Humanities Core is a program that hosts a first-year sequences of courses at UC Irvine which examine how people across time and culture have interpreted their experiences and understood what it is to be human. Through the study of literature, film, history, philosophy, popular culture, and visual art, students delve into how meaning is made and learn various forms of analysis to gain a greater understanding of social interaction and human creativity. Lectures by nine prominent faculty present for students a variety of cultural artifacts and modes of understanding human experience. In small seminars, students engage closely with this complex material while developing visual, oral, electronic, and written communication skills that will serve them in every academic discipline and in public life.

Since 2014, a central component of the Core curriculum has been that students design a website which represents their encounter with the course and life on campus, their thoughts on public events, and their journey as writers and researchers in the humanities over the course of the year. These digital portfolios extend the conversations begun in the seminar, with students eventually focussing on research topics that unite the course theme with their own passions and professional pursuits. By carefully considering their purpose, potential audience, voice, source attribution, and the unique facets of the digital medium, students acquire the ability to build evidence-based claims that engage with larger debates in the public sphere, while also learning how to comment and interact with their peers in a thoughtful and constructive manner.

In this experimental group forum, course directors, lecturing faculty, seminar instructors, guests from the university community reflected on course themes as well as their own experiences as writers and researchers. While the project has sunsetted for the time being, our goal was to model engaged, internet-based scholarly writing for our students while also introducing them to the rapidly-growing field of humanities research at our university and on the web. By reflecting on our own development as researchers and writers, we hope that students will learn that research in the humanities is a process, and one in which even the so-called “experts” face new opportunities and challenges as technology advances. Current iterations of the website project encourage scholarly dialogue and debate along with responsible attribution that makes use of the multimodal and hypertextual affordances of this medium.

While the various points of view reflected in this space do not necessarily represent UC Irvine or the administration of the Humanities Core Program, they do represent the work of the humanities today: to interpret human artifacts and the cultures from which they originate, to question how humans have understood history and collective agency, and to interrogate structures of marginalization and oppression.

Questions? Feel free to contact Tamara Beauchamp, the Writing Director of Humanities Core and acting editor/moderator of this site, at tbeaucha(at)uci(dot)edu.