History Lab: Creating a Digital and Collaborative Approach to Teaching and Research

This Small TLEF Project will support the creation of a new type of course at UBC, called the History Lab. The History Lab allows students to work on a digital history project with faculty members. It brings the experimental and collaborative spirit of a lab to humanities research. The Lab has two main objectives. First, it exposes students to the messy process of research. It removes the walls between teaching and scholarship. Second, it enables students to acquire digital research skills. I co-created a History Lab at my previous institution, Harvard University, with great success. This TLEF will enable me to bring those experiences to UBC and to create scalable approaches to digital humanities. By putting students in the driving seat, the course turns conventional ideas about instruction on their head. We have all heard of the flipped classroom. This is a flipped curriculum.