1. Panama Silver, Asian Gold: Collaborative Pedagogy for the Digital Age
Rhonda Cobham-SanderProfessor of Black Studies and English
Missy RoserHead of Research & Instruction, Frost Library
As many of you are aware, Amherst made headlines earlier this year when the faculty voted to refuse an invitation to join two of the better known massive open online course systems currently gaining in popularity across the academy. News about that decision may have overshadowed the many ways in which the Digital Humanities are alive and well at Amherst. The course “Panama Silver: Asian Gold” is one such enterprise. Cross-listed between English and Black Studies in Fall 2013, the course brought together librarians, IT professionals and Faculty members at three very different institutions to collaborate in novel ways in framing and delivering a content-specific research methods course that would have been impossible for any one of these three institutions to mount alone. It did so without sacrificing the intimacy of close colloquy that characterizes Amherst seminars.

2. An experiment in decentralized, collaborative, blended learning using technology and open-access resources
MOOC: Pedagogically centralized, branded by a single institution
instead: “Expertise is distributed throughout a network, among participants situated in diverse institutional contexts, within diverse material, geographic, and national settings, and who embody and perform diverse identities (as teachers, as students, as media-makers, as activists, as trainers, as members of various publics, for example).” [excerpted from FemTechNet]
[MR] One collaborator’s colleague called this an “anti-MOOC”: three faculty teaching the same small class simultaneously, with a total of 35 students; instead of producing revenue by commodifying and disseminating knowledge from one professor and institution, it seeks to produce knowledge collectively across campuses and among faculty, students, and librarians. It set out to make that knowledge, along with newly available primary historical documents, available for free to anyone with internet access—a principle that’s consonant with our new Amherst College Press based in the library. Faculty were directly involved with the choice and execution of technology, as well as with the design of the course and its website, and the focus was on incorporating digital tools that were already being used by team members and could be relatively easily adopted by faculty and students.

3. “Panama Silver, Asian Gold: Migration and the Birth of Modern Caribbean Literature”
pilot for intercollegiate digital humanities courses
supported by libraries of all three institutions
taught in fall 2013 as a hybrid course with collaboration among campuses
[MR] This course was planned by three scholars without much previous DH experience, to improve online sources and support materials for Caribbean literature and history. Its primary goal was to make available historical sources primarily about indentured and/or immigrant people marginalized in the archive and provide skills to illuminate their lives and appreciate the impossibility for fully doing so. Each campus also had librarians working with their course whose areas of focus are instruction, digital humanities, the Caribbean, archives, or emerging technology. I was able to be “embedded” in this class, attending all sessions and doing as much of the reading as my other work and teaching allowed. This approach works especially well in research-based courses, where the process is so intertwined.

4. Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC)
literature, newspapers, journals, photographs relevant to the development of literature, nationalism, and Independence in the West Indies
J.J. Thomas Froudacity
Claude McKay Songs of Jamaica
and Constab Ballads
The Poetry of Una Marson
The All Jamaica Library
The Independence anthology of Jamaican literature
and nearly all books written
by Herbert de Lisser
[MR] The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) is a cooperative digital library for resources from and about the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean. dLOC provides access to digitized versions of Caribbean cultural, historical and research materials currently held in archives, libraries, and private collections. While some dLOC content was "born digital," its holdings are primarily made up of items digitized on-site by partner institutions. UF hosts the technical infrastructure, with Laurie Taylor responsible for ingest and standards for the library.

