This morning I gave a short talk to the Virginia Foundation for Independent Colleges about our digital humanities initiatives at Washington and Lee (W&L). A couple of my colleagues also presented at this session. My focus was on a concept we’re calling DH Studio.
Formally, we have described DH Studio:
The library and information technology services are developing a series of one-credit lab courses for the humanities and the humanistic social sciences. These weekly courses will give students the opportunity to discuss the context of a topic, examine the important research questions guiding the DH methodology, review exemplary scholarly projects, and gain significant hands-on experience exploring relevant tools. Each DH Studio course will be a co-requisite to one or more full-credit courses in the humanities or social sciences. The studio courses also will utilize student mentors to assist with the classes.
We just completed our first pilot of DH Studio: Scholarly Text Encoding. That course turned out very well, particulary thanks to my colleague Mackenzie Brooks who did a great job teaching the class.
The problem we’re trying to address with DH Studio: how to further integrate DH practices into the curriculum.
W&L has succeeded in introducing students to simple DH tools through the use of timelines, basic mapping applications, blogging with WordPress, and creating short video-based digital stories in iMovie. That’s a great set of basic DH skills and is facilitated by having an academic technology specialist visit the class to provide instruction in those tools.
The students learn the tools rather quickly. But I don’t get a sense that the students really understand why they’re using a particular tool. Why that specific tool and why that tool for addressing a specific problem? Introducing tools to students is a great start but there is a lack of critical thinking among students about the use of digital methods in their assignments. We realized that the bigger question was how do you get students exposed to more digital practices and do so in a way that requires them to reflect on what they’re doing?
Our DH Working Group and DH Action Team started discussing learning outcomes and adopted the learning outcomes from the Short Guide to the Digital_Humanities (pdf):
- Ability to integrate digitally driven research goals, methods, and media with discipline-specific inquiry.
- Ability to understand, analyze, and use data.
- Develop critical savvy for assessing sources and data.
- Ability to use design critically.
- Ability to assess information and information technologies critically.
- Ability to work collaboratively.
As one colleague remarked, “those are lofty goals.” Digital Humanities bring variations to the set of critical thinking skills that undergraduates should learn. But how do you get those outcomes from students when even the majority of the faculty have not yet reached that point?
As I see it there are at least three ways to approach DH pedagogy in the undergraduate curriculum:
- one-time class visits
- full or partial integration
One-time class visits work for small assignments that use introductory level tools. This approach also brings the same pitfalls of one-shot library instruction that attempts to teach information literacy. In many cases this may be the only possible method due to curricular constraints. But if the academic technologist or librarian can only come to class once during a term, then the expectations for students to really grasp an understanding of DH is limited. That is, unless the faculty teaching the course is well-versed in DH. Maybe in another decade there will be more faculty that have assimilated DH into their research and teaching. At the current stage of DH adoption among faculty, I’m not very optimistic about students getting much of an understanding of the digital from one-time class visits other than at an introductory level. And there is an important place for that.
Full integration is when the class is actually taught by a professor skilled in DH methodologies. The ideal scenario is 