DH offers possibilities for teachers to educate in new and engaging ways. Tools are available to make the learning and sharing of information more visual, interactive, and collaborative. However, this prospect can feel overwhelming for those not as familiar with DH practices. Here we offer some guidance and resources.
When incorporating digital methods and practices into one’s teachings, it’s important to ask yourself why am I introducing the digital and how do these digital interventions help me achieve my learning outcomes? This two-part question should be asked on the onset and throughout the development of the intervention, whether for a digital assignment or a digitally-centered course.
The DH Center’s team is available for consultations as you design and implement your syllabi, assignments, and assessments. We also host tool-based workshops and tutorials as well as space for project work-days and final project showcases as part of our efforts to connect faculty and students to the larger DH community. See an example of a collaboration between a History professor and our Digital Humanities librarian here.
Make sure to check out TeachDH, a new website showcasing the ways in which SDSU DH faculty incorporate DH tools, methods, and pedagogy into their teaching. See also Dr. Pam Lach's Spring 2021 Digital Humanities Pedagogy Workshop Series, including slide decks and worksheets. Recordings of the workshops are available on the DH@SDSU YouTube Channel: Workshop #1: Intro to Digital Humanities Pedagogy, Workshop #2: Assignment Design.
Claire Battershill and Shawna Ross. Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom: A Practical Introduction for Teachers, Lecturers, and Students. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Companion website: http://scalar.usc.edu/works/digital-humanities-in-the-classroom-a-practical-introduction/index.
Brett D. Hirsch (ed.), Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles and Politics. Open Book Publishers, 2012. https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/161
Rebecca Frost Davis, Matthew K. Gold, Katherine D. Harris, Jentery Sayers (eds.), Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Concepts, Models, and Experiments: https://digitalpedagogy.hcommons.org/. This is a free, peer-reviewed, curated collection of reusable and remixable resources for teaching and research. Organized by keyword, each annotated artifact can be saved, shared, and downloaded. You can read DigiPed like a manuscript, or use it as a platform to create your own collections of digital resources.
See also various editions of Debates in the Digital Humanities, many of which include essays on teaching and pedagogy. https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/. SDSU Library has the 2012 edition (ebook) and the 2019 edition (print) but all editions are also freely available online.
New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy by
The emergence of digital humanities has been heralded for its commitment to openness, access, and the democratizing of knowledge, but it raises a number of questions about omissions with respect to race, gender, sexuality, disability, and nation. Postcolonial digital humanities is one approach to uncovering and remedying inequalities in digital knowledge production, which is implicated in an information-age politics of knowledge. New Digital Worlds traces the formation of postcolonial studies and digital humanities as fields, identifying how they can intervene in knowledge production in the digital age. Roopika Risam examines the role of colonial violence in the development of digital archives and the possibilities of postcolonial digital archives for resisting this violence. Offering a reading of the colonialist dimensions of global organizations for digital humanities research, she explores efforts to decenter these institutions by emphasizing the local practices that subtend global formations and pedagogical approaches that support this decentering. Last, Risam attends to human futures in new digital worlds, evaluating both how algorithms and natural language processing software used in digital humanities projects produce universalist notions of the "human" and also how to resist this phenomenon.
Teaching with Digital Humanities by
Jennifer Travis and Jessica DeSpain present a long-overdue collection of theoretical perspectives and case studies aimed at teaching nineteenth-century American literature using digital humanities tools and methods. Scholars foundational to the development of digital humanities join educators who have made digital methods central to their practices. Together they discuss and illustrate how digital pedagogies deepen student learning. The collection's innovative approach allows the works to be read in any order. Dividing the essays into five sections, Travis and DeSpain curate conversations on the value of project-based, collaborative learning; examples of real-world assignments where students combine close, collaborative, and computational reading; how digital humanities aids in the consideration of marginal texts; the ways in which an ethics of care can help students organize artifacts; and how an activist approach affects debates central to the study of difference in the nineteenth century.
JITP: Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy: https://jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/
Hybrid Pedagogy: https://hybridpedagogy.org/
Student Collaborators’ Bill of Rights: https://humtech.ucla.edu/news/a-student-collaborators-bill-of-rights/
