Introduction to Issue Twenty-Seven: Minimalist Digital Humanities Pedagogy

Patricia Belen, Fordham University

Stefano Morello, CUNY Graduate Center

Gregory J. Palermo, Emory University

Danica Savonick, SUNY Cortland

Brandon Walsh, University of Virginia

More students in a single classroom; fewer instructors to engage them. Extravagant AI contracts; shrinking teaching budgets. Publish more articles; spend less time on lesson plans. So often, more exists alongside less. Now, more than ever, digital humanities practitioners are under pressure to think about the scale of their work with fewer resources to sustain them. In this context, this special issue explores minimalist digital humanities pedagogy, a broad approach to teaching and learning in DH that works within significant technological, infrastructural, resource, or pedagogical restrictions—whether undertaken intentionally or as a response to circumstance. Vendors and Silicon Valley would offer one-size-fits-all technical solutions for all problems, but minimal pedagogy depends on local contexts and needs.

At least since 2012, scholars like Matthew K. Gold have cautioned us about the ways digital humanities could actually exacerbate existing disparities if it were taught exclusively at elite, well-funded, and research-focused universities, and not at schools that serve working-class students. A minimalist DH pedagogy, then, offers a set of approaches for helping students at a wide range of institutions improve their digital literacy, even at campuses that may lack robust computing infrastructure, digital humanities labs, server space, technical support, or basic infrastructure. For instance, in December 2019, when one of the issue’s co-editors was invited to lead a two-day seminar on DH methods at the University of Turin (Italy), he found himself teaching in a classroom without heat (the instructor had resorted to bringing in a small space heater to keep students warm throughout the semester) and without Wi-Fi (students relied on tethering from their phones, when access to the internet was needed).

Our use of “minimal” when invoking a “minimalist digital humanities pedagogy” is multifaceted and slippery. We draw here from Micki Kaufman’s work on “being scrappy” (as cited in Palermo 2016), Jade Davis’s “frugal innovation” (2017), and Anne McGrail and David Jack Norton’s work on teaching DH in community colleges (2016; 2019). One prominent tradition we invoke with the term is minimal computing, defined as “computing done under significant constraints of hardware, software, education, network capacity, power, or other factors.” Working with constraints can mean having a lack of resources. It also means working tactically with the resources one has available. As Roopika Risam and Alex Gil explain, minimal computing involves “using only the technologies that are necessary and sufficient.” Sometimes our best or only choice is using proprietary or out-of-the-box technologies, which offer low barriers of entry for students without advanced technological skills, time-saving capacities (by avoiding the need to hand-code), and utility in creating projects that are accessible to users with limited hardware, internet speed, or electricity. Minimal computing gives us questions that are as useful for digital pedagogy as they are for the construction of digital research projects: “1) ‘what do we need?’; 2) ‘what do we have’; 3) ‘what must we prioritize?’; and 4) ‘what are we willing to give up?’” (Risam and Gil 2022). And like minimal computing, minimalist DH pedagogy focuses not just on the deficits but also the assets common in under-resourced environments, like student ingenuity and creativity (Risam and Gil 2022).

Increasingly, classrooms are giving up the digital altogether, instead using analog means like paper, pencil, glue, and other craft materials to reimagine digital humanities instruction. String and yarn might become the materials most capable of illustrating the fundamental concepts of network analysis. Counting words with pencil and paper might best convey a bag-of-words approach to text analysis. Paul Fyfe calls this “digital pedagogy unplugged.” Here, we see minimal computing overlap with DH’s maker culture and emphasis on new media and digital materiality. Minimalist teaching might emerge as a response to circumstance, but it can also be an opportunity to rethink otherwise resourced pedagogies from ground truths. For Jentery Sayers, removing the digital can be a way to “stress how all humanities research is mediated,” and to “teach core competencies often automated or masked by tools and software” (2019). In other words, stripping technology away can help students to understand the purposes those tools might serve in the first place—as well as the epistemologies they enable.

Analog approaches to teaching can be transformative for students, as the #DHMakes movement has made clear: “Representing digital work physically connects us back to the materiality of our digital making and serves as a reminder that the physical is not as distant as we might imagine” (Visconti et al. 2024). Whereas instruction that focuses on technology or digital methods can easily alienate new learners, analog pedagogy can usefully recenter instruction on playful grounds by pursuing concepts first and technology later. Another issue co-editor recalls that since his elementary school lacked funding over multiple years for classroom workstations, his earliest formal introduction to computing was in the workbooks for a class that his mother branded “computers without computers.” Many a true word is spoken in jest.

The articles in this special issue explore the innovative ways instructors interpret and implement minimalist DH pedagogy. In the first article, “Tactile Tactics: Re-seeing Technology through Textile Computing,” Christin Washington and Cassandra Hradi argue that complex technologies can be made more legible by asking students to reconstruct them using hands-on techniques such as sewing and embroidery that help recover the gendered history of computation.

Also developing tactile, analog approaches to computational thinking, Luca Messarra and Nichole Nomura’s “Cut-Copy-Paste Constructionism: Teaching Encoding and Text Mining with Erasure Poetics” shows how material erasure can serve as a constructivist method for teaching the intertwined processes of text encoding and text mining. Early in the course, students work by hand on the pages of children’s books to correct OCR output, mark textual features, and design rules for peers to calculate metrics with pencil and paper. After studying published erasure poems in the tradition of poets such as M. NourbeSe Philip and Solmaz Sharif, they create their own by altering a fresh page from the books they had been working with throughout the quarter. In selecting, obscuring, and rearranging language on the page, students come to see how the interpretive decisions they are making mirror those involved in preparing texts for computational analysis.

