Formation Continue du Supérieur

By Prof. Hacker. [This is a guest post by Dan Royles, a lecturer at the University of Angers in western France, where he teaches American Studies and English as a foreign language. He's previously written on "Digital Workflows for the Archives" for ProfHacker. You can find him online at danroyles.com, or follow him on Twitter at @danroyles.--@JBJ]
When I was writing my dissertation on African American AIDS activism, I ran into the problem that plagues many historians of the recent past: lack of archival sources. I had identified a handful of interesting stories to anchor my five chapters, but several of them involved organizations from the 1990s and 2000s that had left little in way of a paper trail. I solved some of my problem with an oral history project, which filled in some major gaps while creating a set of resources that will be useful for the future. However, I didn’t want to rely on oral histories alone. Memory is faulty, and although the narrative choices that people make in telling their stories are often instructive, without a set of corroborating sources it can be hard to piece together even a rough chronology of what “actually” happened. More...

By Adeline Koh. Despite being open to anyone to edit, Wikipedia has been criticized for its gender gap. To help remedy this, Postcolonial Digital Humanities is organizing a Global Women Write-In (#GWWI) on Wikipedia all-day tomorrow on March 18! More...

By Natalie Houston. When you’re deciding what needs to be done next on a project, or in response to an email, or about that flashing light on your car’s dashboard, how do you decide if it’s something to do right away or something to put on your list for later? Do you have a bunch of emails sitting your inbox that you keep meaning to respond to but you haven’t managed to get around to them yet? The two-minute rule might help. More...

By Amy Cavender. This semester, I’m teaching a survey course in Western political thought that I’ve taught for several years. I decided to try something new in the course this time around, though. Rather than focusing exclusively on the classic texts themselves, I’m also having students engage one contemporary piece of scholarship related to each of the major texts we read. More...

By George Williams. Over at the New York Times “Bits” blog, Nick Bilton reminds us that we should review “who has access to [our] social accounts” from time to time. Services like Twitter, Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn often invite us to link certain services to our accounts, for reasons that vary from making it easier to update multiple accounts at once to being able to authenticate our identity for a third-party service. It’s all too easy to forget just how many of those third-party services have been granted access to our accounts. More...