“We might have to give back the grant…”
Introduction
From 2021–2024, New Jersey City University (NJCU) held an Andrew W. Mellon Public Knowledge-Higher Learning digital humanities capacity-building grant with three other regional public universities under the moniker DEFCon—the Digital Ethnic Studies Consortium—to combat the digital divide1 at low-resourced, Hispanic-, Historically Black-, or Minority-Serving Institutions where students are often under-prepared for jobs requiring digital skills. Year one was slow to start but posted some accomplishments. In year two (2022–2023), the original PI, Sonya Donaldson, left for another school, so Jennifer Musial and Caroline Wilkinson became the new co-PIs. We’d been told to expect challenges due to the personnel shifts in the Office of Research Grants and Sponsored Programs and preponderance of under-staffed offices. Musial and Wilkinson had one course release each (4/4 teaching load) to manage the grant, which was insufficient to deal with the “increased administrative role” that grants generate at under-resourced schools (Gold 2012), especially because we did not have a staff member dedicated to our grant. The original PI and new co-PIs concluded that if we could not get the (just-hired) Acting Provost on-board quickly, we would have to return the grant because we could not see a path forward.
Grants are the life-blood of an economically struggling institution; grants fill the gaps of chronic under-funding by the state. Our grant required perseverance and determination when our institution fell into economic chaos. We drew on the same grit of our students: the refusal to take no, or more often silence, for an answer. We resorted to what Michel de Certeau calls “making do”, which refers to when people use “tactics” that are clandestine, crafty, make-shift, errant, and opportunity-seizing to re-make structures of domination (1984). French cultural theorist De Certeau conceptualized “making do” to explain how individuals resist logics of control in quotidian ways, making mundane choices as consequential as mass rebellions. When the institution became chaotic, we had to work outside (and without) it: we had to “make do”. Our essay is driven by feminism, digital ethnic studies, and critical university studies to argue that community-engaged, “minimalist digital humanities pedagogy” (Savonick 2022) was the only way to “make do” at NJCU.
Our essay begins with a short profile of NJCU then explains the ambitious grant plans so readers understand the stakes and subsequent impact of 2022’s “financial exigency” declaration. Next, we discuss how our successes with digital humanities pedagogy and community partnerships relied on accepting our constraints. Finally, we examine how a Digital Games Day with a local high school exemplifies minimalist digital humanities through community engagement, accessible low-cost tools, and emphasis on process over product, aligning with digital pedagogy’s focus on learning outcomes rather than technology itself.
The Institution: Who We Serve and Capitalizing on Gaps in General Education
NJCU is in the Metropolitan New York City area. It is an urban, predominantly undergraduate four-year institution historically offering the lowest tuition in the state2 appealing to financially under-resourced students, the majority of whom are commuters, First Generation to College students coming from working class, immigrant communities, and/or multi-generation homes. NJCU is a Hispanic- and Minority-Serving Institution where the combined Hispanic and non-white/non-Hispanic student population is over 75%. Anecdotally, we know that English is not the primary language for many students. Nearly 60% of students are Pell-eligible (New Jersey City University, “Outcomes”) and come from homes with a median income of $42,000 USD (Lindner 2022).
At most schools, General Education (GE) provides a well-rounded education through the humanities, social sciences, and hard sciences exposing students to various disciplinary ways of thinking and intellectual debates, but NJCU’s GE requires students to take skills-based classes in Oral Communication, Quantitative Reasoning, Written Communication, etc. offered across the entire university. NJCU created an “Information and Technological Literacy” (ITL) GE requirement in 2015. By taking an ITL class, students learn how to “recognize, locate, evaluate, and effectively use information in either electronic or paper forms” (Association of College and Research Libraries 1989) and “demonstrate skills in the use of computers, software applications, databases, and other technology tools to solve problems in order to achieve a wide variety of academic and personal goals” (New Jersey City University, “Information and Technology Literacy VALUE Rubric”). If professors use the student learning outcomes rubric to design their ITL courses or assignments, there is no guarantee that students learn both information literacy (ie. source evaluation, citation management, etc.) and digital skills (ie. tools/platforms, data analysis, communication dexterity, data protection, etc.) because the rubric leans heavily on the former. A Fall 2022 assessment of the “Information and Technological Literacy” requirement confirmed students were under-developing some digital literacy skills. It was the ideal time for DEFCon.
