Presented by Dr. Kathryn Tomasek, Professor of History at Wheaton College.
Digital methods of analysis have exerted growing influence on the practice of many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, yet students majoring in non-science disciplines often have little exposure to computational thinking and working with computer code. Although digital scholarship has become more pervasive among humanists, we have yet to recognize fully the value that collaboration with undergraduates can bring to projects in this field. At the same time, in the curriculum, the Digital Humanities promises significant learning benefits for undergraduates, who need a measure of digital literacy to function well as citizens in the twenty-first century.
Some institutions offer separate courses that introduce students to Digital Humanities as a field, while others integrate digital methods into disciplinary courses. Both models offer locations for engaging students in Digital Humanities projects. Such engagement has the added benefit of linking scholarship and teaching, which can be challenging for faculty members, especially early in their careers or in non-tenure-track positions.
This two-hour workshop will present strategies for effectively integrating digital projects into undergraduate courses. By examining effective cases of assignments linked to digital projects, participants will consider how to make room for such assignments in a syllabus, how to tie digital projects to a course’s learning outcomes, and how to scaffold both technological and content learning to allow students to make positive contributions to a long-term project external to the course. Participants will leave with a set of proven examples of effective assignments, preliminary plans for assignments for their own courses, and suggestions for how to find collaborative partners in library and technology services for such projects at Indiana University.
Bring a syllabus and your own idea(s) for texts/documents that you might use in a transcription and markup assignment. Refreshments will be provided.
Note: The original version of this workshop was organized and offered in collaboration with Rebecca Frost Davis in 2011.
Recommended reading:
Christopher Blackwell and Thomas R. Martin, "Technology, Collaboration, and Undergraduate Research," Digital Humanities Quarterly, 3/1 (2009).
Kathryn Tomasek, Scott Hamlin, Zephorene L. Stickney, and Megan Wheaton-Book, “Discipline-Specific Learning and Collaboration in the Wheaton College Digital History Project,” Transformations (August 2014).