Introduction to Issue Twenty Four: (Un)Preparedness

Cen Liu, The Graduate Center, CUNY

Sarah Silverman, University of Michigan-Dearborn

This issue is both Sarah’s and Cen’s first experience editing a JITP issue. Fair to say, the feeling of unpreparedness accompanied every stage of our journey. Yet we also knew that we can accomplish the work despite the feeling, through learning from the rich resources we have along the way: our Managing Editor Patrick DeDauw, JITP reviewers, and the Editorial Collective. More importantly, we gleaned valuable lessons from our authors on how to transform constraints—be it limited experiences, underdeveloped praxis, or required project scales—into conscientious and collaborative endeavors.

The articles in this issue critically and productively think through the feeling of unpreparedness. They reveal that this feeling often stems from unsustainable research and teaching conditions within our academic institutions. Between overwhelmed students and precarious faculty, such conditions can make work in Digital Humanities particularly challenging. Moreover, DH scholarship is especially prone to under-recognized labor, since traditional models of research fail to capture the reciprocal interplay of building, technology, and pedagogy (Ramsay et al. 2012).

Addressing “unpreparedness” involves negotiating classroom hierarchy and recognizing that both students and instructors enter with varied positionalities and degrees of capacity. Our authors investigate questions of how we can empower students when they do not feel prepared—to settle in an institutional environment, to enter an academic discourse, to begin a scholarly praxis, to launch a career, or to participate in public knowledge production. These articles present a familiar but often overlooked answer: pedagogy. Each shows that intentional approaches to curriculum designs, classroom practices, and assessment strategies can alleviate the feeling of unpreparedness. Furthermore, collaborative work allows students to bring in their experiential knowledge and leverage forms of preparedness otherwise not acknowledged in traditional educational settings. Many of the authors integrate free, low-cost, and open-source tools that not only pool academic labor, but also help students foster digital literacy (Savonick 2022) to prepare them for further academic scholarship and digital citizenship.

The process of critical thinking and making requires students to grapple with a variety of academic disciplines, technical skills, and collaborative challenges. In “A Way In: Digital Pedagogy Training with Speculative, Low-Tech Workshops,” Malcolm Cammeron, Caroline Carter, Winnie E. Pérez Martínez, Samantha Stephens, and Brandon Walsh illuminate the anxieties experienced by DH students as they learn technical skills, engage theoretical frameworks, and explore pedagogical thinking. Drawing from scholarship that reevaluates technology’s role in DH pedagogy, the authors transform classroom constraints into valuable opportunities. With a minimalist approach to technology in their workshops, they create space to explore research and teaching in an interdisciplinary and collaborative environment. Through this collective learning journey, the authors gain fresh insights into their research endeavors while sharpening their critical perspectives on digital tools and methods.

Indexing is a nuanced skill that demands engagement with the classification schemes and semantic infrastructure of a text. In “Teaching the Embedded Index,” J. A. T. Smith demonstrates that employing digital tools for indexing practices helps students develop their informational and digital literacy, thereby enriching their research, analytical, and writing skills. Smith suggests that indexing, like other DH skills, can often be taught on a small scale in hands-on, bite-sized ways. She adopts an analog approach to indexing that asks students to work first with physical books before integrating digital tools to indexing practices. By the end of the course, students not only recognize the utility of indexing in their research, but also grasp the complexity of digital indexing work.

Engaging with digital maps enables students to cultivate affective ties to their campus community. In “Mapping the CUNY Digital History Archive,” Gisely Colón López documents her students’ exploration of their university’s history through digital archives and mapping exercises, illustrating how these scaffolded activities promote digital literacy and a sense of agency. By linking historical events and their own daily experiences to specific locations on a digital map, students begin to chart their institutional history of resilience and resistance, while also recognizing their place within past and present communities. Notably, Colón López emphasizes the pedagogical advantages of adopting open-source mapping tools that empower students to create visible knowledge. Her article shows how place-based learning with digital maps fosters students’ willingness and preparation to pursue academic endeavors and professional goals beyond the classroom.

In “Digital Publishing with Students in Scalar: Pedagogical Opportunities, Challenges, and Collaborative Approaches to Creating ‘A Case Study of The Sephardic Heritage Cookbook,’ Heather Sharkey and Cosette Bruhns Alonso describe their implementation of Scalar, a multimodal digital publishing platform, in an undergraduate food studies course. They describe a heavy lift by instructors and support staff to guide students in collaboratively authoring a digital cookbook as a class project. Their process strongly emphasized the preparation needed by the entire learning community (students, instructors, support professionals) to effectively work toward a public scholarly product. This included training students on the Scalar platform itself, arranging support from librarians and digital pedagogy specialists, and extensive copyediting and revision of the material for publication. The authors reflected that despite—and perhaps because of—the intensive preparation and support the project required, “The results [of the experience] speak for themselves and have left us exhilarated and proud.”

A syllabus is often thought of as the main document that prepares students for the content and expectations of a particular course. Jessica S. Kruger, Sarah Vincent, David Emmanuel Gray, Adam Graczyk , and Jacob Chambers offer a study examining the effects of a “liquid syllabus” on students’ perceptions of a course they are just beginning, with their article “Liquid Syllabus: Worth the Effort or Should We Pour It Down the Drain?” The liquid syllabus has been proposed as a tool to humanize the document that contains course information, learning goals, and course policies. The authors ask whether a liquid syllabus (one housed outside the learning management system and designed to welcome students to the class rather than just provide the fine print of the course policies) could improve students’ retention of course information and satisfaction with the experience of engaging with the syllabus. Finding that video components of liquid syllabi improved students’ retention of syllabus information and satisfaction with the syllabus experience, the authors offer new support for student-centered syllabus design.

The diverse perspectives on digital “preparedness” offered in this issue show that digital pedagogy can suit, perhaps ideally support, times and contexts of uncertainty and unpreparedness.

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