Introduction
In my Theatre History II course at the City College of New York, I faced the challenge that instructors of theatre history regularly encounter: meeting a complex set of learning goals for general survey classes while surfacing critical discussions about the contingency of historical narratives. We must introduce students to a selection of plays exemplifying key theories and practices of theatre, guide students to situate those plays in their social, cultural, political, and aesthetic contexts, and cultivate students’ skills of dramatic analysis and theatre criticism. These compact learning goals typically leave little time to move from theatre history to theatre historiography—to surface meta-level discussions of the cultural politics around the writing of history, the power of the archive, and the erasure of performance as its own repository of cultural insight and exchange.
There is an obvious danger in keeping theatre historiography in the shadow of the classroom. History, as Trouillot (1995, xix) observed many years ago, is a product of power. The production of historical narratives “involves the uneven distribution of competing groups and individuals who have unequal access to the means for such production.” As Bennett (2003, 73) contends, the historical categories by which theatre history writes its narrative, for instance, “Enlightenment,” and “Romanticism,” are acts of selection that produce a hierarchy in the claim of the “best.” In other words, the act of writing history produces an epistemology of hierarchy that sustains a given power structure. Archives, as artifacts of history, are products of the same selective process. As Burton (2005, 6) puts it, “all archives come into being in and as history as a result of specific political, cultural, and socioeconomic pressures—pressures which leave traces, and which render archives themselves artifacts of history.”
Since students grappling with theatre history do not often share the same privilege as historians to visit physical archives and conduct extensive research therein, how can we bring the archive into the classroom? And further, is it beneficial to use archives to teach general education curriculum, and what affordances might it have beyond the specific course content? Drawing on critical pedagogy, particularly Freire’s (2005, 69) call to dismantle the binary between teachers and students, I decenter the theatre history syllabus and ask students to take on the role of historians, participating in the practices of theatre historiography rather than merely reading canonical plays. As Wineburg (1994, 85) points out, the learning of history often focuses on “the end products of historical cognition” rather than “the intermediate processes of historical cognition.” Archive-related learning activities, such as searching, examining patterns, and discovering connections among artifacts, make such intermediate processes visible as they center analysis and synthesis based on texts rather than cultural contexts, enabling students to recognize the constructed quality of historical and social interpretation.
Minimalist Archival Pedagogy
Risam and Gil (2022) define minimalist digital humanities pedagogy in terms of four questions: “What do we need? What do we have? What must we prioritize? What are we willing to give up?”. This methodological framework offers a values-driven approach that prioritizes pedagogical effectiveness over technological sophistication. Applied to theatre history classrooms, these questions reveal that students need access to primary sources, opportunities to practice historical thinking, and frameworks for understanding how knowledge is constructed and contested.
While the use of primary materials in digital archives has been a key strategy for facilitating student-centered learning in history and literature classrooms, there hasn’t been sufficient discussion on the value of digital archives for non-disciplinary or cross-disciplinary research in general education curricula. Digital archives serve as “engines of inquiry” and create multimedia environments that help students navigate complex historical information while accommodating different learning styles (Bass 1997). The search system of digital archives can help students who are not necessarily equipped with sophisticated theoretical frameworks quickly gather a series of related textual artifacts, which they can read against one another to bring new light to their key texts (Hanlon 2005, 99). Students can easily search across texts and combine different images, situating the primary text in synchronic and diachronic contexts (Diaz 2012, 428). In other words, digital archives not only provide materials for inquiry-based learning but also informational tools that help guide students’ inquiries.
For my project, integrating archives shifts the focus of the history class from breadth to depth—not comprehensive coverage of historical materials, but cultivating students’ ability to critically evaluate and interpret available historical information. Archival research practices in the context of a history survey course are particularly beneficial as knowledge and skill development form a symbiotic process: students need to command historical context for evaluating and interpreting information for archival research; the archival practices in turn drive students to acquire meaningful access skills. These archival research skills are also transferable beyond the classroom. When interfacing with digitized collection repositories, students learn basic database structures, search strategies, including keyword searches and filtering, which foster their digital literacy. Yakel and Torres (2003, 52–53) identify three essential knowledge types for archival research: historical context knowledge of the topic being researched; skills to analyze archival materials and determine their evidentiary value for specific projects; and familiarity with search environment rules and research strategies. As Longo (2019, 64) contends, training in archival navigation and usage education matter more than digitization processes for ensuring diverse and meaningful engagement with archival materials.
