Introducing DigitalHumanities Work toUndergraduates: An Overview

You are already a digital humanist, whether or not you know it.Digital humanities has exploded in popularity over the lastdecade, as evidenced by the creation of many different typesof grants to help digital humanities research (The Office ofDigital Humanities at the National Endowment of theHumanities (http://www.neh.gov/divisions/odh/about), thecreation of digital humanities specific grants at the AmericanCouncil of Learned Societies (http://www.acls.org/)), andthe impressive growth of digital humanities-related panels atthe Modern Language Association and American HistoricalAssociation annual meetings. Feeling the effects of this

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expansion, many institutions are starting to privilege the digitalhumanities as a strategic priority. Yours is probably noexception.

But while digital humanities may seem like an intimidating,exponentially growing field with varying ideas of “insiders” and“outsiders,” you and your students are all already digitalhumanists, because you all use technology in your daily lives.At its best, the digital humanities is about engaging morecritically with the intersections between technology and howwe act, think and learn. Without knowing it, you’re probablyalready using many of the techniques of digital humanists inyour life and in your classroom.

What I offer below are some easy ways to dip your toe into thefield. Implementing digital humanities into your curriculummay seem like a monumental task, especially for institutionsthat fall outside of the research one university category. Themost visible digital humanities projects are often locatedwithin graduate programs at well-funded, research institutions.People at primarily undergraduate-focused institutions mightwonder how this field can be applied to rejuvenating traditionalhumanities curricula. In addition, less well-funded institutionsmight not find it as easy to commit to providing theframeworks to build successful digital humanities projects, asthese often require substantial resources such as digitalinfrastructure (computers, servers, software) and technicalsupport (particular for faculty, staff and students who are newto digital work).

To address this, in this article I give a brief overview of anassortment of digital humanities projects that can beimplemented in primarily undergraduate-focused institutions.This has been important work to encourage for me personallybecause so much of traditional humanities work can beaugmented by digital tools, and because getting students tocritically engage in the theoretical foundations of these tools isa core humanities mission. In this essay, I deal mostly with theformer, listing some examples of different levels of tools andexpertise that can go into each type of project. Readers shouldbe able to decide on what level they would like to start at, and

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build some possible ideas to “scaffold” the project, or stagesof development and release for the project. At the end of theoverview I offer an activity that can be easily applied byinstructors interested in conducting digital humanitiesworkshops at their institutions and an annotated list ofadditional resources. My goal is to provide an easyintroduction for instructors to think through possibilities forincorporating the digital humanities within an undergraduatecurriculum with either free or inexpensive digital tools.

Mapping ProjectsLiterature courses often encourage students to reflect on therole of space and place in a literary text. A commonassignment might require students to draw maps ofgeographical places visited by characters in a text. Such anassignment can be greatly enhanced with digital humanitiestools.

James Joyce’s Ulysses is often studied in terms of space andplace. While this is traditionally plotted out in pen and paper(see Vladimir Nabokov’s sketched-out map of the pathsStephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom take in Ulysses on June16, 1904), such projects lend themselves quite easily to digitaladaptation.

Nabokov on Ulysses

Gerry Carlin and Mair Evan’s Google Maps annotations ofUlysses is a digital humanities equivalent of Nabokov’s hand-drawn map. Carlin and Evan’s project allows users to zoominto particular points of interest that relate to key locations inUlysses.

James Joyce’s Ulysses on Google Maps(http://sites.google.com/site/notesonjamesjoyce/map)

Users can click on individual chapters of Ulysses via the leftmenu to retrieve useful notes ranging from a summary ofchapter events, important symbols and parallels, tocommentary by the project authors.

Notes by Chapter

These mapping projects are easily adapted for other texts. Forexample, I worked with Xiaojing Zhou’s Asian Americanliterature class at the University of the Pacific on identifyingand annotating areas in Native Speaker by Chang Rae-Ee.Working together with the class, we created a collaborativeGoogle Map which identified a significant geographicallocation in the novel, and added annotations and quotationson the map:

Annotating Native Speaker at the University of the Pacific

Google maps also allows for a “street view” of specificlocations, allowing students a glimpse of the location withouthaving to physically visit.

Getting to Google Street View

Google Street View

Starting with Google Maps to integrate digital humanities inthe classroom is relatively painless, easy and free. The tool iseasy to navigate, and as many students are already familiarwith the Google interface, this familiarity helps them to get tothe meat of the assignment more quickly. Instructorsinterested in exploring mapping projects should thus probablystart with this tool. While much more sophisticated projectsinvolving GIS and visualization software are possible, theyrequire considerably more investment in terms of course timeand resources.

