The Love of God (L.O.G) Audio Quotation Database is an example of teaching the digital humanities due to its focus on creating an engaging learning process using digital audio and the humanities. Teaching the digital humanities is further discussed in the open-source textbook, Debates in the Digital Humanities edited by Matthew K. Gold, which was our main text for the Introduction to Digital Humanities course and workshop at Princeton Theological Seminary.

This digital humanities project features the practice of informal education for a high school youth group. Rev. Katie Mulligan supported my efforts to facilitate this project by providing the high school students she serves at L.O.G of New Jersey with time to participate in this project within the context of their regular youth group programming. These high school students researched and selected quotes about love and God that fostered ongoing personal reflection and group discussion for their youth group. This project also provided students with an experience where they could develop their speech communication skills as they made audio recordings of selected quotes with their own voices.

Each recording includes:

• A clearly stated quote
• The full name of the quote’s original author and the context in which it was discovered
• An explanation of the important lesson the quotation has for L.O.G about love and/or God.

“The importance of the quote is that it shows the love of God shines through all of our hearts.”

Youth group members used their own recording devices (laptop computers, smartphones, etc.) to create their audio quotations. They then saved the recordings in MP3 file format with the following title form:

Youth group member’s first name – Love of God Quote – Date

Recordings range from 30-60 seconds and are made in a quiet setting. Audio files were sent by email attachment to logaudioquotes@gmail.com for review. After review, the recordings were uploaded to the database in Tumblr, the microblogging platform and social networking website.

“This quote relates to L.O.G because God is there for us (L.O.G) in good and bad situations. We know this through Jesus, God’s son.”

In summary, this project has provided a new process for data collection and education for L.O.G of New Jersey as they continue to create more digital audio of quotes from the humanities to explore varied understandings of love and God.

– Jeffrey Cobbold