CDLA

The CUNY Distance Learning Archive is a collaborative project co-created with Matthew K. Gold, Travis Bartley, Zach Muhlbauer, and Stefano Morello.

Project Description

The CUNY Distance Learning Archive (CDLA) was a group project developed at The Graduate Center CUNY to resist and trouble the discourse of catastrophe around the shift to online learning caused by the COVID pandemic. During the Spring 2020 semester, we documented the experiences of students, faculty, and staff across CUNY’s twenty-five campuses and archived the moment of crisis response from a critical approach to educational technology. In 2021, from the thousands of items we collected, we created three public-facing digital exhibits (hosted on the CUNY Digital History Archive), focusing on three narrative threads that highlight some challenges common across CUNY starting in March 2020. Using different forms of data from a wide range of sources, the CDLA offers a multi-perspective narrative that includes both the institutional and the lived experiences of multiple actors occupying different positionalities and identities.

This resource is a 2021 Digital Humanities Awards nominee in the category of Best DH Response to COVID19.

A paper documenting the CDLA process was recently published in Digital Studies / Le champ numérique.