Researching and Teaching with the Digital Archive

Digital humanities can revolutionize how we teach Caribbean Studies by creating virtual transnational classrooms and a collaborative archive of teaching materials to disrupt divides between the global north and south. In the fall of 2013, three feminist tenured faculty and four librarians in US colleges collaborated to teach a course on overlapping Asian and Afro-Caribbean labor diasporas in the Americas. Through digital media the course drew on additional interdisciplinary and transnational faculty expertise from Jamaica, Panama, Trinidad, and Canada. This pilot course, entitled “Panama Silver, Asian Gold: Migration, Money, and the Making of Modern Caribbean Literature” shares many of the objectives of the DOCC– Distributed Online Collaborative Course—as defined by FemTechNet and stands in opposition to the neo-liberal globalizing project of MOOCs. With a total of 35 students across the three campuses, it sought not to produce revenue by commodifying and disseminating knowledge from one professor and institution, but rather to produce knowledge collectively across campuses and among faculty, students, and librarians and to make that knowledge along with newly available primary historical documents available in the digital library of the Caribbean (www.dloc.com) for free to any one with internet access. We think that this model can be replicated to include higher educational institutions in the Caribbean as well as other non-US diasporic sites.