Building Digital Rubrics for Infinite Literacies

The Age of Text Search is offering new challenges and opportunities for undergraduate teaching. Undergraduate student populations are some of the most diverse, excited, and anxious they have ever been. Faculty in classrooms range from tenured and tenure-track professors to contingent faculty and graduate students teaching from all levels of experience. Speaking as a historian of slavery, a period of history which has been at the forefront of digitization and the digital humanities, even as students often find the topics posed and discussed uncomfortable, inscrutable, or unrelatable, Johnson suggests the Age of Text Search challenges students and faculty to move from teaching students encyclopedic recovery and toward historical and digital literacy. This literacy would, of necessity, include reading the silences, evaluating authenticity, and unpacking the power and politics of something as innocuous as the Google Search box. In a university context where undergraduates engage in a range of social justice activism, encounter and debate issues of diversity, and differ in their levels of digital literacy and exposure to digital resources and tools, Johnson describes her experience teaching alongside Dr. Mark Anthony Neal (Duke University) the course Black Code Studies, and suggests the Age of Text Search offers an opportunity for faculty to build insurgent and collaborative classrooms where students become critics, creators, and conspirators in the historical projects of their imaginings.