The project’s minimalist dimension lies in the scope and scale of archival engagement. My institution, the City College of New York, lacks the extensive special collections of many private institutions. For non-history majors who often work part-time, physical archive visits create additional time constraints. Wythoff’s (2022) analysis of minimal computing during COVID-19 reveals how constraints become productive sites for critical engagement. As he highlights, platform restrictions or technological learning curves create opportunities to examine the underlying assumptions of digital pedagogy. This reframing is relevant for archival pedagogy, where gaps and absences in the historical record become productive sites for historiographical inquiry. Just as I advocate for depth over breadth in content, I emphasize fostering a critical perspective over covering vast quantities of data or pursuing creative digital applications, such as visualization or reconstruction. A minimalist DH approach to archival pedagogy recognizes that students develop historiographical literacy not through sophisticated digital tools but through guided reflection on available materials’ limits and possibilities. As Wythoff (2022) argues, minimal computing’s contribution lies not in particular tools but in foregrounding “cultural practices” and techniques—“the way we do things.” Applied to archival pedagogy, this means emphasizing research methodologies, critical analysis skills, and historiographical reflection over the mastery of digital skills. These learning goals serve the general education curricula well, as students do not need to become field experts. When shifting historical survey classes from content mastery to developing critical historiographical approaches, general education curricula can equip students with skills transferable to investigating other cultural practices.
Platform Negotiations
My course “Theatre History II, 1700–1900” was a lower-division undergraduate course in the Department of Theatre and Speech at the City College of New York. In addition to being a requirement for Theater majors, the course also fulfilled the requirements of general education curricula. The class met twice a week for seventy-five minutes, with twenty-eight students enrolled, a combination of theatre majors and non-majors, who worked on a wide range of computing hardware, including laptops, tablets, and mobile devices. Students submit and revise each of the two major assignments across the span of four weeks, with additional time for student presentations and peer feedback. Given these constraints and opportunities, I needed to make conscious pedagogical decisions about platform selection and resource curation.
Manifold is a grant-funded open-source publishing platform and a joint project between The City University of New York, The University of Minnesota Press, and Cast Iron Coding. Manifold @CUNY, the City University of New York’s instance, is free for use by all CUNY instructors and students. During the summer before the class started, I built the Manifold project “Theatre History II” where I ingested primary texts, created sample catalog entries, and collected resources of digital archives. I used the “category” function in Manifold to organize the different clusters of the course. This function allowed me to create a different historiographical framework for the class. For each “category” of texts, I wrote a brief introduction explaining the thematic concerns of the cluster. Without falling back onto historical categories such as “Renaissance,” “Enlightenment,” and “Romanticism,” these categories foreground the intellectual concerns and social challenges from which theatrical works emerge and to which they respond.
While I primarily used Manifold for the course, I also experimented with the CUNY Academic Commons in a second iteration to explore how different platform affordances and constraints shape instructional design. The CUNY Academic Commons is another open platform built on WordPress that enables CUNY faculty, students, and staff to create websites, blogs, and digital projects for teaching, learning, and collaboration. In so doing, I was able to compare how different platform choices affected student learning. I chose to do so mainly because of my experience with Manifold’s limitations around publishable texts. I reframed the course to follow the trajectory of Europe’s colonial expansion between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, addressing more explicitly in the course content the historiographical injustice in theatre history. In accordance, I added more translated plays and performance videos in the course content, which I put behind password-protected pages on the CUNY Academic Commons.
Though the CUNY Academic Commons site I created for the course accommodated the challenge of finding primary play texts and performance materials, I needed to recalibrate the logistics of the assignments for the class, in particular the ones on catalog entries and annotations. Since the CUNY Academic Commons site does not have a “resource collection” feature like Manifold (which allows users to publish and organize multimedia resources with metadata and preview fields), I asked students to post their catalog entries as blog posts. I provided instructions on how to format these entries so that the visual references of the archival objects, for example, images, playbills and photographs, would appear in the previews of the blog posts. To allow students to annotate the texts, I added the Hypothesis plug-in to the course site. The two platforms have clear advantages and disadvantages: Manifold better showcases students’ archival work and critical engagement with primary materials; the CUNY Academic Commons allows more flexibility with course content.
