Introduction
Digital pedagogy might seem at first glance to be a second-order topic, one that requires expertise both in digital technology and pedagogy in order to begin linking the two.1 For students in digital humanities, however, both fields are likely to feel alien. The interdisciplinary nature of the field requires one to confront new technologies and challenges at a pace that often leaves one with a persistent feeling of imposterdom. Confidence in teaching is often no better, as Jesse Stommel (2018) found in an informal Twitter poll that drew close to 2,800 responses: when asked how much training in teaching or pedagogy they had received in graduate school a majority of academics responded “basically none.” The typical student of digital pedagogy, then, is likely to come to the topic with some level of discomfort with each category, let alone with how they might be combined. This essay argues that, far from being an irreconcilable problem, this tension can actually offer opportunities for transformative learning in digital technologies, pedagogy, and how they intersect. Students new to these fields might feel unprepared to teach them, but this position allows them to create pedagogical strategies from a learner’s perspective. In other words, speculative exercises in teaching, with themselves as the primary audience, can offer students the space to step confidently into their identities as teachers and digital practitioners. We see this pedagogical work as speculative, in that students are asked to imagine new identities—new futures—for themselves as they also create new teaching materials they would not otherwise be asked to produce in their graduate work. The resulting process is one of self-discovery that unifies teaching as a new way of thinking about research, a space of critical thinking beyond the archive, and a process of exploration rather than the demonstration of expertise.
Theoretical context
The approach we take in this article draws on a suite of related theoretical strands— minimalist DH pedagogy, low-tech pedagogy, and buttonology—to develop a framework for graduate students to explore their own developing relationship to teaching. First, we build on Danica Savonick’s (2022) approach to minimalist digital humanities pedagogy. Savonick provides seven principles for this pedagogical approach:
- Organize courses around topics that matter to students
- Assuage anxieties surrounding technological expertise
- Begin with relevant texts that give students new perspectives on their everyday lives
- Help students identify their intellectual investments in the course material
- Organize course units around praxis
- Create opportunities for students to design a portion of the course
- Utilize group work to teach collaboration
Savonick frames this mode of teaching as a strategic pathway to more realistic and sustainable teaching at under-resourced universities. We would go a step further: a minimalist approach to pedagogy can also serve as a useful vehicle for pedagogy itself, as a useful, low-stress bridge into exploring the practice of teaching. To do so, we combine Savonick’s minimalist DH pedagogy with what Jenterey Sayers (2019a; 2019b) has described as low-tech pedagogy, an approach to instruction with “little to no computation and programming involved” and that favors “competencies, not skills” by teaching with tools like “paper, scissors, tape, glue, cardboard, etc.” Student fellows in the University of Virginia’s Scholars’ Lab are explicitly asked to develop a workshop that avoids technology as much as possible, leaning towards pencil and paper approaches to teaching digital humanities as a model. This added constraint encourages innovative approaches to teaching the material while also relocating what it means to have authority over the material. Core to the activities described in this article is the concept of buttonology, a term coined by John E. Russell and Merinda Kaye Hensley (2017) to describe “software training that surveys different features of an interface in an introductory manner.” Approaching workshops in this way, Russell and Hensley argue, yields instruction overly dependent on platforms that are likely to change.2 This form of instruction can also disempower students, who must learn the exact layout of a particular platform before they can teach it on their own. Framing our own pedagogical activity as one that deliberately subverts an over-emphasis on tool-specific instruction is a way of inviting students into a position of expertise by reframing the terms of engagement. Students new to a digital topic can teach their way to their own understanding of it using conversation, rather than a digital interface, as the primary teaching tool.
