The following excerpts were transcribed from a talk that Berit Potter gave on her work with the Art + Feminism Wikipedia Edit-A-Thon at Cal Poly Humboldt as part of a Digitial Humanities Brown Bag Series organized by the Center for Teaching and Learning in Spring 2022. 

My students and I prepare differently now. We understand that our time, writing and resources can be used more effectively.

Priming

For the Art + Feminism Wikipedia Edit-A-Thon, I have students watch tutorials prior to showing up or beginning their assignment for the event, so they know how the system works. Watching the tutorials helps them focus on their work and ask specific questions about what to do. 

Robust assignment descriptions

When classes moved online, I invested more time in outlining and writing step-by-step assignments, so now many of the students' questions are already addressed in the assignments. Essentially, my assignment descriptions have become reference guides.

More digital resources

During the pandemic students had less access to physical resources like books for research. Now I include a greater number of digital resources for students to explore and reference. I plan to incorporate these resources into future iterations of my courses. 

So many Bettys

I remind students that digital resources, such as Wikipedia or Google Books, continually grow through editing and digitizing. New digital resources are constantly being added to Google Books and you can find really random and cool things there that are hard to find elsewhere.

My field is art history. When researching women in the arts, one of the major challenges that I introduce my students to is the fact that their names change. A woman often has a maiden name and one or multiple married names. It can be a huge challenge in terms of research because unlike a man, their names are not constant throughout their lives. During the period that I study, the 1930s through 50s, newspapers and other printed records often only referred to women through their husbands' full names, without their own first names, creating another level of erasure.

Also, during that time, weirdly, women had a lot of nicknames. A lot of them were called "Bunny" or other strange names that don't even seem to relate to their first name. Betty. So many Bettys. I encourage students to look for multiple names, including multiple spellings, when researching women.

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