“Literature and Professional Life” will consist of a digital archive of personal narratives by alumni of Denison University’s English department. I along with a few student assistants will solicit personal narratives from the alumni that answer two tentative questions: (1) How did you build a professional career out of an English degree? And (2) What is the value of your experience as an English major to your professional and personal life? In most cases I hope to solicit videos from the alumni, but I also want to offer alumni the possibility of providing audio and written narratives to address privacy concerns some of them may have. The digital narratives will be archived on the Ohio 5’s ContentDM site, which will preserve the raw footage for research purposes as well as provide a means of tagging and navigating the archive. I will incorporate the archive into a 300-level English class during the Spring of 2016 in which students will use the raw footage in the archive to curate a series of WordPress pages that construct arguments about the relationship between literature and professional life using the footage in the archive. These WordPress pages will be publicly-facing on a denison.edu site created in cooperation of Denison University Communications.