In short, this article argues that the design and implementation of lightweight, low-tech digital humanities exercises can offer students a transformative pathway into digital pedagogy. That is, by de-emphasizing specific tools and, instead, introducing their concepts with as little technology as possible, students are asked to reimagine their own relationship to the materials they cover. In doing so, we call for training in the teaching of digital humanities that invites students to see themselves as capable of contributing to the field and to the classroom before they might otherwise feel ready to do so. This workshop-design exercise is, thus, imaginative in key ways: the subjects the students choose to teach are meant to be new to them, they need not actually implement the workshops they plan, and, importantly, students are unlikely to have the opportunity to design these sorts of teaching experiences as a part of their degree program. The exercise draws upon work in speculative pedagogy by offering students the chance to “disrupt and transcend the anxieties and tensions that bind up young people in classrooms today” (Garcia and Mirra 2023, 5). In other words, the students are asked to imagine into existence the teachers they would like to be and use the workshop as a vehicle for making that future a reality. In what follows, we describe how low-tech, speculative teaching exercises like these engage students as future instructors, re-imagining themselves and their teaching practice in new ways and with new confidence. While the main context of the piece is the training of graduate students in digital pedagogy, we believe the lessons are relevant to newcomers to the field regardless of the stage of their career.
Exercise context and overview
This article focuses on a particular exercise entitled “Workshopping the Workshop” that was implemented as part of the Praxis Program, a yearlong fellowship program embedded in the University of Virginia Library for an interdisciplinary cohort of PhD students that aims to introduce them to digital humanities work by way of project-based learning. The coauthors on this piece consist of the 2022–2023 Praxis Program cohort (Cammeron, Carter, Pérez Martínez, and Stephens) as well as one of the principle instructors for the program (Walsh). Students come to the program with a range of skills and experiences with digital humanities, and this cohort was no different. Carter, Pérez Martínez, and Stephens are enrolled in UVA’s Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities, while Cammeron has received training in other extra-curricular contexts. For some, this is the first deep dive into a field that will come to collect together a range of disparate experiences. For others, the fellowship deepens engagement in familiar territory. The fellowship asks students to collaborate with peers in other departments: this particular cohort comprises PhD students in history (Cammeron), art and architectural history (Carter), Spanish (Pérez Martínez), and English (Stephens). They come from a variety of stages in degree progress as well: Cammeron and Carter were both at the dissertation phase, while Pérez Martínez and Stephens both advanced to candidacy shortly after the conclusion of the program.
The fellowship year consists of four units: digital humanities community, digital pedagogy, research infrastructure, and humanities programming in practice. The digital pedagogy unit that this article focuses on, then, is only one piece in a larger assignment sequence and meant to enrich the students’ broader engagement with digital humanities. The pedagogy unit occurs at the end of the fall semester and asks students to develop a short (fifty-minute) introductory digital humanities workshop based on their research interests as a way to deepen their own engagement with the field. The assignment sequence is scaffolded to guide the students from a broad entry point to DH towards developing a specific workshop of their own:
Preparation
- First, students receive an initial workshop from the Head of Student Programs (Walsh) on sentiment analysis using pencil and paper designed to illustrate a minimal approach to DH teaching. The group reflects on the pedagogy behind the activity together as a means of framing the assignment: design a low-tech, fifty-minute workshop teaching a basic digital humanities concept related to their research.3
- Students explore Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Concepts, Models, and Experiments to find initial entry points into the broad field of digital pedagogy by selecting two or three keywords from the site related to their research (Frost Davis et al. 2020).
Design
- From these keywords, students narrow towards a specific area and then to a particular method or topic to teach, with the idea that they are teaching themselves as well as the rest of the cohort.
- To help students imagine what it might look like to implement a workshop on their method, staff run a series of group design jams, structured free writing, and reading discussions.
- As students develop more polished approaches to how they would teach their workshop, they directly receive peer feedback from other members of their cohort and from staff.
Implementation
- The students publish a blog post about their workshop materials, plans, and pedagogical process to reflect on the experience.4
- Students have the additional option to deliver these workshops to a closed audience consisting of their fellow students and library staff.
At each stage, the students receive feedback on their developing plans and their pedagogy from their cohort and from library staff. In the article that follows, we reflect on the workshops these student instructors developed and delivered during the fellowship year.