Text AnalysisAnother common digital humanities pedagogical approach isto use digital tools to conduct text analysis. These tools canrange from very simple to incredibly complex. This sectionshowcases three easy-to-use and free tools.

The easiest and free tool currently available is Wordle(http://www.wordle.net/), which allows anyone to quicklygenerate “word clouds” from text the user provides. Wordsthat occur more frequently appear larger in the Wordle.Instructors can use this visualization to explore with students ifthis means certain themes might be more prolific in a text theyare analyzing.

Wordle Main Page

To generate a Wordle, the user should paste some text, or theURL of a blog, feed or webpage that has a RSS feed into thequery box.

Wordle Generator

For my example Wordle below, I pasted in the full text ofOthello hosted by Shakespeare at MIT. Outside of the namesof the characters, words that are selected include “Moor,”

“heaven,” “love,” “bed,” “night,” all of which correspond to thetheme of the threat of interracial sexuality dominant in theplay.

Wordle of Othello

Wordle is also helpful in analyzing student writing. Oncestudent papers are uploaded, the resulting word cloud revealswords that may be repeated too often and which inhibit theclarity and focus of the writing.

Voyant (http://voyant-tools.org) and Textal(http://www.textal.org) are two additional text analysis toolsthat are free and easy to use. Voyant, produced by StéfanSinclair and Geoffrey Rockwell of Hermeuti.ca(http://hermeuti.ca), is more robust than Wordle, allowingusers to upload texts from a variety of formats, use texts fromdifferent locations, and allows for complex analysis such asmulti-word (n-gram) views and the searching of terms byproximity. Textal is a free iOS application by Melissa Terrasand her team that allows users to analyze online texts such astweet streams. In the Textal application, inputting a textsource generates word clouds, and zooming in on particularwords generates statistics such as the number of times the

word appears in the text, how many words the documentcontains, and how often that word is used. The Textalapplication is very easy to use and powerful.

Online ExhibitionsCreating digital exhibitions might be an attractive project tosome instructors. Many are used to getting students involvedin creating physical exhibitions — the curation andpresentation of materials being a useful pedagogical exercisein examining questions of cultural value. Furthermore, addinga digital component to a physical exhibition extends its reachand its audience. It also provides an easy way to get studentsinvolved with digital tools.

Online exhibits can be extremely customized and elaborate,such as in the What Jane Saw exhibit below, which allowsviewers to experience a three-dimensional view of an artexhibition Jane Austen visited on May 24 1813:

What Jane Saw (http://www.whatjanesaw.org)

They can also be much simpler. Omeka is a useful tool thatallows instructors with limited coding experience to easilycreate online exhibitions with their students. The simplestOmeka instance is Omeka.net, which sets up faculty with

predesigned templates. While Omeka.net (http://omeka.net)is not as customizable as the original Omeka software, whichneeds to be installed on a server, it is a useful starting point forbeginner faculty.

A good example of what can be done with Omeka is theChildren & Youth in History (http://chnm.gmu.edu/cyh/)project, which contains a showcase of different objectscontaining digital annotations related to global childhood.

Children and Youth in History Using Omeka.

Wikipedia EditingFinally, an easy and valuable project to incorporate in thehumanities classroom is Wikipedia editing. This project oftenappeals to students given how often they use Wikipedia as areference source themselves. Additionally, learning how to

navigate the rules and regulations that govern Wikipedia as acommunity is a valuable teaching opportunity to discuss thecultures of different environments.

For example, one of Wikipedia’s axioms is that it focuses on“verifiability, not truth.” Which means that everything onWikipedia has to be backed up by compelling evidence (whichis often either peer-reviewed articles or fact-checked popularmedia sources — what in fact most instructors demand thattheir own students use as evidence in their courses.) In thisregard, Wikipedia editing trains students to think about whatconstitutes reliable information and what does not, whichtranslates into their academic work.

Instructors who teach socially-inflected humanities coursesmight also be interested in contributing to various politicalWikipedia projects. The online encyclopedia is well known, forexample, for the gender gap in its editors — the typicalWikipedia editor is a thirty-year-old, middle-class, English-speaking college-educated male. Instructors interested inamending this gender gap through classroom instruction canfind a wealth of resources on political Wikipedia editing on thePostcolonial Digital Humanities(http://dhpoco.org/rewriting-wikipedia/) website. Many helpguides are also available for instructors wishing to integrateWikipedia into the classroom, ranging from a booklet(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Sample_Syllabus_for_Wikipedia_assignment.pdf)on using Wikipedia as a teaching tool to sample case studieson Wikipedia in education.

