broader intellectual benefits, such as gaining confidence in speaking with professors on an equal footing as a fellow researcher and arguing for your point of view when particular encoding decisions had to be made. Team teaching can be administratively difficult, but it is well worth advocating for in order to give students an immersive, wide-ranging learning experience. In this instance, students’ work will, down the road, be visible online as part of the completed digital edition of the spiritual manuscript, giving them a lasting testament to their research and enabling them to have their first taste of contributing to their field in a permanent way, and it was all made possible via collaboration.
NOTE
1. Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding.” Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies 1972–79. Birmingham, UK: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (1980: 128—38). Hall espouses three possible approaches or means a reader can use to position himself or herself when decoding a text: the dominant or hegemonic, the negotiated, and the oppositional. For Hall, decoding a work using the negotiated approach lets readers acknowledge the hegemonic definitions at work in the process while reserving the right to make a more negotiated examination of the text. Such an approach allows us to decode María’s Vida in a manner that takes into account the situational level, where we may find exceptions to the hegemonic reading and/or create new ground rules for approaching the text (137–38).
Using Digital Humanities to Flip the Humanities Classroom
University of Texas at Austin
Monash University
Duke University
THE PROCESS OF STAGING MOCK trials is a familiar element of most law school classrooms. Based on extensive research either on real or hypothetical cases, teams of students present arguments and evidence before a panel of judges. Such exercises are incorporated into legal curricula in universities across the world, and there are a range of domestic and international events that allow students to compete directly with each other in this format. This model is far less common in the humanities classroom, even though it presents valuable opportunities to facilitate student engagement with a range of sources and to promote interactive learning.
Beginning in 2017, we experimented with a new model for the flipped humanities classroom that we called Teaching with Trials. It was designed to create a mechanism for structured research, debate, and engagement by pairing a digital humanities platform with a three-week mock trial exercise. Students were challenged to work through large quantities of seventeenth-century primary source material online before taking on one of four roles—as members of a prosecution or defense legal team, witnesses, researchers, or judges—in a comprehensive restaging of a historical trial. Although the model is relatively new, it has so far produced outstanding results, generating a high degree of engagement while improving learning outcomes for students.
THE CASE
Our initial experiment with this format was constructed around a famous, and still controversial, seventeenth-century case, the Amboyna Conspiracy Trial.1 This commenced on February 23, 1623, when a Japanese mercenary called Shichizō, in the employ of the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or VOC), was arrested for asking questions about the defenses of one of the company’s forts on the island of Ambon (often referred to as Amboyna in this period) in modern-day Indonesia. When he failed to provide an adequate explanation, he was tortured using a technique we now know as waterboarding. The result was a confession that Shichizō had joined a plot orchestrated by a group of English merchants to seize control of the fortification and, ultimately, to rip the spice-rich island from the company’s grasp. Armed with this information, the VOC governor proceeded to arrest, interrogate, and torture the remaining ten Japanese mercenaries in the garrison, all of whom eventually admitted to their involvement in the plot. A few days later, the governor’s attention turned to the English. Under torture, they too confessed to a conspiracy aimed at seizing the fort and ejecting the Dutch from Ambon. On March 9, an improvised tribunal of VOC employees convened to render judgment on the conspirators. The result was an emphatic guilty verdict, and, shortly thereafter, ten English merchants and ten Japanese mercenaries were executed in the public square outside the fortress.
The Amboyna case became immediately and immensely controversial. When news of what had happened reached London at the end of May 1624, it sparked outrage from the directors of the English East India Company, the king, and, by all accounts, the general public. Passions were further inflamed by the publication of a slew of incendiary pamphlets produced by both sides that sought to either damn the Dutch as bloody tyrants or condemn the English as faithless traitors. The result was that, despite occurring thousands of miles away in an unfamiliar part of the world, the trial on Amboyna swiftly escalated to become one of the most famous legal cases of its age and the subject of a long-running dispute between the Dutch and English governments, which clashed bitterly over the twin issues of blame and compensation.
The controversies produced by Amboyna combined to generate a sprawling archive that runs to more than five thousand pages of original documents scattered across the British Library in London, the National Archives in Kew, and the Nationaal Archief in The Hague. Despite this vast trove of materials, there is as yet no consensus as to what actually happened on Amboyna. For close to four centuries, scholars have debated whether there was in fact a plot to seize control of the castle and, hence, if the English merchants and Japanese mercenaries on Amboyna were innocent or guilty of the charges against them. After years of wrestling with these questions, we decided to try a different approach to the Amboyna case by turning it into an interactive classroom exercise designed to generate student engagement.
AMBOYNA ONLINE
Inspired by the public reaction to the groundbreaking podcast Serial, which had succeeded in drawing unprecedented attention to a previously obscure murder case, we decided to put the case online. We created a new digital humanities platform, the Amboyna Conspiracy Trial (www.amboyna.org) with the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. (See fig. 5.1.)
At the center of the site, we placed an interactive trial engine called What’s Your Verdict that presented the most compelling evidence offered by the Dutch East India Company, which we dubbed the prosecution, and their English opponents, the defense. To make a complex trial accessible, we boiled the case down to six key questions that have to be answered one way or the other in order to come to a verdict. For each question, the site presents the arguments mobilized by the prosecution and defense in conjunction with their most important pieces of evidence. As part of the process, we asked a distinguished London-based barrister to work through the material. Generously agreeing to waive his fees, he reviewed an extensive series of Amboyna files and then sat through hour after hour of filmed interviews, in which he guided students through the key questions any prospective juror would have to wrestle with. Finally, we created
