Project-Based Teaching in Special Collections: Building Digital Cruikshank

In Fall 2022, students in my combined undergraduate and graduate English seminar at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County participated in a semester-long collaboration with our Special Collections Library. Head of Special Collections, Beth Saunders, and Special Collections librarian, Susan Graham, and I secured seed funding from our university to design and run an upper-level course centered on digitizing a library collection and then curating and building a digital resource.

Revamping Hobson-Jobson

The Dictionary Project Assignment is from my upper-division class “Novel in India.” One of the university’s few offerings on South Asia, the class attracts English, History, and Anthropology, and Political Science majors, and occasionally Indian-heritage students.

A framing question of the class is: “can a language – English—and a genre –the novel – that were imported to India by British colonialists be ‘indigenized’?