The process of preparing work for publication also forced us to look critically at our own work. We had to select three assignments to include as important examples in the various paths and comment on them. For us, this proved one of the most useful aspects of the course. Critically reviewing our own work and considering a possible audience allowed us to become aware of the literacies we had developed during the seminar that would allow us to communicate effectively with specific audiences. Various students from English 507 reflect on this realization: Alison Hedley speaks about the process of learning “to see the continuities between granulation and literary analysis”; Michael Stevens discusses how he was able to apply the skills he learned from the mapmaking assignment to create a Ulysses mobile app; and Daniel Powell reflects on the productive difficulties of working in “a genre [that] will become more prevalent and necessary as digital scholarly objects proliferate." In all these cases, the students gesture toward the competencies that make their classwork relevant for scholarly audiences.

Building and writing for the English 507 seminar and preparing our work for publication has allowed us to find ways of communicating the process of communication to an audience beyond our fellow classmates. With the emerging trends in digital humanities of peer-to-peer review, community-based academic projects, and blogging humanists, scholars are now facing greater contact with audiences beyond their disciplines. And we need to consider how our work might engage these audiences, what we hope to communicate, and whether we are willing to listen to the response.

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