Unlocking Digital Discovery

Founded by historian and President Emeritus Edward Ayers in 2016, the digital humanities project Bunk strives to make history accessible.

It’s best known as a history project, curating popular writing on wide-ranging topics and connecting them across time, space, and theme. Bunk also holds untapped potential for teaching far beyond the history classroom.

With more than 13,000 pieces of digital media available, it’s a powerful discoverability tool, ideal for faculty facilitating early stages of student research in any discipline. “Bunk is designed to be a vetted sandbox for quality writing,” said Tony Field, editor of Bunk.

If a student has an idea, they can search within Bunk and find a range of accessible writing and other digital media on that theme, all from trustworthy sources. Bunk staff uses a tagging system that enables users to search for highly abstract ideas in addition to specific events, places, or people. “Students will start to understand what the relevant and interesting questions are about the topics they’re interested in, which will help focus their research,” Field said.

Bunk also provides an opportunity to improve media literacy skills. Field noted that students are increasingly using generative AI as a search engine, but “history is the intellectual work of humans. Bunk makes the author visible and provides interpretations of history that build on one another. It reinforces the idea that there is no one answer to a research question; there are many answers.”

Bunk’s Collection Builder tool can help faculty quickly select readings for their courses, particularly around real-time events. “If something happens in the news and you want to discuss it in class, you may not have time to do all the academic work to situate it in a deeper historical context,” said Kathryn Ostrofsky, digital archive coordinator. “Bunk cuts out all the noise and provides short, accessible writing for you.”

An assignment tool also allows faculty to ask students to find and think about a group of articles. The beauty of Bunk is that every student will find a new and different pathway within a theme.

Field and Ostrofsky see the potential for Bunk to be used across the humanities, but also in courses for sciences, business, and law.

“Anything can be historicized,” Field said. “Bunk is a project that promotes historical thinking, and we want to encourage students to think historically about any topic.”