Session 089 will take place on Thursday, 3 January from 3:30-4:45 pm in Hyatt Regency – Columbus H.
Anastasia Salter
As a professor teaching the “theory” course in Texts & Technology, I struggle with drawing the lines of where transdisciplinary study ends: how do I define the “need to know” texts in a field that can be so broadly construed? If, as Alex Reid suggests, “all of the humanities are digital,” (“digital humanities: two Venn diagrams,” blog post, 2011) whose texts, and whose technology, is centered–and how do those decisions offer a path forward for crafting a more meaningfully intersectional approach to technology at a time when such platforms are in turn reshaping the world?
Grant Glass
What are the expectations concerning what students produce in a DH classroom? Taking into consideration the intersections of student labor and teaching outcomes while emphasizing process and critical thinking, teaching DH in a writing classroom often times results in prototyping, but not producing. To what extent should work done in the classroom model scholarship produced by DH professionals?
Molly Des Jardins
My experience is with broadening teaching of DH to include non-Western perspectives and promoting students’ expertise in area studies as an important part of the field. The challenge is how to engage students from different disciplinary backgrounds with varying content, temporal, and language expertise, at a range of levels (from advanced undergrads to PhD candidates). How can we approach teaching students with deep expertise in non-Western fields who have no uniting “discipline” other than the fact that they do not study the West; no familiarity with computational methods; and little knowledge of the state or possibilities of DH? How do we meet the challenge of introducing students to DH broadly as well as demonstrating that you can participate in the field meaningfully beyond the usual Western context?
Mitchell Ogden
The stakeholders in digital humanities go beyond scholars and academics. Undergraduate students being exposed to DH ways-of-thinking and industry partners looking for a productive workforce are important stakeholders in the DH movement—whose voices are often absent from our academic discussions. As we academics continue to define DH and contemplate its place in our disciplines and the larger world, what valuable insights are we missing from these neglected stakeholders?