A grant plan for the racialized digital divide
Innovative digital humanities is most often at competently (if not well-) resourced institutions across the United States. In 2022, Danica Savonick reported that nearly 60% of digital humanities programs were offered by R1 or R2 institutions and nearly 21% were offered at Small Liberal Arts Colleges (SLACs). By contrast, schools like ours, categorized as “other public institutions”, made up 13.2% of the DH programs across the United States (Savonick 2022). This exacerbates a digital divide for First Generation to College, working-class, immigrant, commuter, and/or returning students of color who are more likely to be educated by lower tuition state schools or community colleges located close to home. These students are not as prepared for the 21st century workplace that requires digital skills, which puts them at even more of a disadvantage (Gold 2012; Savonick 2022; Silva 2023).
With the grant, we envisioned four ways to build DH capacity: faculty development, community engagement, curriculum development, and student development. First, faculty development would ensure professors and librarians could teach and mentor humanities-based inquiry and computing technologies. We funded six faculty fellows to develop DH projects and participate in a reading group. Postdoctoral Fellow Al Valentín was hired to facilitate workshops, lead the reading group, and teach the first digital humanities course. Next, our curriculum goal was to create an undergraduate Digital Humanities minor and a Certificate to institutionalize digital ethnic studies. This entailed creating new DH courses to introduce students to the theories and tools of DH. Lastly, student development would occur through our DH curriculum and compensating faculty to mentor student researchers who were encouraged to join the workshops and reading group to hone their expertise. The grant also funded community partnerships with local community organizations and artists. The community partners and Artists-In-Residence were paid to build out DH projects that center core issues in Jersey City. The partners mentored student research assistants and provided classroom and campus talks open to all. Our plan was audacious, ambitious, interdisciplinary, and collaborative. The grant capaciously imagined the future we wanted, but met with real, material obstacles.
The impact of disinvestment
NJCU is the least-funded university in New Jersey. Declining state appropriations3—chronic disinvestment—alongside the looming, twin threats of student out-migration to nearby states for higher education and the “enrollment cliff” of a declining population created perilous ground for the COVID-19 pandemic. By 2022, NJCU experienced a drastic enrollment decline when the most marginalized students—our traditional base—did not or could not return; to illustrate, 6,237 undergraduates attended in 2018–2019 and by 2022 (our grant’s second year), undergraduate enrollment dropped to 4,895 students. These events led to a dramatic June 2022 when the school’s president resigned, the Board declared “financial exigency”, and announced the upcoming elimination of academic programs (47 undergraduate programs, 24 minors, 28 graduate programs, 10 certificate programs, and one doctoral program) and staff layoffs (Lindner 2022; New Jersey City University, “Academic Portfolio Reduction Actions: List of Programs Impacted”).
These cuts impacted university operations in significant ways that led us to consider exiting the grant. First, the department that housed our GIS lab—the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences—was eliminated resulting in the loss of GIS-trained personnel who could train us on the industry standard GIS software, ArcGIS. The GIS lab closed and has not re-opened. Second, a personnel reduction exacerbated chronic under-staffing in key offices across campus. Our queries went unanswered because we didn’t know that a person had been laid off. We heard ‘no’ frequently (including being told we could not use some grant monies as planned), and we were a year behind in hiring a budgeted Postdoctoral Fellow. Third, and critically, all program growth stalled. Administrators paused all proposals during the financial crisis, which remains in effect today. If we were to post any successes with the grant, we needed to think creatively and sometimes this required working outside the institution despite having money.
Curriculum Development: Minimalist Digital Humanities Pedagogy and Making Do
Institutional constraints altered the grant’s timeline. We entered the second year of the grant without progress on the minor. When Musial and Wilkinson came in, there was little enthusiasm to discuss curricula. Faculty and staff were understandably disinterested in growing digital humanities because so much had been cut. Even invested parties given released time for faculty fellowships were pulled in numerous directions to pick up the institutional slack. Nevertheless, we persisted.
Once Valentín became the Postdoctoral Fellow, work on the minor began in earnest but there were still challenges. The minor had to be budget-neutral to be considered. Two new DH courses were required (ideally taught on a rotational basis from the faculty fellows as part of their regular load) while the rest of the minor utilized existing courses. Still, we understood that “Minimalist digital humanities pedagogy aims to maximize learning while minimizing stress, barriers of access, and time (for both instructors and students)” (Savonick 2022). Thus, we designed our minor advocating for open-source programs to ensure software would not be a drain on an already-taxed university.