Case Studies
Pérez Martínez case study: connecting research to teaching
In addition to a dearth of pedagogical training for graduate students, the academy also encourages graduate students to think of teaching as a fundamentally separate activity from research, a distraction from their primary mode of professional advancement. The analog approach to digital humanities pedagogy we describe in this article can offer one alternative to this tendency by providing a flexible environment to think outside their disciplinary training. The activity taught me how research and teaching can mutually inform one another. My pencil and paper workshop titled “Design Your Own Visual Language—The Basics” combined my approaches to these practices through an introduction to the drawing basics that make data visualizations possible.
My workshop was a hands-on demonstration of how visual languages build and communicate ideas or arguments, and how they can become a useful critical tool to anyone–but especially for humanists. The workshop used several short prompts to invite students to practice transforming everyday objects and topics into data using elements such as lines, shapes, textures, text, and shading. For example, the first exercise asked attendees to draw the best meals they had each day of that week using different representations of a triangle for every meal. The deliberately ambiguous and arbitrary tone of the instructions were meant to give free rein to creativity and its complications. To close the event, participants discussed the questions, challenges, and surprising findings that came up while drawing.
I fashioned this speculative workshop after what I envisioned to be the first steps in my creative research journey: learning the basic visual principles and techniques necessary to make a simple data sketch. Data visualization is, in essence, the practice of using graphic elements to communicate ideas, which consequently infuses the method with an expansive quality where each idea can be presented in multiple media and color swatches. These characteristics signal a productive avenue of study for my current research project on twenty-first-century Caribbean science fiction literature. This corpus often mixes languages, inserts unconventional narrator changes, and features many allegories; all these elements come together to generate an extensive and powerful graphic layer hidden between the lines of narration. I plan to use data visualization techniques to further analyze the cultural and ontological propositions embedded in the aesthetic decisions within this literature. The teaching exercise helped me to work through some of these ideas for myself as I also thought about how to convey them to others.
This workshop experience taught me an important lesson about using teaching to share your research, and it underlined the value of collaboration as a critical methodology for unveiling new angles in my study. I learned from the activity that research is a long autodidactic journey that is best experienced in the company of others. The pencil and paper workshop turned out to be an ideally sized temporary learning space, one in which I shared and received feedback on the preliminary findings of my research. Turning this approach into lessons while connecting with scholars outside my discipline was instructive as well. In particular, the assignment’s minimal approach to teaching pushed me to think carefully about the clarity of my research question and the value of its lessons for different audiences. Teaching its underlying critical methodology encouraged me to challenge the critical assumptions behind the work and the relevance of its topic for multiple perspectives. I had to gain a degree of mastery of the topic in order to teach it. In this case, that meant explaining why visual language is vital for my research and why anyone else, academic or not, should care to learn about developing a visual vocabulary. The next time I teach, I will integrate more activities where the lesson plan is inspired by the goals of my research, as an instructor and academic. In this way, designing the workshop helped clarify how teaching can inform a rich research agenda that caters to multiple audiences.
Stephens case study: experimental techniques, collaborative learning
Teaching is highly experimental. Lesson plans and lecture notes are simply hypotheses, where the creativity and collaboration of students and instructors create space to experiment with ideas and measure growth. All the same, it can be challenging to retain this same sense of generative imagining when learning to practice digital pedagogy for the first time. Digital pedagogy was a new concept and practice for me, but the lightweight, speculative nature of the workshop assignment helped me to discover new ways of thinking about teaching that I might not otherwise have found. Combining a teaching praxis with the digital world opened up new avenues of experimental thinking. Working in the fields of Caribbean studies and digital humanities, my research focuses on Caribbean poetry and poetics with attention to visual experimentation in the digital age. I think about Black archival imaginaries and how we might reimagine the colonial archive through poetry and visual art. With these elements at play, I conceptualized a low-tech workshop: “Data Visualization and Archives of Enslavement.”
My workshop proposes ways to reimagine the colonial archive through Zong!, a long poem by M. NourbeSe Philip broken into 26 numbered sections. The poem seeks to “not tell” a story that must nonetheless be told—a horrific story of the transatlantic slave trade (Philip 2011, 189). The poem was created from the language of a court case borne out of a massacre on a slave ship named Zong. My workshop encouraged participants to consider text as data and her poetry as an archive. From here they thought about visualizing this sensitive data.
