Digital Humanities: The Most Exciting Field You've Never Heard Of

The digital humanities is the almost exciting field you lot haven't heard of—unless you lot happen to work on a college or academy campus.

For anybody else, I'll gamble censure and offering the pithiest definition I can muster: digital humanities (DH) is an interdisciplinary field that scholars and educators bring computational tools and methods to humanistic enquiry. For a more thorough definition, I recommend curious readers visit Debates in the Digital Humanities.

If you've read this cavalcade, you've already gotten a taste of the digital humanities: many of the online athenaeum, open educational resources, digital reading platforms, online education initiatives, and information visualisations I've examined could be classified every bit such.

Opinions Adequately or unfairly, critics have charged digital humanities with omphalos-gazing. To an extent, that critique is both warranted and expected given the field's relative nascence. American studies, for case, underwent a similar introspection, and today that field boasts departments, scholarly associations, journals, conferences, and summertime institutes.

When I attended final weekend'due south annual Mod Language Association convention, I wasn't sure if digital humanities would have moved beyond the abstractions of field formation. Certainly, at that place were more panels than I could perchance nourish. Searching the program for "digital humanities" returned no fewer than 41 panels, almost five% of the conference proceedings.

To put that number in context, in a convention dedicated to linguistic communication and literature, the digital humanities inspired more panels than Geoffrey Chaucer, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, William Shakespeare, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Walt Whitman combined. Has DH really grown up? Or would practitioners continue to call for incubators— digital humanities centres—that limit participation of students and kinesthesia at small-scale liberal arts colleges and community colleges?

I am heartened to meet a lively mix of theoretical and applied panels. Perhaps well-nigh reassuringly, I institute panelists honestly engaging with how to downsize digital humanities and integrate digital educational activity practices and archival research without vast institutional resources or support.

Downsizing Digital Humanities

Several panelists at the Minimal Digital Humanities panel spoke to the need for a downsized digital humanities. In a longer slice, I would gloss each of the splendid papers (thankfully, all are bachelor online), just in the involvement of brevity, I'll focus on one talk that addressed what has been a blind spot in the field: community colleges.

Anne McGrail, an English faculty member at Lane Community College, spoke directly to the challenges of practicing digital humanities at customs colleges.

"At open-access, nether-resourced institutions such every bit the customs higher where I teach, minimal digital humanities has been the only kind possible," McGrail explained. "Delayed and uneven evolution have characterised community college digital humanities, which is unfortunate given that digital projects offer empowering tools for students to represent their communities and to claiming inequalities."

Some of that unevenness is a product of the community higher'south open-access mission. Heavy teaching loads and limited mentoring hateful that the faculty who might otherwise experiment with digital humanities lack the time, energy, or incentive structure to go on pace. Moreover, community college students, who are more probable to exist working-class, non-white, or commencement-generation students, are less likely to accept risks on technological experimentation. As McGrail explained information technology, these students are already taking a chance to go to college. The idea of failing upward is a middle-class assumption, whereas, for the working-class, failure is a sign of non belonging.

McGrail advocated for outreach in a grade that back up community colleges' teaching missions: curricular blueprint. While DH has been historically slow to embrace community colleges, she heralded this 'minimal moment' as a sign of the field's maturation, and an opportunity for practitioners to engage at a practical, local level.

Digital Pedagogy

Several panels answered McGrail's call for pedagogy-centric DH courses, especially Curating Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities, a roundtable in which participants discussed concrete examples of digitally inflected teaching.

Rebecca Frost Davis, Director of Instructional and Emerging Engineering science at St Edward'south Academy, argued that moving humanities teaching practices from solitary classrooms into participatory networks increases student engagement and extends the reach of humanistic inquiry. She described the Full general Teaching Maps and Markers initiative, for which she served on a digital working grouping, that found students gain a sense of commonality when they learn and act through networks.

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Matthew Gold, Associate Professor of English and DH at the CUNY Graduate Eye, suggested that open publishing systems can as well enable humanities teachers to join new publication workflows. Digital Educational activity in the Humanities, which curates pedagogical keywords and related instruction materials such equally syllabi, prompts, and, exercises, models this ethos through an open peer-review process.

"Teaching in public leads united states to new forms of publication," Golden said. That is, when educators share their education, it serves the interest of students—who benefit from the apportionment of educational best practices—and information technology besides changes the mode scholars think almost their teaching. "As scholars share their work publicly, they start to think their didactics as scholarship," he said. Practically, Golden encouraged faculty to share materials on platforms similar the MLA CORE repository, Open Syllabus Project, or even GitHub.

Gold also touched upon benefits and dangers of teaching on open platforms such as the CUNY Academic Commons. While online platforms tin help students envision writing for a wider public, he cautioned that openness tin can also brand students vulnerable, recommending that faculty think carefully about student privacy and data security.

Lauren Coats, Associate Professor of English and Manager of the Digital Scholarship Lab at Louisiana State Academy, also focused on students in her description of an archival-centric educational activity. In seeking to encourage students to evaluate the materiality of textual artifacts and to grapple with the relationship of course and content, Coats discussed how she asks students to use print and digital archives in tandem. She described an assignment in which students examine Frederick Douglass' newspaper and compared the historic original to an online surrogate from a database.

For a final project, Coates asks her students to curate, create, or rearrange an archive or build a digital exhibition in Omeka. Through hands-on work, students confront the intellectual consequences of curation—an object'due south archival fate determines if and how future users will run into it, know about information technology, or apply it.

Digital Archives

As Coats's presentation underscores, online repositories are primal to digital pedagogy. It's piece of cake to assume they've been willed into existence, when, in fact, they demand deep and sustained institutional investment, as I've discussed in a contempo column near the DPLA-LOC partnership.

Moreover, one time those repositories are bachelor, they require continuous care-taking. In a panel about scholarly editions, Ray Siemens described open-access resource as "free as in puppies, not as in beer." That is, digital projects are a delivery, and their caretakers can expect more than a few accidents forth the style. Nevertheless, when these digital projects are available, they're invaluable to students and educators. The 19th century, in particular, enjoys a veritable embarrassment of archival riches, every bit illuminated in the Digital Educational activity and Nineteenth-Century American Literature panel.

Finally, associate professor of English at Lehigh University Edward Whitley discussed how the idea of the archive can be used to link historical periods and media forms. While Harriet Beecher Stowe is typically read as a sentimental novelist, Whitley asks students to approach her as a curator, to re-excogitate Uncle Tom's Cabin as a "curated archive of responses to slavery." After students evaluate the methods through which Stowe collected and synthesized abolitionist texts, Whitley asked them to evaluate how activists utilize similar methods using digital media.

"In the context of Stowe's novel, students consider how social activists involved in social media campaigns like #blacklivesmatter and #yesallwomen too sort, catalogue, organise, select, and reject the documentary record of social injustice actualization online in real-time," Whitely said. Students aren't studying an historical period (abolitionism) or media form (Twitter), so much every bit they are deconstructing the process through which texts are created, structured, shared, stored, and mobilized to enact social modify. Whitely has effectively created a crash course in media literacy inside a literature seminar. I doubt I could pull it off. Nevertheless, in an era of siloed social-media channels and profligate and unverifiable news stories, media literacy is essential for responsible borough participation, and it'due south heartening to see Whitely and other scholars and educators at MLA rising to that challenge.