Teaching DH on a Shoestring: Minimalist Digital Humanities Pedagogy

The educational benefits of digital humanities are multifaceted. Studying DH helps students increase their digital literacy. It teaches them to think critically about how technology shapes social, cultural, and political life. They learn to see beyond “productivity” and “innovation” and question the material conditions—related to labor exploitation and environmental impact—that underlie shiny new technologies. Many use what they learn to create digital projects that aim to improve society. In the process, they gain valuable transferable skills like project management, collaboration, and digital publishing. These skills, we know, are valuable not only to future employers, but to students, in their lives as activists, artists, and engaged citizens. At the heart of this article is one simple but strongly held belief: that these experiences should be available not only to students at elite research universities, but to all students, regardless of the kind of institution they attend.

Though access to college has increased dramatically in the past fifty years, disparities in the kind of institutions students attend and what they study have actually intensified along the lines of race and class (Mullen 2010; Fabricant and Brier 2016; Hamilton and Nielsen 2021). Today, affluent white students are channeled into elite, exclusive, and well-funded institutions—private colleges and flagship campuses of state universities—where they have access to small class sizes, receive personalized instruction, and are encouraged to study a broad liberal arts curriculum. By contrast, working-class students and students of color are tracked into drastically underfunded institutions, which have fewer full-time instructors, larger class sizes, and higher instructor teaching loads, and where they are steered towards pre-professional vocational education.

In “Whose Revolution? Towards a More Equitable Digital Humanities,” Matthew Gold (2012) sounded the alarm about the ways that DH funding was contributing to these disparities through its concentration at elite, research-intensive universities. Gold writes, “At stake in this inequitable distribution of digital humanities funding is the real possibility that the current wave of enthusiastic DH work will touch only the highest and most prominent towers of the academy, leaving the kinds of less prestigious academic institutions that in fact make up the greatest part of the academic landscape relatively untouched.” For all that digital humanities promises in regards to disruption, transformation, and social change, such promises will ring hollow if the field is confined solely to elite institutions and the affluent students they serve.

Though it’s difficult to find precise information about where exactly DH courses are taught, data from Gold’s “Degrees in Digital Humanities” Github repository suggests that the vast majority (roughly 87%) of the schools that offer DH programs are research-focused and/or private universities.1

At these schools, teaching loads are lower, class sizes are smaller, and there is often greater funding for technology, equipment, physical space, librarians, and support staff. The problem, then, is that the siloing of digital humanities teaching only in elite institutions can actually reproduce, or even exacerbate, existing power hierarchies by equipping more affluent and predominantly white students with extensive digital skills, while students at under-resourced institutions fall farther behind. Thus, this article focuses on what I call minimalist digital humanities pedagogy: strategies for teaching DH at institutions that don’t have many resources for doing so.

Teaching DH at Under-Resourced Institutions

While elite schools more often make news headlines, the vast majority of our nation’s students are educated at what I’ll refer to as under-resourced institutions. Though definitions of “under-resourced” vary, I use this as an umbrella term for institutions where funding falls short of what is available at elite, private, and/or research-intensive institutions.2 This encompasses open-access institutions like community colleges, Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Minority-Serving Institutions (MSIs), and regional, comprehensive universities—what Gold calls “the institutionally subaltern” (2012). My aim is not to erase the specificity of these various institutional contexts, but to strategize across these sites to develop pedagogical practices tailored for the material conditions of students and faculty at these kinds of institutions. At such schools, resources are often scarce and endowments nonexistent, but creativity and desires to learn exist in abundance.

Though we often imagine the average college student as someone between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two who lives on campus and is not working, but focusing solely on school, this profile describes an ever-smaller fraction of actual students. Today, 77 percent of undergraduates attend public universities and nearly 35 percent are enrolled in community colleges (NCES “Student Enrollment” n.d.). Thirty-three percent are above the age of 24 (Hanson 2022) and their average age is 26.4 years old (McCann 2017). Forty percent are first generation students (Startz 2022) and 33.6 percent receive Pell grants (NCES “Financial Aid,” n.d.). More than 70 percent of college students work while enrolled in college (and 40 percent work at least 30 hours per week) (Carnevale, Smith, Melton, and Price 2015). Only about 50 percent attend college full-time (McCann 2017). In contrast to their elite university counterparts, students at less exclusive and expensive institutions are more likely to be low-income, the first in their families to attend college, returning adults, veterans, and students of color. Many commute, rather than living on campus, and work full or part time outside of class. They can’t always afford functioning laptops, high-speed internet connections, or unlimited data plans. Often, their levels of preparation for college-level work vary widely. These are the material conditions we must keep in mind as we think about DH pedagogy.

This article draws on my experiences teaching DH courses (and incorporating such methods in other courses), alongside examples from other scholars, to articulate a vision of minimalist digital humanities pedagogy.3 Digital pedagogy, here, refers not only to the use of digital tools and platforms, but to the process of helping students think critically about them, especially in relation to broader social conditions and questions of power. Minimalist digital humanities pedagogy aims to maximize learning while minimizing stress, barriers of access, and time (for both instructors and students). In the sections that follow, I explore how we can take a minimalist approach to course design, course websites, and DH project assignments. More specifically, I highlight how free, low-cost, and open-source tools can be used to help students increase their digital literacy, including their awareness of the ways technologies reproduce and challenge conditions of inequality.

