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Digitally mediated inclusive comparison: A pedagogy
- Sayan Bhattacharyya
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Description: By means of the affordances of creating unexpected assemblages and constellations of texts, digital platforms are uniquely positioned to support and foster comparative thinking among students by making comparison explicit and legible. I argue that the digital can facilitate anachronistic and atopic comparisons differently than traditional means. I develop this argument in the context of an undergraduate Digital Humanities program in Singapore. Although the practice of "making" continues to be peripheral in the humanities (Klein, 2017), I argue that digital making contributes to an inclusive pedagogy of comparison by facilitating the move from comparatism to comparativity in Svend Erik Larsen’s sense of these terms (2015), and that it provides an actionable way to implement Eric Hayot’s suggestion that it is necessary to make explicit the operations of representations of space and time not only within but also across texts (Hayot, 2012). In the light of Singapore’s position as both an island of the Southeast Asian archipelago conceived of as Nushantara (Bowring, 2019) and a cosmopolitan, diverse international city with a large immigrant population, the experience of incorporating the digital within a pedagogy of comparative thinking that I share in this paper offers, I will argue, lessons for a pedagogy of inclusion that is of wider applicability beyond the city-state of Singapore. The digital platform that instantiates the use case I describe in the paper is the digital publication and curation platform Omeka.