of tools that the humanities can use to broaden research and understanding. The last step in the process of teaching with digital humanities is for students to create with DH. Student-generated projects should allow the student to develop a new idea but be based, initially, on prior research. This will be the culmination of the scaffolding effect on research. Students’ work can then focus on the DH components.
For the final step in teaching with DH, students’ previous research and technological understanding is foundational. Students need to learn more tools, but this might look more like the integration of various components. For example, one DH project might involve a timeline of the events surrounding John F. Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs invasion. A secondary DH project of the same Bay of Pigs invasion could create a KML file using Google Earth.12 At the end stage, the student might use a tool like MIT’s Exhibit to blend the timeline and the map into one coherent piece. Shifting the work to a combined project would take more technological understanding, but a student with the background of two relatively simple DH projects should be able to develop a more complex project using an increased level of technological knowledge.
Teaching with digital humanities broadens the usage and exposure of already important humanities research while developing skills that students may apply outside of the classroom. Students and instructors alike can create new understandings of information through digital humanities that the public may appreciate more than student papers. Many students appreciate humanities classes more when they are learning through DH. Reaching a point of student work that is primarily digital, while a new idea, is one that colleges and universities are embracing, even if it is challenging the traditions of the humanities.
NOTES
1. “Francis Bacon Network [2, 1562–1626, 61–100%],” Six Degrees of Francis Bacon, accessed May 17, 2018, http://www.sixdegreesoffrancisbacon.com/?ids=10000473&min_confidence=60&type=network.
2. “Mapping Occupation,” accessed May 17, 2019, http://www.mappingoccupation.org.
3. Stefan Sinclair and Geoffrey Rockwell, “Voyant Tools,” 2016, accessed May 17, 2019, http://voyant-tools.org.
4. William G. Thomas III, “Railroads and the Making of Modern America,” accessed May 21, 2018, http://railroads.unl.edu.
5. “Google Sheets,” accessed May 21, 2019, https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets.
6. “TimelineJS,” Northwestern University, accessed May 21, 2019, http://timeline.knightlab.com/#.
7. “Exhibit 3.0,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology, accessed May 21, 2019, http://www.simile-widgets.org/exhibit3/.
8. Jim Cullen, Essaying the Past: How to Read, Write, and Think about History, 3rd ed. (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), 30.
9. “GitHub,” accessed May 21, 2019, https://github.com.
10. William Turkel, ed., “The Programming Historian,” accessed May 21, 2019, https://programminghistorian.org.
11. “DiRT: Digital Research Tools,” accessed May 21, 2019, https://digitalresearchtools.pbworks.com/w/page/17801672/FrontPage.
12. “KML Tutorial,” Keyhole Markup Language, accessed May 21, 2019, https://developers.google.com/kml/documentation/kml_tut.
Teaching Text Encoding in the Madre María de San José (México 1656–1719) Digital Project
University of Alabama
University of Alabama
Southern Methodist University
THE ALABAMA DIGITAL HUMANITIES CENTER, part of the University Libraries and located in the Amelia Gayle Gorgas Library at the heart of the University of Alabama campus, has played a prominent role in fostering both research and teaching using digital humanities. In the fall of both 2015 and 2016, Dr. Emma Wilson, Mary Alexander, and Dr. Connie Janiga-Perkins partnered to team teach the graduate course Readings in Women’s Spiritual Autobiography: Language, Materiality, and Identity in Colonial Spanish American Texts using Digital Humanities.
The team-taught course was composed of four four-week segments that introduced students to the traditional literary research and paleography skills necessary to work with historic manuscripts and then to the thoroughly modern process of using text encoding with the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) to translate student transcription and research into a digital edition of part of one of the texts they studied. The first segment consisted of an extensive study of history, literary criticism, and bibliography of and primary sources by women authors of the Spanish American colonial period and focused on the spiritual autobiographies of two Spanish American nuns. The first, Jerónima Nava y Saavedra (b. 1669), was a black-veiled sister in the Order of Poor Clares in Bogotá (Colombia). She resided in the Convent of Santa Clara her entire professed life until her death in 1727. María de San José (b. 1656, d. 1719) was an Augustinian Recollect nun from New Spain (México), who professed at the Convent of Santa Monica in Puebla and later founded the Convent of Soledad in Oaxaca.
Women such as María and Jerónima were taught that they were inferior in every way to men. From this early training as well as from other cultural and societal messages throughout their lives, women internalized a deep sense of inferiority, a belief that they were more given to emotion than logic, more deceptive than men, more capable of morally questionable behavior, and, therefore, in need of a stern, guiding (male) hand. Early in life that guidance was provided by the father of the family, or another strong male figure such as a grandfather or uncle. In adulthood, the honorable options for these (upper-class) women were marriage, the convent, and in some rare cases spinsterhood under the protection of a brother or another male family member.
María de San José and Jerónima Nava y Saavedra chose the convent, where they confronted not only a strong system of female authority but the “heavy male hand” of their confessors and the church hierarchy. Their autobiographical accounts portray their lives, both spiritual and worldly, and show the maturing of their agency despite often-harsh treatment by their confessors. The survival of these women’s writing depended exclusively on the male authority exercised within the colonial
