students can get frustrated and, instead, look for an easier question.

This problem is especially difficult at...