the classroom allows students to engage with course material and share their research in innovative ways. Additionally, by introducing basic coding into the undergraduate classroom, students discover, learn, and master new digital skills necessary to share this unique collection with a wider audience—skills that students will be expected to know in an increasingly digital age. Over the past three years, the Seward Family Digital Archive has successfully incorporated digital tools into the classroom as a means of deepening historical study while providing a platform for introducing students to new technological concepts and tools.
NOTES
1. Seward Family Digital Archive Project, University of Rochester, Seward Family Digital Archive, https://sewardproject.org/. On the impact of digital projects as a collaborative work, see Matthew K. Gold and Jim Groom, “Looking for Whitman: A Grand, Aggregated Experiment,” Debates in the Digital Humanities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 406–408.
2. William Pannapacker, “Stop Calling It ‘Digital Humanities’: And 9 Other Strategies to Help Liberal Arts Colleges Join the Movement,” Chronicle of Higher Education, February 18, 2013, accessed May 12, 2018, https://www.chronicle.com/article/Stop-Calling-It-Digital/137325.
3. Kara Kennedy, “A Long Belated Welcome: Accepting Digital Humanities Methods into Non-DH Classrooms,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 11, no. 3 (2017), accessed May 12, 2018, http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/11/3/000315/000315.html.
4. Stefan Jänicke, Greta Franzini, Muhammad Faisal Cheema, and Gerik Scheuermann, “On Close and Distant Reading in Digital Humanities: A Survey and Future Challenges,” in Eurographics Conference on Visualization, 2015, accessed May 12, 2018, https://diglib.eg.org/handle/10.2312/eurovisstar.20151113.083-103; Kate Singer, “Digital Close Reading: TEI for Teaching Poetic Vocabularies,” Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy 3 (2013), accessed May 12, 2018, https://jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/table-of-contents-issue-three/.
5. Neil Selwyn, “The Digital Native—Myth and Reality,” Aslib Proceedings 61, no. 4 (2009): 364–379.
6. Text Encoding Initiative, accessed February 11, 2020, https://tei-c.org/.
Teaching with Digital Humanities
Northwest Missouri State University
THE BROAD SCOPE OF THE digital humanities requires significant attention to what we are attempting to do in our classes and what we expect our students to take away from the course. Many others have written on the value of engaging students early and often with digital humanities (DH) for the most impact on the students and professors. Teaching students through a program that has digital humanities interwoven throughout each course has been successful in developing interesting research ideas, revealing student interests, and even engaging high school students with entry-level DH work. Undergraduate work in DH can develop interactive timelines, multilayered textual analysis of documents, social network mapping, and cross-referenced maps and timelines. Developing ways DH tools work together across various courses allows educators to increase their teaching effectiveness.
Over the past several years, I have developed student and faculty interest in the digital humanities by using a four-step approach: (1) exposing them to DH through simple projects; (2) using DH in a collaborative setting; (3) refining the desired skills while streamlining student interests; and (4) having students create their own DH projects. This broad structure, spanning several courses and multiple interactions, has yielded significant understanding of digital humanities, interest in DH projects, and new student-based digital projects. As undergraduates have the ability to understand, analyze, and develop digital humanities projects, our task is to develop the programs and courses that can best inculcate the students’ growth as humanists. Removing the barriers that stand between the humanities and the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields is also possible through teaching with DH. By bridging digital humanities teaching across several courses, faculty can teach using DH in multiple formats and drive overall student interest in the humanities.
Digital humanities can be broadly understood as research, writing, and publication utilizing computers in ways that cannot be done in traditional paper formats. DH work generally consists of data, display, analysis, and teaching that interact in various capacities to develop new understandings of the human condition. The vast array of DH projects is inspiring and demonstrates the multitude of ways computers can be used in the study of the humanities. Digital humanities projects, for example, may include sources or data that use “big data” to ask and answer difficult questions. The “Six Degrees of Sir Francis Bacon” project is a great example of the effective use of complex data by creating a social network of early modern England. This project is a digital reconstruction of the expected social map of early modern England using information contributed from multiple sources.1 Digital humanities also may include novel methods of interaction and display such as the digital project “Mapping Occupation” that reveals in maps and timelines a new understanding of the American South during the era of Reconstruction.2 In other ways, digital humanists created digital tools such as Voyant and Token X to give new means of analysis to existing texts, allowing the users to “see” texts in a new way.3 DH also can include digital teaching tools that demonstrate ways to use existing websites for a primary or secondary classroom purpose. The large digital repository “Railroads and the Making of Modern America,” for example, includes a “Teaching Materials” link that includes lesson plans and ways to incorporate the site into classrooms.4
Teaching with DH is effective when instructors are intentional with the material and method of teaching. The first interactions with DH should be for exposure. A simple, single-class assignment, using a class-wide collaborative framework, can both generate new findings and expose students to the possibilities of DH. The challenge is to engage students and draw them into a deeper interest in the liberal arts and in digital humanities. Engaging new students with low-level interactions can generate new projects and develop new humanists.
One of the challenges of teaching with DH is to maintain course structure while integrating digital components into the course. Data are key to each DH project. As students come to understand the foundations of data, they can then develop interactions with such information. Data entry, while somewhat tedious, can engage students and produce amazing results while not veering too far from the traditional course design. This data entry allows students to think about the process of building DH projects and to understand that they are not intimidating. Creating spreadsheets helps students understand the value of data sets and how to use them, even discovering new relationships within data. Several platforms allow for online collaboration for spreadsheets. As of this writing, Google Sheets, a spreadsheet program, allows multiple users to collaborate at once using their Google account.5 Using Google Sheets as a foundation, TimelineJS builds
