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

Part of the NYU Public History Programme, these authors discuss how digital technology has fundamentally altered the archival, public history and editing landscapes through the use of new media and digitisation of analogue resources. Thus students need to be educated in the methods, skills and tactics to manage digital resources and integrate new media into existing industries that employ historians. The article continues to discuss, at length, the need to alter the way in which students need preparing for careers in archiving, public history, museum professions and historical editing. The emphasis is on the importance of incorporating digital skills into degrees, not only in theory, nor only at post-graduate level but with practical experience throughout their course. The chapter details the NYU archives and public history program’s experiences in reconfiguring a long-standing program and integrating digital skills throughout its curriculum. A detailed discussion follows on what type of course should be made core, and what type should be electives, before suggesting how internships could follow on from these classes, to utilise the skills in a ‘real world’ setting. There is a fascinating section entitled ‘Capstone Projects’ that discusses the assessment of digital projects and the challenges of integrating new technologies; rather than having a separate DH faculty, they work in a silos structure which they acknowledge has some weaknesses. The final part of the chapter is a discussion on student feedback about the curriculum changes, highlighting the generally positive response to the course, as well as concerns about a possible overemphasis on digital material and a shortage of possible historical content in the course – students were mainly worried that the digital aspect would overwhelm the other important aspects of learning how to work in archives and the like – mainly this was addressed with making sure the accreditation was balanced, through constant evaluation of the students’ needs.

CEA Critic. 76.2(2014), pp.169-90

An article centred on close digital analysis of the poetry taught in a chronological survey course of American literature, considering ‘digital humanities tools as a means to reconsider the anthologized texts of literary works’. Raabe uses the differences in the punctuation in various copies of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” to teach that through slight variants, the message of a text can be dramatically altered; and how are we to know which of these variants was actually what the author intended? Digital facsimiles, online transcriptions, and DH research tools that permit students to visualise textual variation allow students to review alternate versions of literary works as a classroom activity, even during undergraduate survey courses. Raabe discusses how he uses this pedagogy with examples including Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” and Emily Dickinson’s poetry manuscripts. The second half of this article discusses how the teaching of such a literature survey course has changed over the generations, and whether the teaching of anthologies is any longer relevant when students, trained as consumers, have instant access to a media-rich archive of all texts ever written. Raabe argues, in conclusion, that ‘One reason to introduce digital humanities skills to students of literature is to encourage them to think critically about such commercial trends and to seek opportunities for them to engage with literary texts in a wide array of material forms.’

CEA Critic, 76.2 (2014), pp.191-99

This article discusses the use of DH in the teaching of English Literature, and specifically the pedagogical value of the digital tool Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). The merits and pitfalls of teaching with TEI are explored at length; not just the practical hurdles but the theoretical ones also. Negatives include, for example, convincing students that the time consuming and labour intensive task is worth it, even though it can be frustrating to beginners. Also that it requires relatable take home computers and a classroom licence for software that may be difficult to obtain for teachers who are the first in their department or institution to use this teaching/learning method. She then goes on to discuss the pedagogical benefits of attentive reading in that it offers a rigorous, systematic and somewhat flexible way for students to inscribe a view of the text onto the text itself. The students would often come across the difficulties of encoding during the process of the task itself, and as long as they were made aware in advance that they could account for them, and overcome them, then they tackled these difficulties well. Gailey also found that by letting students (or groups of students) chose their own aspect of a text to investigate, that they then could bring an individual focus to the text that might not have been widely explored before. Being forced to write a rational explanation for the focus of their project and what kind of critical lens inform it, adds to any assessment that could be made on the encoding itself, and including the development of customised tags, and methods for quality control. Asking students both to think about texts from a material or representational perspective and to contribute creatively to cultural knowledge is the hallmark of many digital humanities classes. Gailey concludes that rigorous digital editing in the humanities is currently based on TEI and whilst this may not always be so it is important as the market gives rise to new technologies and digitally inclined researchers develop competing standards.

For a great summary of Amanda Gailey’s experience of teaching close textual analysis, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEXXS4V76y8 for a sixty minute talk that she gave at the University of Kansas in 2014.

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.