Preparing a workshop for a mixed audience required me to think deeply about how I define the terms archive, poetry, and data. During the workshop these categories became fluid, where participants helped to offer new insights from their perspectives. What counts as data? What does it mean to treat this text as data in the wake of the systematic datafication of Black bodies in the slave trade? What happens when a computer/machine cannot process the words/data? Considering the complexity of what goes on behind the cursor of a word processor like Microsoft Word, the workshop prompted attendees to consider what humanistic word processing looks like.
I arrived to the workshop with paper copies of Zong #24 for a collective reading activity and Zong #1 for the hands-on workshop. One of the main activities in the workshop—and my favorite part—asked participants to manually type the poem into a plain text editor, a kind of DIY/humanistic word processing that required a range of challenging choices. How do you type the first line of the poem? What is the first line? Participants talked about what they learned about the text from reading and typing it on our computers and how that changed when they put it into Voyant, a browser-based suite of tools for introductory text analysis. They meditated on the multidimensionality of the poem, using spatial awareness to read it. Some visualized ships and others noticed wave patterns—drawing together the thematic concerns and poetic techniques. For several, the language was made legible through the typing process, namely the word “water”—taken from the colonial archive and stretched and transformed to humanize the tragedy of the Zong massacre. Voyant was the most complicated piece of technology used, as it functioned as a counterpoint to manually working with the poetry and an accessible tool for those new to data visualization. It became a playful and productive space to think about how to “handle” text as data and the politics of visualizing data of enslaved peoples.
While creating this workshop was my formal introduction into digital pedagogy, the process did not feel like a foreign experience, but rather it facilitated a legible way for my work in the Caribbean and DH to come together. In other words, doing the workshop gave me a level of confidence in articulating how my research thinks at the intersection of enslavement and technology. It reveals that Black archival methods have already been digital, where critical approaches like Jessica Marie Johnson’s (2018) “black digital practice” illustrate how our archives not only “defy computation” but are flexible in their fragmentation, demanding imaginative approaches to engage them critically, meaningfully and responsibly (71). Particularly, questions that texts like Zong! ask—about the digital divide, text analysis and data critique—reflect key issues in DH. The experience struck a balance between familiarity and newness/innovation, as I worked with a familiar text in a new context with voices other than my own to develop my digital pedagogical praxis.
With several different disciplines, academic orientations, and areas in the hybrid workshop experience, the participation and feedback I received was transformative. Their responses to the workshop pushed me to consider additional approaches to one of my primary texts, augmenting my ideas in unforeseen ways. The pedagogical model the Praxis team introduced facilitated this environment—that is, an open-ended approach to discussion instead of a fully prepared and enclosed lecture. It is a pedagogical style that is focused on collaborative knowledge and meaning making rather than didactic, one-directional information sharing. This method taught me that I do not have to know everything about a topic or related idea in DH to teach. Instead, I learned to deeply consider my teaching principles instead of hyperfocusing on technical skills. Digital pedagogy feels quite accessible in this way, where the unfamiliarity requires one to be open to experimentation and creativity, and these qualities deeply align with both my scholarly and personal values.
Cammeron case study: joining the community of experts
Inducting graduate students into the practice of digital pedagogy requires us to navigate a range of intersecting pressures towards expertise. For students struggling to develop confidence in their own research, a topic they devote countless hours towards, teaching can be especially shot through with feelings of imposter syndrome. This withering confidence in one’s abilities is especially pervasive in students who are learning new methods and particularly so for humanists attempting to learn technology. Even so, we argue that the actual practice of digital pedagogy, paradoxically, helps students to see themselves as practitioners of it. As Jennifer Wicke (2001) notes in her discussion of academic professionalism more broadly, the best way to galvanize graduate students into an understanding of themselves as professionals is to make their training mirror the professional circumstances we expect them eventually to inhabit. In other words, rather than expecting professional development to take place implicitly or at an indeterminate stage in the future, we help students become professionals by actually asking them to do the work of professionals and giving them the support to do it: “Professionalization may be a double-edged sword, but it is also the necessary step toward what becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: I am in the profession because I am professional: I profess” (57). In this context, asking students to develop a digital humanities workshop becomes an invitation to the broader professional community of researchers and teachers.
