Our DH 101 class met for the first time today. Washington and Lee (W&L) has this 4-week Spring Term in which students only take one 4-credit course. The way we’re teaching DH 101, it should really have been called Literary History: An Introduction to Digital Humanities. If we teach this again in the Spring Term, then we’ll try to call it that. The reason for this approach is that we wanted to build the course around a specific structure (e.g., literary history) and not just as a survey of DH methodologies and projects in the wild. We felt that it’s important for undergraduates to have a more concrete focus in order to understand DH.
I’m co-teaching the course with Mackenzie Brooks, our Metadata Librarian. This is the second DH course Mackenzie and I have co-taught. The first was a 1-credit course on Scholarly Text Encoding. Our Spring Term course DH 101: An Introduction to Digital Humanities has only 3 students. That’s a great thing about a small liberal arts college. There’s a long story about the low enrollment that deserves a separate post. This is the second time that DH 101 has been taught at W&L. Last year’s DH 101 course was taught by Paul Youngman (Professor of German) and Sara Sprenkle (Associate Professor of Computer Science). Neither Paul nor Sara were available to teach it this year, so the assignment fortunately fell to the librarians. And it looks like we’ll be teaching this going forward.
We completely rethought the syllabus from how they taught it last year, partly to take into account the experiences and interests that Mackenzie and I have with digital information as librarians. The literary history focus comes from my own research interests into literary networks and a significant archival collection we have about the early years of the Shenandoah literary magazine published by W&L.
The class started by getting the students talking, first about themselves, their career goals, and then their experiences with technology. Due to the nature of our short Spring Term we have a lot of time together in the classroom. The students will spend much of that time working on their group project, but we want the class to be very much a conversation about DH. One of our students, a senior history major, should already be fairly comfortable with DH. She was the first student at W&L to do a digital honor’s thesis and used Omeka for that project.
We asked the students to watch a nine-minute video on DH prior to the first class, which we then used to launch into a conversation about different aspects of DH. What terms were new to them? What questions were raised? Knowing that none of these students plan to pursue a PhD, we’re very aware in this course that we need to relate DH to the world outside academia. We point out how DH methodologies translate to skills in a variety of careers, such as accounting and advertising. One student plans a career in librarianship. Yeah!
We had three hours for this class. We talked a lot about the literary history structure we’re taking in this course. And I should write up a post just describing that in more detail. Then we spent the last hour in a hands-on exercise. We feel that it’s very important in any DH course to get the students doing something hands-on during the very first class. Since we’ll be coming back to the topic of network analysis quite often in the course, we had the students download their Facebook friends and mutual friends via givememydata.com and then generate a network graph using Palladio.
The next class will meet in Special Collections & Archives.
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