tal 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 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 thre