For me, the lightweight, analog constraints on the Praxis workshop assignment subverted pressures towards expertise and placed me in the familiar territory of discussing concepts rather than technical interfaces. As a scholar of US history, I am interested in cities and urban life in the twentieth century. In particular, my research explores how post-World War II urban planning development affected African American communities in the South. Fire insurance maps, depictions produced by New Deal agencies, aerial photography, images and visual representations of blight, and other spatial data, often produced by the state, are important sources and components of my methodological approach. Curious about these cartographic representations’ discursive power, I designed a workshop, “Invasion of the Mappers,” to think critically about their (mis)use, demonstrate alternative cartographic practices, and model these practices with digital tools. In the process, I found myself with increased confidence in my ability to take on the identity of a practitioner of digital pedagogy—and to do so with confidence.
My workshop began by highlighting the long and troubled history of mapping. Spatial data, like those dredged from the depths of a segregationist state at midcentury that I use in my research, are far from neutral and objective. Maps, and other cartographic practices, are frequently freighted by the values, beliefs, and feelings of mapmakers. For example, beginning roughly with the period some scholars call the Age of Discovery, maps in Western society were used to control, manipulate, and siphon wealth and resources. Cartographers, working for colonial powers and capitalists, leveraged maps as instruments of empire. These maps served to make various regions and geographies, previously unknown, coherent to interested audiences. Mapping also codified and validated the subjugation of peoples and their lands, lent a sense of permanence to colonies and possession to citizens at the imperial core, and helped colonies extract people, materials, and mineral resources from new territories and thus facilitated capitalist development. However, mapping as a political technology, shaped by the biased views of cartographers, did not cease with decolonization. In the twentieth century, in the US and elsewhere, maps continued to be used to position communities with largely minority populations for dispossession and extraction. I drew upon the classic 1978 horror flick Invasion of the Body Snatchers to frame the workshop. In the classic film, alien body snatchers take over and replicate humans who then become hollow shells of their former selves. Similarly, maps have been used to support projects that sap the life from vibrant peoples and communities. By centering the learning experience for workshop participants on maps as a technology in themselves—rather than on more overtly technical GIS topics and technologies—I shaped a teaching role I could comfortably inhabit.
Beyond critically examining Western knowledge production, I am curious about how marginalized populations have challenged and subverted hegemonic spatial knowledges and practices. Therefore, the workshop also introduced participants to the counter-cartographic practice of counter-mapping. Counter-mapping describes the compilation, interpretation, representation, and circulation of various social and spatial data by marginalized communities for political resistance and social transformation. It complements other subversive cartographic and spatial practices used by marginalized groups—like creating rival geographies, developing fugitive infrastructures, employing marronage, and creative placemaking—to create safe and welcoming spaces and resist subjugation. Historical examples of counter-mapping in the twentieth century include the lynching maps of activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Tuskegee Institute sociologist Monroe Work, and The Negro Motorist Green Book (commonly known as the Green Book). Their work, and the work of others, became important counter-narratives to Jim Crow and pointed towards alternative futures and possibilities. In a similar way, the workshop enabled me to imagine a new pedagogical approach and myself as a subject-matter expert.
Following this history of mapping and overview of counter-mapping, I encouraged participants to create their own counter-maps using a pencil and two blank, paper maps of University of Virginia’s grounds. Now familiar with the political performativity of maps and their frequent erasures, obscurations, and misrepresentations, I asked workshop participants how they might use the blank maps to produce alternative representations of grounds which support important causes and underrepresented populations at the university. Participants mapped the labor of enslaved men and women, highlighted university development that dispossessed black residents, and documented ineffectual university bus routes for differently abled students, faculty, and staff. The maps produced in the workshop suggested different modes of thinking about grounds and proposed changes to campus infrastructures that would benefit all.