The two required DH courses are Introduction to Digital Humanities and Science, Technology, and Power. We wanted these courses to count as General Education electives to bolster student enrollment. However, it has been difficult to gain approval for these designations because our university, aiming to be transfer-friendly, has aligned our General Education curricula with NJ community colleges. Because DH training tends to be concentrated in well-funded research institutions, there are not many aligned offerings at community colleges (McGrail 2016). While we aimed to address the digital divide through our minor, the university was unwilling to make our courses accessible to a wider General Education audience, which could have helped combat the digital divide.
Student development: pedagogical praxis and what we learned
We secured temporary approval for Valentín’s new Introduction to Digital Humanities in Fall 2024, a precursor for permanent approval. Course learning objectives included giving students the technical and critical thinking skills to produce digital projects centered on power and justice. To maintain budget neutrality and remain accessible, Valentín opted for browser-based tools Voyant, Google MyMaps, Twine, and Flourish.4 Students didn’t need to worry about computer access because the course was scheduled in a computer lab. The course employed a series of projects that taught students mapping, text analysis, network analysis, artificial intelligence prompting (alongside AI literacy and ethics), and beginner game development. We connected readings and projects from DH scholars who are Indigenous, Black, Latine, disabled, and queer. This contextualized how the tools might factor into solutions to existing social problems. At the end, students designed digestible, engaging, and interactive projects that addressed social problems in their daily lives.
Despite the support offered, Valentín was struck by students’ lack of computer skills. Students are assumed to be tech-savvy but their technical knowledge is limited to certain types of technology. The course was in a Windows-based computer lab, but many students struggled because they were unfamiliar with basic computer competencies, Windows-based computers, and/or keyboard shortcuts; many students used iPads rather than a laptop or desktop computer. This illustrates the digital divide because students who can only afford an iPad will not develop the same competencies as their peers with MacBooks. This made some of the data entry work in the mapping project even more tedious for the students. Valentín adjusted the next time they taught the course by giving students a handout glossary, which circumvented consistent triage throughout the semester.
Valentín’s Social Justice Mapping Project serves as an exemplar for minimalist digital humanities pedagogy because it taught students that mapping is not just a way of cataloging and archiving the memories and lives of marginalized people; maps are also a way to see patterns and devise solutions. By contrasting digital and non-digital methods, students can better understand how technology has altered mapping. To begin, students looked at two projects: 1) The ABUELAS Project, which uses ArcGIS and StoryMaps to preserve the rich history of Latinos across the United States and Puerto Rico (Latinos in Heritage, 2021); then 2) The Red Hearts Campaign’s Mapping Femicides project, which maps violence against women and children in Australia using Google MyMaps (The RED HEART Campaign, 2020). Compared to ArcGIS, Google MyMaps’ simple interface was more accessible and better embodied open-source, minimal DH pedagogy. These projects were viewed alongside Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein’s chapter in Data Feminism (2020) that looks at how paper maps were made to fight against racial violence with the Detroit Geographic Expedition and Institute’s Where Commuters Run Over Black Children on the Pointes-Downton Track.
With a mapping background, students created their own maps about a social justice issue that they chose following best minimalist DH practices. They had maximum flexibility to focus on what’s important (McGrail 2016; Silva 2023). Students selected a topic, sourced and cleaned data, plotted points of interest, and overlaid keyhole markup language (KML) files which create bounded spaces on the map to indicate zip codes, counties, or states dependent on students’ needs. Using KML files, students could provide further demographic context about the areas of plotted points. Students determined where their data would focus, which led to interesting conversations about how and why knowledge is produced. For example, while one student wanted to research Haiti, it was difficult to find data on violence against women in Haiti as well as KML files of Haitian cities. This is not a failure of the students but a teachable moment to consider how racism and sexism shape who is counted. Another student used a KML file of the US to mark red and blue states based on the recent election, and plotted the top 50 universities in the country, researching which schools offered majors or minors in Gender and Ethnic Studies to see if there were correlations with the state’s politics and university offerings. Initially Valentín considered giving students preset data sets, but ultimately decided that working with the data gave students a better understanding of the process of research. Their passion shined through.
