ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the methods, goals, and practicalities of integrating digital labor into pedagogy through a discussion of the development and implementation of Reading Cities, an augmented text platform, to highlight the pedagogical, institutional, and intellectual labors that cohere around it. Analysis of the types of faculty and student labor needed to implement this project within the humanities classroom allows Dinsman, Johnston, and Rodrigues to evaluate the collaborative labor they contributed while serving as postdoctoral fellows at different institutions. Central to this analysis is reconsidering “augmentation” as an annotative form of reading. Defining augmentation as a process of growth highlights the ability of the digital to expand the print textual field, while considering the labor of blended learning from an infrastructural framework shows how calls for blended learning are calls for labor expansion: for more technologies to learn and teach, more assignments to design and assess, more topics and skills to cover. This expansion quickly becomes unsustainable, as this chapter shows through a combination of pedagogical theories of labor, close reading, and ethnography. “Augmentation” is defined as a new form of labor emerging through iterative processes of course design and the stitching together of digital tools with critical humanistic values.