My choice of Manifold aligned with open pedagogy’s concern with “the ideology embedded within educational systems and the ways pedagogy impacts these systems” (DeRosa and Jhangiani 2023). Open pedagogy views accessibility to resources and technologies as essential for enabling students to shape the public knowledge commons they inhabit. Similarly, DeRosa and Jhangiani contend that open educational resources herald greater accessibility by enabling knowledge co-construction and contextualization. By focusing on digitized collections in the public domain or under Creative Commons licenses, I encourage students to engage with and extend their work beyond academic contexts, making public knowledge contributions while rendering archives more publicly accessible.
Implementation: Working with Available Resources
The Manifold project served as a class text repository, a student-class interface, and a showcase for student work collections. It provided accessible structure for an integrated learning environment. Using Manifold’s built-in annotation function, students engaged with texts and one another’s responses, explicating character dialogues and monologues, charting plot progressions, and connecting texts to broader cultural issues.
It is important to note that digital archives, despite their accessibility, are not comprehensive records of the past. Following Klein’s (2013) analysis, when digital archives primarily draw from existing institutional collections, they perpetuate the same hierarchies of value that shaped what was deemed worthy of preservation in the first place. I addressed this limitation directly with students from the outset, discussing how digitized archives represent selective preservation decisions shaped by institutional priorities and resources. Our work with these archives itself becomes an exercise in critical evaluation of what institutions choose to preserve and make accessible, and students learn to question not just what is present but what is absent from these digital collections.
First assignment: catalog entries
Throughout the semester, students searched digitized collections from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum, the British Library, and databases such as Artstor and Google Arts & Culture, discovering artifacts such as playbills, theatrical portraits, scenic design prints, and architectural interiors. Given the limited library resources, including database subscriptions, I prioritized open-access repositories. Manifold’s responsive platform allows students to read and annotate easily on mobile devices.
Students then wrote descriptions for three objects—“catalog entries”—incorporating object details and explaining their significance within the context of theatre arts and theatrical culture. By creating their own catalog entries, students participate in the meaning-making process rather than merely consuming pre-existing narratives. The act of selection itself becomes pedagogically significant: when choosing which objects deserve cataloging, students confront Bennett’s (2003, 73) observation that historical categories produce hierarchies claiming the “best.” A student might discover dozens of portraits of David Garrick but struggle to find visual representations of eighteenth-century female performers beyond sexualized prints—a gap that sparks discussion about whose theatrical contributions are preserved.
The process of writing metadata and source information makes visible what Burton (2005, 6) calls archives as artifacts of history, products of specific political and cultural pressures. When students document an object’s creator, rights holder, and repository, they begin to understand how institutional power shapes what enters the historical record. As students investigate theatre’s physical dimensions—seating, architecture, stage design, costumes—they develop a concrete understanding of theatrical performance and their own repertoire of theatrical registers: what to observe in theatre and how to interpret theatrical events. Students thus begin seeing theatre not merely as staged plays, but as events and institutions embedded within expansive cultural networks. This assignment helped students develop a critical vocabulary for writing theatre histories and exercising analytical skills for assessing relevant cultural contexts in historical narratives.
For the first assignment, students published catalog entries on Manifold. Manifold allows users to publish multimedia resources and organize them into resource collections. Each resource has its own page, which includes preview fields (image, video, audio, slides, and iframe), descriptions, comments, and basic metadata (creator, credit, rights, and rights holder). When creating entries, students also provided source metadata information. Students thus learned about copyright—a necessary step for engaging public-facing scholarship. By collectively creating these resource collections, students translated reflection into practice, participating in public conversations about their subjects of engagement.
Scaffolding process
I scaffolded this process through class discussions with annotation exercises, feedback on draft entries, and library instructional sessions. I use each play to introduce historical contexts, pairing this with close-reading skill development exercises. Students create annotations falling under four categories: 1) close-read text passages with explanations of how they reflect general themes and concerns; 2) pose questions about passages, explaining their relevance to understanding general topics, themes, and concerns; 3) provide historical/cultural contexts, including images and links; 4) observe text relevance to contemporary issues. These annotations help students take notes and ask questions while reading plays and organize class discussions.