After creating their maps, students reflected on their decision-making process. This critical thinking about data sources, areas of focus, and accurate visual representation made the mapping project highly successful. The thoughtful projects helped students better understand how power works in specific spaces. This project’s success demonstrates the value and impact of our curriculum design, which was achieved with basic tools like Google accounts, KML files, data, and passion.
Community engagement: community is the way through
Community-engaged partnerships5 were baked into the grant proposal, but partner products changed over the grant’s term. The grant imagined two types of partners: community partners and artists-in-residence. These partnerships were designed to build a mutually beneficial relationship between the school and our neighbors in the spirit of “communal care, coliberation, and knowledge sharing” (Silva 2023) instead of reinforcing the hierarchical, intellectual colonialism or “savior” complex that can be embedded in town/gown interactions and service learning. We hoped to critique and reimagine new worlds together using digital tools to address the practical concerns associated with racialized gentrification in our area. In this section, we highlight two of the strongest partnerships that illustrate how minimalist DH pedagogy was an effective strategy to manage institutional obstacles. In our experience, working outside the institution yielded the greatest satisfaction. Not only that, using grant funds to support local artists and schools enacted a redistributive economy to benefit our local working class, communities of color.
The first productive partnership was with WereHere JC. Spearheaded by Jin Jung and Duquann Sweeney, WereHere JC is a public history meets activist art initiative to “spotlight the people’s history of [city]” (WereHere JC, “Home”). WereHere uses local archives, oral history, and news records to mark forgotten geographical sites and people across Jersey City. The act of forgetting is the result of Jersey City’s disinterest in local non-white history (eg. Kathleen Collins’, the first Black woman to produce a feature film, residence) or intentional disremembering (eg. the Communipaw Massacre wherein Dutch soldiers murdered 120 Lenni Lenape tribal members in 1643). Jung and Sweeney's project surfaces6 Jersey City history in a few ways: Jung creates ceramic blue plaques that look like blue dinner plates that are affixed to the site or its approximation based on historical records. Sweeney photographs the plaques or Jung holding the plaque when permission is not granted to affix it. Then, the team pinpoints the sites using Google MyMaps thereby offering an alternative vision of the city. Like in the classroom, their artivist7 practice required a minimalist DH tool—Google MyMaps—because they did not have major sources of funding to train on, use, or purchase ArcGIS.
Jung and Sweeney were keen to bring WereHere to NJCU. They created three new plaques to honor NJCU’s Black alumni with a global impact. We employed three student research assistants to support the project and proudly hung the final plaques in Spring 2025. There was a ceremony to hang the final plaque but to permanently affix the first two, Jung, Musial, and an Art professor went rogue. We quietly called our Facilities crew to move the other two plaques from their temporary location to a permanent one, a building that was once in talks to be sold off to assist with debt recovery. Later, Jung created a Black alumni mosaic originally intended for our Africana Studies Center. Our “digital native”8 student researchers encountered obstacles when they could not Google all the facts we required. One student—a History major—was undaunted. They enjoyed the challenge of digging through historical records, such as university yearbooks or city archives. The other student—a Political Science major and burgeoning content creator who is “always online”9—was nearly immobilized. Jung and Musial informed the student that she may have to consult yearbooks or speak to someone in the Alumni office. This student’s reaction demonstrates Gong and Yang’s claim that “it has become so ingrained in researchers to seek answers to any problem [from Google] as soon as it arises that they may experience withdrawal if they are unable to find one immediately” (Gong and Yang 2024, 2). She had become so “dependent” (Wang et al. 2017, 7) on Google that analog methods like print or interpersonal communication created anxiety. In the end, our intention to create a wallpaper mosaic was stymied when the Center director resigned and our administration paused use of the space. This is another example of how we needed to pivot quickly: Jung and Musial decided to turn the mosaic into a poster display for a highly-traffic area. We imagined a maximalist artivist project to honor alumni and bolster confidence in our Black students; however, we needed to reimagine smaller (literally!), which may have a greater effect given the new location’s visibility. Like the subversive act of screwing two plaques into a building, Jung and Musial’s wallpaper mosaic was another way to “make do”—reclaiming and appropriating neglected space to surface Black history at our institution.10
Creating a bridge with high school STEM students
We built another successful partnership with José Martí STEM Academy, a nearby high school that foregrounds “Competence, Academic Rigor and Nurturing” through STEM curriculum (Baez 2025). We wanted to bring DH training outside of the academy and focus on Valentín’s area of expertise: gaming. We (correctly) trusted that STEM students would be able to handle learning some code under Valentín and computer science teacher Samuel Clavijo’s guidance. Social justice games blend design, research, and simulation to make big topics accessible and playable to the people they aim to teach. The minimalist DH impulse to reduce the scale helps students learn about the world around them and act to change it. We used Twine because it is open-source, browser-based, and allows people to make text-based games with minimal coding. We held two sessions to introduce students to basic concepts in game studies and how to use Twine. The first session gave students background information on digital humanities and game studies, then showed them the most central components of Twine’s game design: making passages and links. Passages are like pages that give context to the game’s plot and links function as the actions players can choose in response to the plot. Students worked in teams to create games using Valentín’s guided questions to consider the relationship between real-world structure and game mechanics. The program culminated in the José Martí Digital Games Day where students came to campus to share their games and receive feedback from NJCU faculty and students.
