Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom

A Practical Introduction for Teachers, Lecturers, and Students

Claire Battershill, Shawna Ross

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781350180895
• eBook ISBN: 9781350180918
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Literature

Rooted in the day-to-day experience of teaching and written for those without specialist technical knowledge, this is a new edition of the go-to guide to using digital tools and resources in the humanities classroom. In response to the rapidly changing nature of the field, this new edition has been updated throughout and now features: - A brand-new Preface accounting for new developments in the broader field of DH pedagogy
- New chapters on 'Collaborating' and on 'Teaching in a Digital Classroom'
- New sections on collaborating with other teachers; teaching students with learning differences; explaining the benefits of digital pedagogy to your students; and advising graduate students about the technologies they need to master
- New 'advanced activities' and 'advanced assignment' sections (including bots, vlogging, crowd-sourcing, digital storytelling, web scraping, critical making, automatic text generation, and digital media art)
- Expanded chapter bibliographies and over two dozen tables offering practical advice on choosing software programs Accompanied by a streamlined companion website, which has been entirely redesigned to answer commonly asked questions quickly and clearly, this is essential reading for anyone looking to incorporate digital tools and resources into their daily teaching.

1 Finding, Creating, and Using Digital Resources

Digital resources can allow you to test the digital humanities (DH) waters in a simple, straightforward way: by including digital artifacts, texts, or exhibitions in your course materials. In this chapter, therefore, we recommend reliable, stable sources for digitized literary and historical texts, archival objects, and maps. We also provide simple step-by-step instructions for creating your own digital text from nearly any primary source and for involving students in the process. We conclude with a practical guide to copyright and citation practices for the use of digital resources.

Why Use Digital Texts (and Other Assets)?

Electronic texts can serve many functions in your classroom: as a source of course readings; as a provocation for discussing mediation, technology, book history, scholarly editing, typography, and design; as part of a class trip to your local libraries, museums, archives, and special collections; or as the focus for in-class activities, student presentations, or graded assignments. When considering digital resources, keep in mind that many students still prefer physical copies of books, especially if they are particularly long or if there are issues with digital resources. All the information below assumes that you may be adopting a mixture of physical and electronic course texts, that you are providing accessible versions of electronic materials, that you are allowing students to use physical materials whenever appropriate, or that you are using digital resources as a tool for managing class activities and assignments.

We strongly support the use of—and particularly the creation of—free, open-access electronic resources for teaching the humanities, especially for out-of-copyright historical content. These include not only electronic editions of primary and secondary texts (including photographic images of important documents and editions, as well as complete, corrected, searchable texts) but also digital images of historical objects, such as maps, artifacts, and buildings, as well as audio and video assets. As many of the costs related to higher education soar, we as teachers can help reduce students’ textbook costs (and relieve some pressure from library resources) by assigning free digital reading and resource materials. Indeed, many of the literary and historical texts we teach are readily available online already, while others are currently coming out of copyright. Beyond the issue of textbook cost, the issue of variant and variable-quality print editions can cause practical difficulties in the classroom. Some of our students, unaware of the legacies of scholarly editing and reliant on Amazon, often will purchase poorly or sparsely edited works or will, being justly concerned for their bottom lines, choose inaccurate open-access editions whose provenance is unclear. By helping to promote or even create new, carefully curated digital resources, we can guide our students toward affordable and reliable sources.

Digital resources have some practical advantages over paper anthologies or textbooks when it comes to teaching. They have a far greater capacity for high-quality, full-color illustrations; they are often transferable between devices and forms (i.e., students could view them on a smartphone as easily as on a library computer, or they can even print them out); and they are helpful for students who will not or cannot carry bulky, heavy textbooks to class. Sometimes they also provide access to resources not available in institutional libraries. Although we often (and usually, correctly) assume that access to technology is difficult for underprivileged students, the internet is more ubiquitous than access to well-furnished libraries in some parts of the world, and many students who cannot afford laptops or home computers do own smartphones capable of loading electronic texts (Cerwall 6), as we will discuss further in Chapter 2. For teaching newer forms of media, digital sources are sometimes also primary sources.

We advocate not only using such sources as digital text repositories and scholarly digital archives but also contributing to them. Contemporary publishing structures make our participation necessary; it is important to represent the interests of humanist scholars in these matters, rather than allow institutions, publishers, and corporate bodies to determine how our cultural record is digitized and curated. We can adapt streamlined, easy-to-use tools for analyzing or creating electronic texts so that we (in many cases, with the help of our students) can take control over our course material and make our own decisions about digitization and mediation more transparent. Here it is crucial to draw a distinction both for yourself and for your students between “mass digitization” initiatives like Google Books and “critical digitization” initiatives that make their assumptions and processes transparent (see Dahlström). This is especially important because, as Jerome McGann explains in A New Republic of Letters, “the migration of the paper-based archives to digital forms” is often “undertaken … by agents of commercial entities like Google, Chadwyck-Healey, Gale, and Kluwer” (21). Despite the good faith with which these entities often approach digitization, relying implicitly on them can be problematic because, as McGann continues,

The commercial examples are the most troubling from a scholar’s and educator’s point of view since these entities operate to maximize profit. … Their work on our cultural inheritance, while often very useful, is always marked by cost-cutting procedures that damage or endanger the cultural record. (21–2)

By actively contributing to the creation or maintenance of digital pedagogical materials, we can help ensure their integrity and sustainability.