During class, we conducted various close-reading activities. One prompted students to identify theme-related passages using keywords. Identifying keywords requires students to consider translating themes into searchable terms. For instance, while “gender” might not appear in texts, searching for terms like “daughter,” “feminine,” or “household” likely yields passages discussing gender-relevant issues. Since most play texts are digital, students can quickly search entire texts. The logic of this close-reading activity builds toward archival research: when seeking particular evidence types, they must determine which keywords lead to relevant materials. Often, specific names—theatres, cities, actors—yield more concrete and extensive results than abstract concepts. Additionally, I provided feedback on catalog entries to help sharpen students’ visual analysis. Before the first assignment, students attended a library instructional session where a librarian introduced archival resources and demonstrated research methods using the cross-archival database Artstor. During the session, I worked individually with students, offering opportunities to ask questions and clarify assignments, as most lacked prior experience with this type of work.
In the second half of the semester, students gave a short presentation on one of their classmates’ catalog entries. Students walked the class through the archival object based on the entry description, highlighted sections of the entry that intrigued them, and shared what they appreciated about the entry. After the presentation, the author of the entry responded to the presentation and shared about the process of finding the object and writing the description. These presentations forged conversations among students about their work for the class. In various ways, using the Manifold project as the learning platform facilitated students’ exchange of archival resources, research strategies, and inquisitive processes. While engaged in the same research activities, each student arrived at different objects and topics, bringing their perspectives to class as “experts” who then explained archival material unfamiliar to the rest of the class.
The first assignment, as well as these complementary exercises, help students develop knowledge of the historical context, apply evidence-based analysis to archival materials, and gain familiarity with source discovery and other research methods. These skills laid the groundwork for their second assignment, which asks them to examine correlations between history and power by investigating gaps, absences, and erasures in historical and cultural representations.
Second assignment: fictional theatre review
The second assignment asks students to discursively construct a theatre-going experience by imagining themselves as an audience member in a theatre or playhouse from past centuries. I called this assignment “a fictional theatre review” and prompted students to describe what they saw, what they thought, and how they felt in the theatre, in addition to their evaluation or opinion of the imaginary performance. When choosing which performances to review, students often gravitated toward non-Western or popular entertainments, directly confronting what Tillis (2004, 8) identifies as the “Western parochialism” that concerns only elite Western theatre. Some chose to review Kabuki performances, others explored working-class entertainments absent from our canonical readings. Students were not required to create a specific historical persona, but could choose how to position themselves temporally. Some wrote as themselves time-traveling, others created period-appropriate characters, and many occupied a deliberately ambiguous position that allowed them to comment on both historical and contemporary issues.
After researching relevant archival artifacts, the process of which resembles the first assignment, students added creative details to fill in gaps where information had been missing from the archive. This creative act responds to the revisionist effort to rewrite theatre history through an “expanded archive” (Bennett 2010, 66). Rather than seeking new evidence, students acknowledge and creatively address what cannot be recovered. The assignment is informed by performance pedagogies that invite students to embody multiple perspectives on historical issues and reflect on what documents count as “proof” in collective memories (Zazzali and Klein 2015, 264–265; Wood 2017, 193).
Here, I asked students to write a reflective rationale about the choices they made in constructing the imaginative theatre-going experience: what contents were based on relevant archival objects and historical materials, and what contents were imaginatively and creatively crafted. What did they draw from the historical record, and where did they fill in the gaps? They also included relevant archival objects that explain how they inform their decisions and arrangements; reflected on what is absent in the archives and what they wished they could have found; and by extension, what and who was missing in theatre histories and how the presence and the absence of evidence shaped the narratives of theatre history.
Student outcomes: critical engagement with constraints and gaps
Many students found the two assignments productive. By imagining themselves as spectators in a long-begotten theatre of the past, students started to consider the possible selves available to them as historical subjects, and reflected on how master narratives perpetuate social norms, gender expectations, and cultural tropes and thus circumscribe notions of acceptable identity at different historical moments. For instance, one student narrated an imagined experience as a female audience member in the seventeenth-century English theatre. In her reflection, one student explained that she chose to imagine herself as a female theatergoer in 1611, despite recognizing the historical impossibility of this scenario. She acknowledged that women were often prohibited from attending theatre unaccompanied by men during this period. The student deliberately rejected the option of writing from the perspective of a wealthy man, even though this would have been more historically accurate, because she wanted the experience to feel personally authentic and meaningful to her own identity. Reading this reflection, I found myself struck by how my student engaged with the historical moment in ways that shed light on the politics of gender as she grappled with the absence of her gender identity in theatre history and the historical conditions that led to such erasure.