We were proud of the seven games created to different levels of completion. Some games were standouts in terms of technical skill and creative vision. For example, one game focused on Latino immigrants trying to survive in the United States while playing with spelling and grammar to reflect navigating the world with a language barrier, making the game function as poetry and protest. Another game aimed to address homelessness by asking users to try different approaches while accurately representing the barriers to being heard. A third game used science fiction to consider how immigrants could be further oppressed in prison camps, positing a future that draws on real historical examples like Japanese internment. While there were a lot of successes, the program could have been even stronger if we’d structured it with playtesting in the design stage, not just at the end. This was not feasible because of their spring break and standardized testing schedule but it would be useful in future iterations of this partnership.
Conclusion
Safiyah Umoja Noble provoked, “we might also consider the degree to which our very reliance on digital tools, of the master or otherwise, exacerbates existing patterns of exploitation and at times even creates new ones” (2019, 27). There are paradoxes in minimalist DH work; for instance, MyMaps is a Google product, a nearly monopolistic tech giant responsible for skyrocketing carbon emissions and water consumption in our emerging AI-dependent world (Bhuiyan 2025). Our commitment to accessibility contributes to the kind of climate catastrophe that disproportionately affects the communities we serve. DH pedagogues may wish to consider these trade-offs if they are committed to social justice and environmental stewardship. At this time, research, dialogue, and strategizing on this topic is still emerging.
Our work is in limbo. The Trump administration’s cuts to grants associated with social justice goals and community resilience curtailed our plans to apply for additional grants (eg. the NEH DH grant). DH work remains vital, such as the scores of data recovery activist-archivists who are downloading data sets scrubbed by the federal government so that information—and history—are not lost through planned erasure. Our institution is also in flux. NJCU will dissolve due to a merger with Kean University in 2026 (New Jersey City University, “Kean University and NJCU Sign Definitive Merger Agreement to Launch Kean Jersey City”). Kean University has more economic and infrastructure resources than NJCU; there are grants and faculty support for DH research but no DH academic program. It’s unclear if our imagined minor will have a future at Kean University—Jersey City. Some of our community partner products live on: there are three WereHere plaques on campus, though it remains to be seen if Kean will remove them—a reminder that even institutional history is fleetingly preserved. Faculty projects are archived on Omeka, Canvas, and Tableau and included in our library’s DH LibGuide. While some student projects are already public because of the tools used (like Google MyMaps) they have not been preserved institutionally. We intend to emphasize preservation in future community partnerships and Intro course iterations as well as in other DH course offerings.
As renegade scholar-teachers, sometimes we wonder, “is the hassle worth it?” We are exceedingly proud of what we’ve accomplished in nearly-impossible circumstances but a grant cannot fix systemic issues. Therefore, are we seeking entry into existing structures of domination—the academy, the big tent DH, the “industry-standard” tools—or, are we trying to “hack” the system, make it work for us and for our purposes? When you are already educationally- marginalized as a struggling school with students who are system-marginalized too, we do not want students to have access alone: we demand access and critique. Maybe De Certeauian “making do” is ultimately a more radical and creative DH future filled with “new hybrid practitioners: artist-theorists, programming humanists, activist-scholars; theoretical archivists, [and] critical race coders…” (McPherson 2016, n.p) who are better positioned to imagine a different world because they exist on the margins of this one.