5. Course Description
Concurrent migrations of Chinese and Indian indentured laborers to the Caribbean and Afro-Caribbean workers to and from the Panama Canal, at the turn of the twentieth century, profoundly influenced the style and scope of modern Caribbean literature. Both migrant groups worked under difficult conditions for exploitative wages, yet members of each managed to save enough to enter the educated middle class. Their cultural forms and political aspirations shaped Caribbean literary production as well as anti-colonial political movements. In this course, students will learn how to use digital, print, and audiovisual archival material related to these migrations to enrich their reading of Caribbean literature. Librarians at Frost as well as scholars, librarians, and students at two other universities will join us. We will hold some class discussions online and students at all three campuses will learn how to create finding aids for the archives we use. We will read works by Claude McKay, H.G. de Lisser, Marcus Garvey, George Lamming, V.S. Naipaul, Ismith Khan, Ramabai Espinet, Meiling Jin, and Patricia Powell.
[RCS] Each faculty introduced ideas, texts, shared lecture notes, efforts to get permissions, personal contacts. The course started out from Rhonda’s desire to teach students research methods for using new literary texts and magazines available in dLOC, was originally entitled “From the Colonial to the Digital Archive”, and had the goal of addressing the challenges posed by studying the colonial archive and by its digitization. We had bi-weekly conference calls October June 2013 with librarians when needed plus 2-day meeting at UF hosted by the libraries and by January or February we developed a specific content and premise for the course. One of the challenges of this phase of the work was learning how to create a syllabus meant to be used online rather than on paper . The initial drafts of our shared assignments sometimes ran on for two single-spaced pages. Working with an online course designer at Gainesville, we learned how to pare the assignments down in ways that would make them user friendly, not just for our students but, eventually, for anyone who chose to adopt a module from the course for use in other contexts.

6. Vision
“We hope that the course will become part of a broader initiative to make visible to other teachers and scholars new ways of incorporating archival material into research on Caribbean literature and culture.
Since the Panama and Asian migrations are rarely privileged in stories Caribbean nationalists tell about the region, we want to use the project to intervene more broadly in the way Caribbean literary scholarship imagines the Caribbean cultural diaspora and interrogates the ways in which both traditional and colonial archival sources shape the stories we can tell about the Caribbean region.
We hope our experiment will sow the seed for future collaborative courses involving students at institutions in the Caribbean, Panama, China, and/or India, capable of working with relevant documents from these regions in languages other than English.”
[RCS]Our project also aims to intervene in the way scholars think and write about the Caribbean. The largest immigration of indentured laborers from India, China and Java into the Caribbean took place between 1838 and 1917, while the movement of Afro-Caribbean workers in and out of Panama, to build the Panama Railroad and the Panama Canal was busiest between 1850 and Despite the snug chronological overlap between the Panama and Asian migrations, however, historians seldom considered them side by side, as different aspects of a single historical event – the massive global movement of labor between colonial territories that dominated the period between the end of slavery and the beginnings of the mass migrations to Europe and America in the aftermath of the second world war. The stories literary critics tell about the emergence of modern Caribbean literature also downplay these migrations. They prefer to take the Middle Passage of slavery rather than the voyage over the Kali Pani as their originary moment and they focus on the West Indian exodus to England after the Second World War, and to North America in the 1960s and 1970s, rather than the earlier migrations, as the big move that brought Afro-Caribbean writers, like George Lamming, Derek Walcott, Jamaica Kincaid and Edwidge Danticat into the international spotlight. Indo Caribbean writers figure only marginally in this story, to the extent that they demarcate good and evil stereotypes– the good being represented by creolized Indo Caribbean writers like Samuel Selvon, whose works can blend seamlessly into the Afro-Caribbean canon; the “evil” being represented by V.S. Naipaul, the supercilious outsider.
The ideas behind our course intervene in this narrative by focusing simultaneously on the literary implications of the Asian and Panama migrations. We maintain that the movement of people, wealth and ideas between colonized territories in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced a newly literate strata in the Caribbean, whose mobility did not depend exclusively on white patronage and whose access to modernist notions of subjectivity as well as new ways of accumulating capital exacerbated tensions within the Caribbean social order. Despite being subjected to dire working conditions and discriminatory practices, the migrants accumulated enough wealth to raise their communities’ levels of education significantly. Moreover, the ideas about nationalism, working class organization, and racial solidarity these migrants acquired or passed on, from Ghandi’s India, Chiang Kai Shek’s China and the Central America of Marcus Garvey and Simon Bolivar, disrupted entrenched attitudes towards subaltern powerlessness. Finally, the social dislocation of travel itself, to the New World for Asian-Caribbeans and to the Canal Zone for Afro-Caribbeans, allowed both groups to situate themselves as modern subjects in spaces beyond the social reach of caste systems or the plantation’s racial hierarchies.
Such massive social and political transformation was not without its contradictions. Migrants destabilized hierarchies at both ends of the social spectrum. Their new access to cash challenged the prestige of traditional elites. It also inflamed the envy and suspicions of those within the lower classes who did not share in their successes. Literary representations of both groups of migrants often reproduce the deep ambivalence within the society at large about their status. These contradictory social currents led many Caribbean intellectuals to minimize or overlook the extent to which their own aspirations had been furthered by the very social transformations their work often criticized.