Extending this focus on the human labor of preparing text for computation, in “Putting the Friction Back In: Minimal Computing Approaches to Corpus Construction,” Anouk Lang demonstrates how students can learn to think critically about large language models by co-constructing their own corpus. After reading about Google’s digitization projects and experimenting with Google’s Ngram Viewer, Lang’s students build a small digital corpus through Optical Character Recognition, then clean and structure the resulting data—a process that teaches them how to work with textual data and helps them develop collaboration skills. This assignment sequence “puts the friction back in” to digital interactions and computational processes by foregrounding the human labor, time, energy, resources, and historical contexts that underlie them.

Like Lang, Laura Milsk Fowler and Margaret K. Smith also use small data sets to teach digital literacy. While big data and the tools designed to parse it can feel intractable, their article “Small Data for Maximal Effect: Integrating Digital Humanities, Digital Ethics, and Pedagogy Across a College Curriculum” explores a pedagogical approach that centers ethical engagement with local sources, contexts, and communities, all while empowering students to make real contributions that might feel out of reach when working at a larger scale.

Continuing this attention to small-scale and context-driven approaches to data literacy, “Reader-scale Text Mining and Visualization in the Secondary ELA Classroom,” by Nichole Nomura, Georgii Korotkov, Sarah Levine, Christine Wynn Bywater, and Victor R. Lee, reports on a collaboration with Bay Area middle-school English Language Arts teachers to co-design text-mining visualizations and adaptable pedagogical routines. These lightweight, reworkable routines—including conversation starters and mini-activities—were developed with teachers to address classroom constraints in device access and instructional time. Paired with “small” data visualizations, created from single texts or short excerpts, the routines keep technical barriers low while helping students to reflect on the limits of computational processes.

Several contributions to this issue contend with teaching AI literacy through experimental and creative methods. In addition to Lang’s aforementioned article, Kera Lovell’s “Teaching History with ChatGPT: A Minimalist Approach to Critical Digital Pedagogy” argues that freemium AI chat interfaces can be selectively leveraged to advance primary-source literacy and historical interpretation, and to support ESL learners. The article highlights scaffolded assignments that position AI as a catalyst for inquiry rather than a shortcut to answers and advocates for creatively repurposing off-the-shelf (often proprietary) tools to meet, rather than undermine, a history course’s learning objectives.

Taking up related questions about how to foster critical engagement with AI, in “Punk Rock Pedagogies: DIY, Minimal, No-Code/Low-Code, Resource Constrained, Learning Frameworks for the (Digital) Humanities,” Monica Storss proposes a pedagogical framework that treats scarcity as a design parameter, translating DIY ethics into experiential and process-centered teaching praxis. Storss’ case studies, spanning a variety of instructional settings, model low-barrier experimentation that broadens participation while maintaining a critical stance toward the technologies involved.

Spaces for experimentation and inclusivity are also central to the article “A Dostoevsky Laboratory: Creating a TEI Training Workshop for Undergraduate Students using Minimalist DH Computing.” Here, Katherine Bowers and Kate Holland illustrate how a minimalist approach to collaborative DH projects that engage students in their development can be empowering, contribute to students’ professional development, encourage creativity, build intellectual community, and strengthen the overall quality of the resulting work.

Engaging with communities both inside and outside of the classroom, while coping with issues of infrastructure, funding, and resources, can lead to inventive solutions within the framework of minimalist DH. In “Mississippi as a Blueprint for Community-Engaged Learning in the Digital Humanities,” Portia Agyapong, James Durr, Sydney Sweet-Bowen, and Dhanashree Thorat illustrate how a minimal computing framework can support community-engaged learning. By producing a multimodal digital exhibit on the life and legacy of Dr. Douglas L. Conner, one of the first Black doctors in Starkville, Mississippi and a local civil rights leader, Mississippi State University students forge connections between textual studies, writing, and current events, while developing an understanding of digital and public scholarship.

Despite systemic challenges and ongoing state disinvestment at New Jersey City University, Jennifer Musial, Al Valentín, and Caroline Wilkinson demonstrate how minimalist DH thinking helped them navigate the challenges of a Mellon-funded digital humanities project. In their article, “On Chaos and Making Do Through Minimalist Digital Humanities Pedagogy,” they outline their experiences in building a DH program through faculty and curriculum development, community engagement, and student involvement, often relying on radical and creative solutions.

In “Minimalist Archival Pedagogy: New Engagement with Theatre Histories in the Undergraduate Classroom,” Cen Liu models teaching a Theatre History survey course at The City College of New York using extra-institutional digital collections and low-barrier platforms, such as Manifold@CUNY and the CUNY Academic Commons. As Liu demonstrates how to creatively leverage existing tools and infrastructures to teach digital and archival literacy in under-resourced settings, she also makes the case for centering archival inquiry and historiographical reflection rather than prioritizing advanced technical skills, arguing that this approach can successfully foster information literacy and critical thinking.

Taken together, the contributions in this special issue suggest that minimalist DH pedagogy is not about doing less, but about doing differently—for instance, by redirecting attention from novelty, scale, and speed toward care, access, and sustainability. The approaches taken by these authors invite us to consider what becomes possible when we start from institutional and community realities, rather than from the demands of tools and technologies, and they remind us that low-tech, analog, and impromptu practices have long sustained transformative teaching. We thus offer this issue as both a record of what instructors are already making possible under constraint and an invitation to imagine other, more equitable approaches to digital humanities in and beyond the classroom.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.