Ideas for Your Own Digital HumanitiesWorkshopThe project showcase I listed above is a useful starting pointfor people wishing to give their own “getting started in thedigital humanities” workshop. Once the overview is complete,I suggest the following as a hands-on activity. I have tried thisactivity in a number of institutions, and it has alwaysgenerated widespread interest and enthusiasm for startingwork in the digital humanities.

Activity

Give out 3×5 index cards to everyone in the room before youbegin the workshop. After you finish your overview of projects,ask everyone in the room to write down three digitalhumanities projects they see value in pursuing (this can beadapted for both a faculty workshop and for a class projectwith students). Give everyone adequate time to write threeideas down. Setting a watch or a timer for 90 seconds is agood idea—it provides enough time for most people to get atleast one idea down on paper.

Once the 90 seconds are over, ask your participants to sit nextto someone they do not know and discuss which one of the sixprojects they have listed is the most important, and why. Letthem have enough time to do this—a minimum of another 90seconds is suggested. Then watch and listen as the quietroom begins to burst into noisy activity. This “think pair share”activity, which I borrowed from Cathy Davidson, is helpfulprecisely because by brainstorming on their own, eachparticipant in the workshop envisions their own project (and inturn, their connection) to the digital humanities.

Finally, if you have adequate time and a small enough group(not more than 70 people), you can ask each group for theirchoice of project and for their rationale for it. The group canthen make a pitch for their project. Once you create the entirelist of projects (which can be shown on a projector), you canask the room to vote on the project they would most like topursue. When I gave this workshop at Cabrini College, weended up with two fantastic projects that a group of studentseach started brainstorming and outlining on their own onwhiteboards. The whiteboards were full of plans by the end ofthe session. Below is an image of one mapped-out project:

Whiteboard from Cabrini College workshop

ConclusionThis brief article has provided an overview of digitalhumanities projects that can be inexpensively and easilyapplied to the undergraduate classroom and suggested anactivity to conclude an exploratory workshop for faculty and/orstudents. To end, I list below a brief annotated bibliography onadditional helpful sources that can be used to elaborate on theworkshop structure proposed by this essay and to get facultyand students interested in starting digital humanities work.

Further ReadingAppleford, Simon and Jennifer Guiliano. DevDH.org.Web. 27 Jan. 2013. (http://devdh.org)

Website with very useful presentation slides, lectures andother downloads on getting started with the digitalhumanities, creating your first digital humanities project,starting a digital humanities laboratory.

Morgan, Paige. “What Digital Humanists Do.Demystifying Digital Humanities. Web. Sept. 2, 2013.(http://www.dmdh.org/2013/09/what-digital-humanists-do/)

About the Author

In this post, Morgan lays out an extensive overview ofdifferent genres of digital humanities projects, possibletools for creating these projects and different instances ofthese projects from smaller to greater scales.

Posner, Miriam. “How did they make that?”MiriamPosner.Com. Web. Aug. 29, 2013.(http://miriamposner.com/blog/how-did-they-make-that/)

Posner gives an overview of seven genres of digitalhumanities projects, and the types of skills and toolsinterested people will need to embark on such projects.

Project Bamboo Dirt. Web. 27 Jan. 2013.(http://dirt.projectbamboo.org/)

An easy to navigate resource that is a repository of digitalresearch tools for scholarly use. If you want a tool toaccomplish something, there’s a good chance that it’salready been reviewed on Dirt.

Hybrid Pedagogy uses an open collaborative peer review(http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/journal/collaborative-peer-review-gathering-the-academys-orphans/) process.This piece was reviewed by Marisol Brito(http://www.twitter.com/MarisolAlhena) and Sean MichaelMorris (http://www.twitter.com/@slamteacher).

[Photo, Lucky Stars(https://www.flickr.com/photos/brokendownlover/8340262583/),by Kendra Miller(https://www.flickr.com/photos/brokendownlover/) licensedunder CC BY-ND 2.0(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/).]

ISSN: 2332-2098 (http://lccn.loc.gov/2013273461) CC BY-NC 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/)

Adeline Koh (@adelinekoh) is Assistant Professorof Postcolonial Literature and Director ofDH@Stockton (https://dh.stockton.edu), the Centerfor Digital Humanities at Richard Stockton College.She co-runs the Postcolonial Digital Humanities(http://dhpoco.org) website with Roopika Risam(http://roopikarisam.com), and writes forProfHacker(http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/). You canfind her personal web site at adelinekoh.org(http://www.adelinekoh.org).