7. Course Objectives: Literary and Historical
Gain knowledge of key concepts, themes, tropes, styles, and aesthetic concerns of Caribbean literary discourse by examining literature about these two migrations—written during the migrations and contemporary literature that examines them.
Integrate this historical research into literary analysis, using contemporary historical studies, and primary historical sources such as government reports, oral histories, historical photographs, newspapers, and memoirs.
Enhance dLOC’s collection in two key areas: West Indians in Panama and Asians in the Caribbean
Illuminate some of the limitations of the colonial archive records of subaltern and disenfranchised people and techniques used by Caribbean scholars, writers, and ordinary people to challenge and/or employ these colonial historical sources to illuminate the experience of indentured Asian immigrants and West Indians working in Panama
[RCS] Example - We started out with units that compared the ways in which each migration figures in poems and selected short stories. We compared the ways in which writers used references to the migrations to talk about loss, social injustice, nostalgia and ambition. Later we read a novel by Ramabai Espinet, an Indo-trinidadian writer. Her novel, The Swinging Bridge, chronicles the lives of three generations of an Indo Trinidadian family, from their arrival in Trinidad, through their struggle to educate their children and gain a foothold in the Trinidad middle class, to their eventual migration to Canada. The author visited Amherst and her talk to my class was simulcast to the two other campuses.
Many of the colonial archives we used contained partial or biased accounts of the lives of the workers - or they disregarded them as people altogether. We read about ways in which historians use a variety of sources to “read between the lines” as well as how writers and literary critics have taken this process a step further and constructed interior lives for historical figures about whom we know very little. We discussed the ways in which such accounts remained true to the historical record, even as they deliberately chose to go beyond it. (e.g. reading of and exercise with “Maharani’s Misery”)

8. Faculty & Librarian collaboration
Collaborative design of syllabus including assignments, incorporating archival-research techniques and introducing digital humanities aims and tools
Pooling resources for guest lectures & for digitizing materials (5 guest speakers online, streamed to three campuses, supported by Academic Technology at Amherst)
Working with librarians from each campus to choose appropriate technology and design technology-based assignments—and then to teach these to students
[RCS] Key writers and scholars in this field--Verene Shepherd, Victor Chang, Rhonda Frederick, Ramabai Espinet--gave online lectures and discussed their work with students; their presentations will become part of dLOC for future classes to use. The librarians have taken a particularly important role because conceptualizing the place of technology in the course is completely central to the course design and objectives and because the course has required the digitization of many historical texts. We have worked with Laurie Taylor (Digital Humanities Librarian), Margarita Vargas-Betancourt (Caribbean Basin Librarian), Paul Losch (Latin American Collections Librarian) and Judith Roberts (Instructional Design & Training) at the UF libraries and Missy Roser, Head of Research and Instruction at the Frost Library, Amherst College.

9. Collaborative experiment with online pedagogies
[MR] The whole course has been an experiment in what technologies are useful in which ways for collaborative use. Whenever we talk about technology, we don’t want to shoehorn something in because it’s shiny, but instead want to thoughtfully incorporate tech that helps accomplish our learning objectives and larger goals: it’s a tool, not the object. That said, it’s a moving target, and a best practice of DH is to build skills and capacity and people for research in a digital environment.
Vidyo and video-conferencing technology here at Amherst allowed scholars and artists located at their desks in the Caribbean to present their work and discuss it with students and faculty at three different campuses in the United States at the same time, in real time. With Multimedia Services’ help, presentations were recorded and could be viewed afterwards, and will get added to dLOC.
PBWorks is hosted wiki-software (free to educational users) that brought all three campuses together. We used it as a de facto course-management system, one place for all info about the course. It allowed students to share their work with each other and built the foundation for their final research project by presenting each other’s research of historical sources in their initial assignments.
Zotero provided a shared library of bibliographic information (an iTunes for citations) that helped build reserve lists, can be used by future classes, and can be annotated by anyone with access t the group library.