If you cannot participate actively in the creation of digital materials, you can nonetheless emphasize the quality of the sources you adopt as course materials and by teaching students how to evaluate these materials. After all, evaluating the quality of existing digital texts and archives is not merely what a good instructor does when selecting course readings but indeed, we would argue, part of being a good scholarly citizen in general. If you ask your students questions about these resources—including interrogations about what is or is not available, and why—digital resources become an object as well as a mode of inquiry. Using and discussing electronic texts with your students can, in other words, provoke important conversations about scholarly values and the commercialization of knowledge if you consciously reflect on the digital nature and provenance of your resources. When you actively critique the resources you use, and when you participate in the creation of the resources you recommend to students, you ensure that the texts your students encounter conform to your scholarly standards of completeness and representativeness.

Beyond these questions of accuracy and rigor, though, digital maps, images, texts, and audio/video assets are especially useful for teaching because of the activities they make possible. For example, searching is facilitated in digital objects, allowing your class to find what they need quickly and efficiently. You can simply execute a simple search command in Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America rather than flip pages hurriedly for that quotation about history as a gallery, manually count the number of references to “arms” in the Declaration of Independence, or ask students to reread all of the Federalist Papers, highlighter in hand, to discover if “rule by majority” tends to be accompanied by positively or negatively charged phrases. And with digital texts, “text analysis” does not refer to close reading of appropriate passages in, say, The Portrait of a Lady but to a host of approaches that allow machine reading—that is, approaches that rely on computers to identify patterns that the scholar or student interprets in order to drive future research. With software-based approaches like distant reading, corpus analysis, and topic modeling, which we will describe further in Chapters 4 and 6, you can, for example, easily track and chart Henry James’s uses of the word independence, compare the serialized first edition of 1880–81 with the revised edition of 1908, or discover conceptual clusters of words that tend to appear together. A network graph or most-frequent-word list cannot (and, we believe, should not) replace the careful, informed reading of Confucius’s Analects or Arendt’s The Human Condition or Marx’s Capital, but digital texts do allow you to plumb them in ways not possible or extremely time-consuming with traditional texts.

Finding and Evaluating Digital Resources

Because the copyright holder of a piece of useful content—whether a press, an organization, an institution, or a private citizen—may have any number of attitudes toward digitization and copyright, it’s always worth checking if the resource you need is already freely available online in some format. You may be pleasantly surprised about what you find. For example, there are many prominent large-scale repositories, including Internet Archive, HathiTrust, Google Books, and Project Gutenberg, each containing millions of digitized texts. Each humanistic field and subfield has, additionally, its own particular clusters of resources. In the field of modernism, for example, which is both C and S’s research area, we rely on large-scale projects, such as The Modernist Journals Project, The Modernist Versions Project, and the Yale Literary Lab, as well as small-scale repositories, such as the Harlem Shadows archive and Mina Loy Online. We work actively to create and promote these resources; C is a founding member of the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP). These examples are literary in nature, but this does not mean that the repositories would only be useful in a literature classroom or that such initiatives are solely literary; search in your field for just a moment, and you’ll find similar projects that you can benefit from and participate in.

So how do you choose a reliable repository? Resources that consistently draw a large pool of users and strong sources of funding are the resources whose assets will (probably) not suddenly disappear. This is partly why even new digital assets associated with renowned libraries such as the British Library or the New York Public Library (NYPL) tend to be good places to start. They are grounded in a supportive, publicly funded library infrastructure and usually have been designed with robust metadata standards in mind. This means that, much like a respected publisher’s imprint, their affiliation with an established institution and its practices often leads to the creation of reliable, stable resources.

Some resources might offer opportunities not only to interact with their assets but also to contribute new materials. A “Get Involved” button is a strong sign that you have found one of these resources, and “Log In” and “Sign Up” buttons are even better signs, as registered members can save materials and track their own engagement with the resource. For example, Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is a best-case scenario for digital resources. DPLA has created a noncorporate, large-scale digitization model through the public library system, not only providing a fantastic resource to students but also contributing solutions to some of the problems with existing digital resources in the academy (the very problems McGann raises in his critique of corporate resources). Looking at this attractively designed site (http://dp.la), you will notice the multiple potential points of engagement with their materials—including searching, browsing exhibits, interacting with timelines, and downloading apps—which means that you can design many different types of assignments from the one site. Furthermore, whereas a novice digital pedagogue can browse the educational outreach materials on the “Education” tab, once you have some experience with code, the “For Developers” tab will allow you to use the same materials at different stages in your (or your students’) mission to bring computational approaches to bear on library materials. If you still do not know where to begin, watching a detailed, hour-long YouTube video, “Using DPLA f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Introduction
• 1 Finding, Creating, and Using Digital Resources
• 2 Ensuring Accessibility
• 3 Designing Your Syllabus
• 4 Designing Classroom Activities
• 5 Managing Classroom Activities
• 6 Creating Digital Assignments
• 7 Evaluating Student Work
• 8 Teaching Graduate Students
• 9 Collaborating
• 10 Contributing to Your Research
• 11 Teaching in a Digital Classroom
• Coda Developing Your Teaching Philosophy
• Index
• Copyright Page