For a long time, I had been frustrated that student research and writing is so often lost—effectively erased from the scholarly conversation. After all, thousands of undergraduate and graduate students take art and fashion history courses and write papers every year. Yet often the only audience for that research is the class or even just the professor. Students repeat topics year after year and few benefit from their efforts. All this intellectual labor is being performed, but not preserved. Yet, with digital papers and projects, this doesn’t have to be the case.
Open-access online publishing is an ideal way to preserve student research and share it with the world, while also teaching students valuable digital publishing skills and serving the field and the public. Indeed, by transforming a standard paper assignment into a digital one, you can harness student research for the greater good, reach a wider audience, and imbue it with a longer life beyond the professor, the class, and the semester for which it was created. I encourage students to pick unique topics that build on previous contributions and students benefit from both the content and the model that earlier scholarship provides. At the same time, I, along with my students, had been frustrated that few open-access, reliable sources for fashion history research existed online. This gave a natural focus for the students’ research in line with their interests and course content. And thus the Fashion History Timeline was born. Now, two years after launch, the site is receiving more than 4000 visitors a day and is used by students, scholars and the public from across the world.
To learn more about lessons learned from launching this open-access resource, see my article, "Rethinking Student Research as Public Scholarship" published in Art History Teaching Resources (Sept. 2018). For a quantitative analysis of the success of the student research, see my recent article in the peer-reviewed journal Art History Pedagogy & Practice, "Assessing Undergraduate Fashion History Research via Content Analysis" (Jan. 2020).
Prof. Justine De Young, PhD
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