Conceptualizing and leading the workshop helped inform my research and pedagogy. Like Pérez Martínez, the experience helped me to see new connections between research and teaching: the workshop encouraged me to think more capaciously about the spatial knowledge and mapping practices of marginalized populations and how black southerners employed counter-cartographic practice in the communities I study. To give an example, some groups leveraged discourse, via local media and legal channels, to challenge troubled characterizations and destruction of their communities. Further, as a relative newcomer to the digital humanities and digital pedagogy, the workshop and exercise affirmed that I could do this work and make meaningful contributions to both communities. These fields are vast and expansive, incorporating multiple disciplines and incorporating approaches that range from textual analysis to online curation and collecting to various forms of digital mapping. Leading the workshop demonstrated that I need not know every expression of digital research and teaching in order to participate in them; instead, exploring light-weight, low-tech teaching activities taught me that I could make valuable contributions to applications of digital mapping. Finally, although I thought deeply about the learning approaches I would employ and strategies I would use to engage participants, conducting the workshop encouraged me to reflect on the logistics of workshop management like transitions, instructions, and timing. In this way, designing the workshop provided a helpful laboratory environment where I could experiment with new approaches to my work and pedagogy—in theory and in practice.
Conclusion
Consistent among all three case studies is a through-line of self-discovery. The speculative workshop assignment allowed students to follow their own academic curiosities and gave them permission to explore the teaching of unfamiliar technologies and concepts by loosening their assumptions about the prerequisites necessary to convey any given skill. In doing so, it is the process of engaging and learning that becomes rewarding for the students, not just the outcome of the completed assignment. Mahony and Pierazzo (2012) reached similar conclusions following an assignment in which they had students use digital technologies to analyze medieval manuscripts: “by using such digital technologies, [the students] had seen things in a way they had never previously thought about. By applying these unfamiliar technologies to a familiar and interesting object, students recognized how such techniques could form the basis of a methodological approach to learn something new and exciting about the objects of their research” (222). In our case, the actual workshop outcomes were always a means to an end in the pursuit of the real goal: allowing the students to discover new aspects of themselves—new perspectives on their teaching as much as their research.
The activity frames a pedagogical journey that does not end in a single expert at the front of the room. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire (2000) famously argued against what he saw as a banking model of education, one in which an expert instructor in possession of information deposits in the lacking—and subhuman—learners. Practitioners of critical digital pedagogy often work against this model with transformative approaches to teaching. But graduate students struggling with their confidence as instructors of new, highly technical material in the classroom can find it difficult to work against this familiar model as they try to develop their voice as teachers of digital technologies still new to them. Speculative, low-tech teaching exercises like the ones described in this article can subvert this dynamic. The workshop exercise helps graduate instructors to imagine a new, emergent relationship to the classroom where DH teaching is no longer the pursuit and performance of technical expertise. Instead, digital pedagogy becomes a space for teaching to inform research and galvanize the shared nature of the learning process by thinking critically about data, materials, and methods separate from tools. The classroom becomes a space of learners: not experts.
While the Praxis students were able to identify the general benefits of the speculative activities the workshop unit asked them to generate, the lessons became clearer when made concrete. Designing a speculative workshop offered useful experience to the students, but these benefits were significantly augmented by making space in the curriculum for the students to put their ideas into practice. The assignment described above creates a space for students to explore what it might mean to live out their imagined pedagogies within the practical constraints of the classroom. In a way, this process continued in the very writing of this article. While the students received feedback from a range of Scholars’ Lab staff as part of the pedagogy unit, this article involved deep collaboration with Walsh, the Head of Student Programs and primary facilitator of the program, to articulate the pedagogical vision of the unit. This reflection forced all the authors—students and staff alike—to consider whether their practices live out the pedagogies that they imagine for themselves. Since the completion of their fellowship, program alumni have taught their own courses relevant to their disciplines and others have returned to a focus on their dissertation research. In each case, they have done so with a transformed sense of how digital pedagogy can be a part of a new imagined future.