10. Research methods and digital humanities
To use hands-on assignments to teach research methods for newspapers, photographs, memoirs, historical accounts, government records, oral histories.
[MR] In the first half of the class, students completed a weekly assignment to actively engage in specific research methods and archival materials. For instance, comparing the representation of West Indians in Herbert de Lisser’s novel Susan Proudleigh and Eric Walrond’s Tropic Death with the portrayal of West Indians in the Panama Canal in newspapers, memoirs of U.S. women, U.S. Senate hearings, historical photographs, oral histories. This is an approach we’ve taken in other disciplinary-based research methods courses, but in this class, it had a specific geography and time period, as well as a focus on historical sources that were digitized or available as open-access scholarship. As students are becoming acculturated to how to find and use scholarly sources, there’s a learning curve to getting into the conversation. This hybrid environment—where print is still important and necessary, and digital can be immediately accessible but not always contextually understood—is even trickier for students to navigate.

11. Research methods and digital humanities
To introduce students to the technology used in digital archiving (producing metadata, exhibit labels, finding aids) and digital humanities (timelines, data visualizations like mapping programs, Zotero, WordPress)
[MR] In the second half of the course, students used these skills and data to develop a finding aid, using all that they’d read and discussed and found to enhance metadata for one archival item in dLOC. They put in additional information, variant spellings, important relationships that might not be visible to a layperson; Terms such as “native” or “coolie” might be explained and more accurate terms used when possible (such as Afro-Caribbean, indigenous, Indian immigrant, Indo-Caribbean). This was an important step not just so they join the cult of librarians but so they can understand how information is structured, allowing them to recognize gaps or think about how people try to find information. We also led students through a workshop where they critiqued other DH projects based on criteria grounded in scholarship and usability. This scaffolded the process of starting their own digital humanities project.

12. Respect for diversity, specificity, and the local + critical engagement with technology
Challenges posed by digital archiving; how can we avoid reproducing the colonial structure of existing historical archival materials?
Students note absence of online presence for the Caribbean authors they study and see their work as potentially intervening in the US-European orientation of Wikipedia and other digital sources on literature.
Students’ digital research projects (finding aids, curated exhibits, timelines) that annotate and explicate literary and primary historical sources can address bias and lacunae in existing archives. Successfully completed projects will be added to the Digital Library of the Caribbean ( to enrich information available about these sources and help future scholars and students make use of them.
[RCS] Expand

13. Collaborative creation of the historical archives
[RCS] We sought to expand the open-access digital archive in general concerning subjects who had been omitted, marginalized, and often presented in colonial and racial, gender, and sexualized stereotype…
You can see some examples of materials we used for this purpose on this page. Instead of being limited to documentary materials like the photo of Indian indentured laborers you can see here, we paired those documents with memoirs and fictional acounts by the laborers themselves or by their descendants. In another pairing we brought together Conniff’s history of “Black Labor on a White Canal” with a novel called “Susan Proudleigh” by a Jamaican writer, which is a rollicking romance about a young woman from Jamaica who follows her lover to Panama to escape the limitations of her life in Jamaica and returns a wealthy married woman. The family photo in the top left comes from a documentary made by Richard Fung, about his family’s ascent from village shopkeepers in rural Trinidad to prosperous business people and professionals today in Trinidad and Canada, while the “Voices from our America” project links students in our course to oral histories gathered from West Indians who still live in Panama today.

14. Enhancing dLOC’s holdings and information about Asians in the Caribbean and West Indians, particularly women, active in Panama
[MR] One goal of the course was to enhance dLOC’s holdings in two areas where the collection had few: Asians in the Caribbean and West Indians, particularly women, active in Panama. One example is the Panama Canal Museum Collection, which the UF libraries are in the process of cataloguing and integrating. This collection is comprised of the donations of white US families who were employed in the Panama Canal Zone.

