Digital Humanities Quarterly. 7.2 (2013).

This article is about a University of California course taught in the Spring semester of 2010 for undergraduates in the History department. The focus of the course was the historical phenomenon known as ‘The Silk Road’, and the students were asked to utilise spatial history principles and methods, and to use Google Earth to make atlases of the historic journeys. The authors use this article to argue that the best place of DH within the classroom (as of 2013) is within specifically designed assignments, which make use of students’ knowledge and interests, as well as tools that are easily accessible within usual teaching schedules. Continual evaluation of all aspects of the project allows the students to see the merits and flaws of the digital tools, as well as their own use of them within a scholarly environment. The majority of the article is given over to addressing he issues faced in interpretation in the spatial humanities; and how this can be analysed and in turn assessed within the work of UG students. The article then moves on to discuss how spatial literacy ad spatial thinking can be addresses in a classroom setting, before moving on to a narrative account of how the specific module in question was delivered, received ad assessed. The authors conclude that the students’ achievement of the learning objectives exceeded their expectations during the course, and that the course was extremely rewarding for all involved. This article would be exceptionally useful for those looking to teach a similar module, as the Appendices give detailed outlines of the Digital Map Rubrics used, along with other criteria used for the spatial reasoning and visualisation component, and finally the storytelling and integration sections. The second Appendix contains the responses given in the student feedback forms at the conclusion of the module, which illustrated how valuable the students found it.

Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles and Politics. Brett D. Hirsch, ed. Cambridge: UK, OpenBook Publishers, 2012.

Looking at UCLA’s 3 year Digital Culture Mapping Program sponsored by the W. M. Keck Foundation. The variety of topics that was seen in the final year projects that the students of this course submitted, showcases how DH skills can address a broad range of issues and interdisciplinary questions. The main tension that was faced during the delivery of this program was whether the Digital or the Humanities components of DH should be more dominant, or tackled first, when teaching through project based learning. This book chapters examines the conflicts that arose in the UCLA team’s delivery of its initial DH teaching (prior to 2011); mainly in regards to the variety of topic areas that mapping can be used to address, and the problems surrounding topic specific data collection methodology. The limits of a DH teacher’s knowledge (in either the digital, or the humanities section) when faced with a very specific project topic, must unavoidably be acknowledged, so that the best help can be sought to realise the full potential of the students’ resourcefulness when apply DH to their areas of interest. The chapter then proceeds to discuss the development of the UCLA program in detail, and looks at how the problems faced were tackled. This includes problems faced in the initial delivery of the program and the development of the three main pedagogical goals of (1) Teach the use and critical analysis of geospatial digital tools (2) Provide the tools for the students to contribute to, and develop their own, digital mapping projects (3) “teach professional vision”; a critical thinking approach to mapping. These goals were addressed as core components of the curriculum structure. The challenge was in integrating digital toolsets within detailed and appropriate humanities instruction. Practical demands were addressed, such as keeping up with the pace of change in DH mapping tool technology. A detailed explanation of the teaching and topic contents of the program follows, including the professors’ insight into how various teaching/learning tasks went. This is full of examples of task for students, though many are US or even LA specific. The program discussed in this chapter laid the foundation for the wider teaching (both separate and integrated) of the DH at UCLA: an UG minor was launched in 2011, along with a PG certificate.

Digital Humanities Quarterly. 5.3 (2011)

Does digital pedagogy have to be electronic? This paper discusses the idea that digital pedagogy is too frequently conceived in terms of instructional technologies. Technology, at least in its electrified forms, can be a limiting factor in imagining how humanities instruction can be "digital": something to get your hands on, to deal with in dynamic units, to manipulate creatively. What might an electronically-enabled pedagogy look like if we pulled the plug? This paper surveys several examples to suggest that an unplugged digital humanities pedagogy can be just as productively disorienting as doing humanities digitally, and can potentially help students prepare for and contextualize their learning experiences with instructional technologies or in online environments. The most accessible example is of the close and distant reading of the Austin novel ‘Pride and Prejudice’. Depended on how it is counted, the term ‘pride’ appears between 6 and 9 times more frequently than ‘prejudice’. This is interesting in terms of the vocabulary choice of the author: where pride describes a character trait, prejudice is more of a relational term: changeable, situational, and more dangerous to accuse someone of. Looking at where in the novel the frequency of ‘pride’ occurs, it can be seen at three key character introduction points. At a distance, the reader can see the ‘hot spots’; moving closer, the reader can analyse their contexts; and somewhere in the middle we start to learn about the novel’s reformation of pride through Elizabeth’s perspective. Though there are criticisms of using this method to teach about a novel, there are many values. Particularly for students whose interface with digital texts and resources is driven by search engines or guided by keywords and text strings. Unplugging the search engine can help students perceive the limitations as well as the possibilities of what makes these engines run: pattern matching. A method such as this sharpens students’ attention to forms of analysis that explore the analogue and digital domains along a continuum. It helps students to interrogate the various kinds of readings they can do therein. And it reveals all of those kinds of readings as actively constituting critical interpretations. Fyfe then moves on to discuss various different teaching methods for integrating DH into a class schedule; for instance he uses an example he takes from Ramsay, Stephen. "On Building." Stephen Ramsay. 11 January 2011. Web. 13 July 2011. After working on programming on Mondays and Wednesdays, his class devotes Fridays to a theoretical text on new media or the digital humanities. But no one gets to read it in advance. Instead, on "No-Reading Fridays", the class takes turns reading, paragraph by paragraph, the text projected on the classroom’s screen. After two such Fridays grappling with Heidegger’s "The Question Concerning Technology", the class had covered only eight paragraphs, but Ramsay declares that "I truly think that this is one of most enlightening class discussions I’ve ever been a part of (either as a student or a teacher)." The format allows the seminar to flourish, and "the professor is only a very small part of what’s going on." Fyfe asks if this is different from a seminar where everyone works from the same edition of a physical book. He concluded that it is not, yet for a graduate course in digital humanities, where much of the attention is on the digital realm and on theories of new media, it is a chance for everyone to be on the same page — literally — where the page is projected on the wall. Because no one (save the professor) has read it before, the seminar reimagines real-time information processing in a very old fashioned way. This is what Fyfe terms ‘teaching naked’ as it is meant to be understood: using technology effectively, subordinating it to the pedagogical goals of the class.