for the DH aspects to be integrated into the content and assignments of a subject-based course and not a course about DH itself. (I’m not fully convinced about the value of courses like Introduction to DH, even though teaching one this spring term.) At W&L I’m thinking of courses like Classics in the Digital Age or a German literature course that makes heavy use of DH.
Partial integration are hybrids in which half of the class time is turned over to work with technology. A sociology professor recently completed such a course with the data specialist within the library: Neighborhoods, Culture, and Poverty. The professor received a DH incentive grant to develop the course and worked very closely with the data specialist to integrate census records and other data sources into an ArcGIS project. The class met on Tuesday and Thursday for ninety minutes each day. Considering the complexity of working with data and GIS tools, they decided that Thursday would be a hands-on day with the technology. The students and professor met in a computer lab in the library and the data specialist guided the sessions. This approach worked really well for that course.
Is it desirable to devote half of a course to working with technology? It really depends upon the course and the desired learning outcomes. For a quantitative-based course, then it makes sense. What about a course on the history of medieval Spain? Or a literature course on the Victorian novel? Certainly, there are a lot of ways to do DH in those disciplines since that is, after all, digital humanities. But there are legitimate concerns about diluting the contents of an undergraduate humanities course through excessive attention to technology, especially if the digital focus is more on the mechanics of what buttons to push within software.
The lab option potentially offers a scalable solution that also fosters critical thinking about technology. At W&L we opted for the more humanistic sounding studio as a way of referring to humanities courses with a DH lab. There are three scenarios:
- a lab as a 4th credit, just as in science labs
- a lab as a separate 1-credit co-requisite
- a lab as a standalone 1-credit course
It’s important to note that these should not be considered outsourced solutions. The subject faculty needs to be closely involved with the development and teaching of the labs even though the labs may be taught by librarians or academic technologists.
We’ve not tried the option of a 4th yet. Doing so will require identifying a suitable course and faculty willing to pursue that approach.
As previously mentioned, we had success with the second option in our Winter Term that just ended. The Scholarly Text Encoding studio was a co-requisite to a 300-level French course La Légende Arthurienne taught by Professor Stephen McCormick. The description of the French course:
Prerequisite: three courses at the 200 level. Corequisite: Digital Humanities (DH) 190. This course introduces students to the Arthurian narrative tradition of the medieval francophone world. We examine the origin and development of Arthur and the knights of the round table, the manuscript tradition in which these legends are transmitted, the concept of le merveilleux, and the role beasts and monsters play in the textual fabric of Arthurian material. The course project, which is completed in conjunction with the digital humanities corequisite studio, aims to create a website on the works of Marie de France, a medieval woman writer. Students learn how to encode text according to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). The main objectives of this course are to improve students’ reading fluency in French, and to give students an introduction to the field and applications of digital humanities.
Compare with the description of our corresponding DH studio course. A unique aspect of our DH Studio approach is that we’re also opening the studios to enrollment by students not in the aligned course. In addition to the six students from the French course, we had three students who were not enrolled in that course. The non-Fren