Furthermore, the creative flexibility of the assignment allowed students to use their personal voice and experience in their exploration of theatre histories and recognize the contemporary relevance of the issues raised by their historical inquiry. One student, in narrating a spectatorial experience of Japanese Kabuki theatre, used his real-life experience of his first encounter with Japanese anime to tap into the psychology of the imagined protagonist. He wrote: “I envisioned a character similar to me who does not understand the Japanese language, therefore not knowing what to expect, but ultimately enjoyed the entire production... By reflecting upon this play, I aimed to also connect with our class discussions on the power of art and its ability to transcend language and cultural barriers.”1 In this comment, the student grappled with the politics of language in cultural encounter and translation. As he considered the various elements of a Kabuki performance and their potential impact on the audience, the student also developed a nuanced understanding of performance as a cultural expression that conveys worldviews and conventions, just as the written archive. Far from hindering the work, technological and resource constraints revealed an opportunity to foster deeper critical engagement with both historical content and methodological questions.
Methodological Reflections
The comparison between Manifold and the CUNY Academic Commons revealed important lessons about the productive tension between content and inquiry in general education curricula, as well as between resources and technology. Platform limitations themselves became pedagogical opportunities, forcing both instructor and students to think critically about access, representation, and the politics of digital infrastructure in education. The constraints of each platform drove creative solutions: Manifold’s public domain limitations led to deeper discussions about copyright and cultural gatekeeping, while the Commons’ formatting challenges encouraged students to think more deliberately about how they presented their archival discoveries.
My experience of adopting an open platform was similarly a negotiation between the advocates of open pedagogy and minimalist DH pedagogy and the institutional norms that influence the distribution of resources. With an emphasis on Western, and particularly Anglophone theatre history, the content did not sufficiently represent the historiographical concern of the course. While I intentionally foregrounded issues of historical absence and injustice in our class discussions, I found myself limited to a few stock examples in Western theatre history of female playwrights, non-white actors, and popular entertainments, which do not sufficiently illustrate the scale and the acuteness of the issues. These platform limitations exemplified the productive tensions between different values: accessibility (free, open platforms) and representation (diverse, global content).
In future iterations of the course, I am inclined to teach again with Manifold, but with more careful curation of the course content and its presentation on the Manifold project. Instead of using Manifold’s textual collection to organize the home page, I will likely post my syllabus on Manifold and add links of the readings. In this way, I can keep the texts in the public domain on the Manifold project, and store translated plays under copyright in a separate place. This hybrid approach would enable instructors at other institutions to adapt the model to their own contexts, whether they have access to similar platforms or face different technological constraints.
Conclusion
The case study I presented exemplifies how minimalist digital humanities pedagogy can be conducive to archival engagement in undergraduate classrooms by reframing technological and resource constraints as productive pedagogical opportunities. Although the assignments primarily involve written work, they encourage students to explore theatre as a multi-sensorial, affective, and interactive experience embedded within expansive cultural networks. Students developed critical vocabulary for archival inquiry while recognizing how historical narratives construct hierarchies of race, gender, and class that persist in contemporary institutional structures. By engaging as both active learners and imaginative thinkers, students demonstrated their capacity as critical subjects of theatre history, productively reengaging both canonical and alternative forms.
The pedagogical model developed through this project—scaffolded archival assignments supported by collaborative platforms—offers strategies that other instructors can adapt across disciplines and institutional contexts. The core principles extend beyond theatre history, positioning students as knowledge producers rather than consumers, utilizing primary sources to foster critical thinking about how knowledge is constructed, and leveraging digital platforms to support collaborative inquiry and public engagement. Through annotation practices and archival work, students transferred their historical inquiry skills beyond the classroom, seeing one another as sources of expertise and contributing to public knowledge through their resource collections. The open features of the platforms motivated deeper engagement as students worked to convey their understanding to both classmates and broader audiences. The emphasis on collaborative learning and peer expertise also helps address constraints of large class sizes and limited instructor resources.
As minimalist digital humanities pedagogy continues to develop, projects like this one provide evidence of its practical applications while highlighting areas for further research. Future work might explore how these approaches scale to different institutional contexts, how they address diverse student populations, and how they interface with emerging technologies. The framework developed here—beginning with needs rather than tools, embracing constraints as pedagogical opportunities, and prioritizing collaborative knowledge production—offers a model for an expanded engagement with digital humanities education.
Notes
I thank Jaiden Aquilar, a City College student at the time of this course, for permitting me to quote his assignment directly. ↑