15. Resources in dLOC added for/from the class
Villalobos, Joan Victoria Flores. “West Indian Women in the Panama Canal Zone, ” Thesis. Amherst College, 2010.
Isthmian Historical Society competition for the best true stories of life and work on the Isthmus of Panama during the construction of the Panama Canal
Mahase Snr., Anna. My Mother’s Daughter. Trinidad: Royard Pub. Co, 1992.
Syllabi, assignments, and powerpoint presentations
Being added to dLOC: videos of guest lectures and a finding aid for all the course materials; plans in the future for more developed lecture notes and commentary for teaching the course.
[MR] We will be able to include a number of sources previously nearly inaccessible, with the most important representing close to first-person accounts of immigrants, like digitized prizewinning essays produced by canal workers and the Mahase family memoir. In the case of Joan’s thesis, a paradigm-shifting piece of scholarship done by an undergraduate/now PhD candidate that models the research process. We’ll also be adding pedagogical materials and learning objects, including screencasts and videos that can be used in flipped-classroom settings. For this pilot, we used two videos recorded by Laurie, the UF librarian, of an overview of DH and introducing dLOC records and metadata that I then followed up with discussion and questions in-person.

16. Final projects as exploration of DH + interests
[RCS] One of the aspects of the course about which I was most apprehensive at the outset was the movement away from traditional research papers as final projects. I worried that students would be overwhelmed by the amount of material to which the digital platforms we were using had exposed them. Although I have a great deal of experience teaching interdisciplinary courses, I also worried about my ability to guide and evaluate digital projects that would not all have a literary component at their center. Here, again, our collaborative approach to the course was crucial. Kelcy Shepherd, our head of library digital programs, joined Missy and me to introduce students to a range of digital tools they could use to create their final projects and it was soon apparent that although students had a better intuitive grasp of many of the technologies than I did, there was a great deal they still had to learn from Kelcy , Missy and me about how to use archives and technology in ways that built coherent arguments and served broad intellectual and creative goals. As it turned out, students made wonderfully imaginative use of the technology to explore ideas and present their findings. They produced everything, from timelines that mapped the plots of specific novels onto actual historical events; they composed fictional back stories to augment the partial accounts they unearthed in the colonial records; they produced mini-documentaries about specific social or ecological challenges the migrants faced. Some students who had family links to the region used the tools they developed to attempt memoirs like the ones they had encountered in the sources we had added to dLOC.

17. Final projects as a way to enhance the archive
Yasmina Martin, Amherst College, “Encountering cultures: the role of the Chinese shop in Jamaica, ” provides historical background and context for a specific novel, Patricia Powell’s Pagoda, but also a general overview of scholarship and key concepts about Chinese immigration to Jamaica, including historical photos and newspaper articles about anti-Chinese riots, and anti-Chinese racism (Yellow Peril).
Abigail Nichols, University of Miami, “Women of the Panama Canal” brings together information from two previously hard-to-access texts with images from primary sources to illuminate the different roles West Indian women played in the Panama Canal projects and to dismantle the general assumption that they were few in number and all employed in domestic work.
Dhanashree Thorat, University of Florida, “Indian Indenture” places the memoir of one Indo-Trinidadian woman, who narrates the story of her parents who migrated from Trinidad as indentured workers, in the context of the large-scale migration through mapping and a timeline.
[RCS] The course was conceived as a project to produce annotation and other secondary materials for early literature and journalism in the Digital Library of the Caribbean to facilitate the use of the materials by scholars and instructors. As we said, as much of the course materials and successful student work as possible will go into dLOC. Students are producing digital-scholarship projects that contribute to the archive by using secondary studies and primary sources to contextualize and illuminate literary texts and historical phenomena. This alternative to a research paper has many benefits: it builds on knowledge and skills through the course, pulls students more fully into scholarly conversation, and introduces open access and responsible use of sources.

18. Further Collaboration
Conference Panel on the course at the International Conference on Caribbean Literature, to introduce the project and invite other faculty to join
Plan to teach the course collaboratively in Fall 2015
Plans underway to produce a DH project based on the course
[RCS]

19. Some lessons learned Technological learning curve
Cross-cultural communication
Pedagogical feedback and improvements
[MR] Research, teaching, and technology are all ideally experiences of continual iteration: testing ideas, gathering feedback, making adjustments, modifying or recasting questions. And there’s usually fail involved at some point with each. Some may call this “perpetual beta”, but it’s also continual learning. From a long list of possible technologies for collaboration and digital scholarship, we identified a few that seemed to fit our needs best. Some, like Omeka, an exhibit software, didn’t used the way we thought (but is in another class this semester); others, like TimeMapper and WordPress, were big winners with students. This will shape what we introduce, how, and when next time.
[RCS] [cross-cultural communication and changes to syllabus/group project]

20. Questions?