Jessalynn Bird will present on writing underrepresented groups into medieval history. She will focus on a student research project (The City of Ladies) as well as an international project intended to provide student-friendly short but analytical biographies of women from the world of the crusades. These biographies will be short enough that teachers can assign them as readings for students to enlarge and enrich their conception of the roles played by women in the global medieval world of the high and late Middle Ages. The City of Ladies project requires students Boccaccio's and Christine de Pisan's criteria for which women were considered worthy of historical representation, and negotiate their own expectations for which individuals deserve to be represented in the historical record.

Laura Williamson will present on a digital and public humanities-based approach to teaching medieval literature as a means of responding to the increasingly pressing question of mattering. Students and faculty in humanities disciplines -- especially those that work in premodernity -- confront questions of utility and profitability from both within and outside of the academy. How can we embolden not only our students but also ourselves to advocate for both the intrinsic and extrinsic value of literary analysis and historical knowledge? What pedagogical approaches might help students not only identify the implicit and authentic value of premodern scholarship but also articulate and demonstrate its significance to both internal and external audiences? The Object Project offers one pathway toward empowering educators and students by proactively creating both a space for and an artifact of learning. In this digital curation project, students work in teams to elucidate the story of an object from medieval literature, researching and communicating its historical, material, and literary significance to non-specialists.

Sarah Noonan will discuss a series of activities within her 200-level Digital Humanities Project Lab that leverage a detailed engagement with the materiality of the past to responsibly study digital manuscript surrogates within their own research. Students begin by reproducing a folio from a manuscript using the technology available to medieval scribes. Through the act of making, they evaluate and revise what they think they “know” about medieval manuscripts. They then turn to how the study of manuscripts has shifted dramatically thanks to numerous digitization initiatives. Students explore a particular digitization project focused on manuscripts held in the Midwest (the Peripheral Manuscript Project). By confronting the difficulty of describing a complex object like a medieval manuscript through a regularized descriptive taxonomy, they gain facility in working with preexisting metadata.