This article is inspired by recent scholarship on “minimal computing”: what Alex Gil defines as “computing done under some set of significant constraints of hardware, software, education, network capacity, power, or other factors” (Gil n.d.). This involves designing digital projects, not with the most flashy and expensive tools, but with those that will make the project accessible to users in a wide range of subject positions and geographic locations, who may have disparate access to resources. As someone who has only ever taught at under-resourced institutions, it’s always struck me that this is the work that we do every day as we’re figuring out how to teach digital humanities in such schools. By necessity, these institutions are sites of what Jade E. Davis (2017) calls “frugal innovation.” Davis’s four principles for “meaningful and accessible digital innovation” include: “1) simplify 2) make it fun (for faculty to learn and students to engage as part of the learning) 3) show relevance in learning and beyond 4) goal is always small cost to students including time, equipment, stigma, etc.”

This article also builds on a small but growing body of research on teaching digital humanities (Hirsch 2012; Risam 2019; Davis, Gold, Harris, and Sayers 2020; Guiliano 2022). In recent years, scholarly projects like Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities have made a concerted effort to focus on innovative teaching practices at a wide range of institutions (the introduction to that text is a useful primer for those who are just getting started). In examples drawn from her courses at a regional, comprehensive, teaching-focused institution, Roopika Risam (2019) shows how assignments such as digital textual analysis, digital writing, social media content creation, mapping and timeline projects, and Wikipedia editing assignments can help students better understand postcolonial literature, intervene in the digital cultural record, and increase their digital literacy.

Minimalist DH pedagogy also builds on Anne McGrail’s (2016) and David “Jack” Norton’s (2019) work on teaching DH in community colleges. In “The Whole Game: Digital Humanities at Community Colleges,” McGrail demonstrates how experiments with distant reading; long-term multimodal composition projects; and scaffolded, interactive assignments provide opportunities for community-college students produce knowledge and facilitate the kind of “social and cultural integration” that students at elite colleges gain through extracurriculars. Because such students often maintain “a fragile sense of belonging in the academy,” McGrail advises educators not to overwhelm them with unnecessarily complex assignments that might catalyze self-doubt. In addition, McGrail suggests that because community-college students’ average age is twenty-nine, it is important to affirm the different kinds of learning that they bring to the classroom as potential bridges to digital work. For Norton, the key to teaching DH at community colleges is designing sustainable, efficient, and reproducible teaching “workflows,” his term for the entire process of creating, teaching, and assessing assignments. Though some may hear in “efficiency” the squawks of the neoliberal university, Norton reminds us that this is a necessary strategy for navigating the large class sizes and high teaching loads one finds at community colleges. There, Norton reminds us, just five additional minutes spent per student on assessing an assignment can yield an additional thirteen hours of grading per week.

Seven Strategies for Minimalist DH Course Design

This section discusses seven strategies for minimalist DH course design, using my course on Digital Divides: Race, Class, and Gender in the Age of the Internet as the primary example. The syllabus is publicly available, as is the course website (a pedagogical decision I’ll discuss in greater detail). Digital Divides explores how digital tools and platforms both reproduce and can challenge conditions of inequality, especially in relation to race, class, gender, and sexuality. It aims to help students increase their digital literacy and to become advocates for digital justice. Though technically a 400-level seminar, minimal prerequisite requirements mean that it attracts a wide range of students. I also want to note that because my regional, comprehensive university affords the benefit of relatively small class sizes, with just fifteen to twenty students, I’ve also included ways to adapt these strategies for larger classes.

To give you a feel for the course, I’ve simplified the syllabus into six main units, which I’ll refer to in the points below. Such a structure, I believe, could easily be adapted for courses on topics like Black digital humanities, digital Black feminism, or digital ethnic studies.

Organize courses around topics that matter to students

At teaching-focused institutions, students often have not heard of digital humanities. It’s likely not listed on institution websites as a major, minor, concentration, or certificate. The halls may not be plastered with posters announcing upcoming DH events, speakers, or skills workshops (as was the case at my DH-focused PhD institution). Thus, instead of organizing the course around a subject many students were unfamiliar with, I instead organized Digital Divides around topics they do care about: namely, questions about justice and equity. The description states: “Is Google racist? Is Wikipedia sexist? In this course, we will critically reflect on the digital tools and platforms that mediate so much of our daily lives. More specifically, we will explore how digital technologies can reproduce and challenge conditions of racial, class, and gender inequality.” Framing the course in this way signals to students who care about social justice that this will be a course to explore their interests.

Assuage anxieties surrounding technological expertise

Another common experience among students at under-resourced institutions is a perception of their own technological inability. As Gold, Davis, and Harris write, recent research shows that “the last two generations of students are high-functioning consumers and users of digital technology rather than fluent, critical users of digital tools” (2020, 21). Though my students are aware of the large role technologies play in their lives, they’re also quick to admit how little they know about them. One way we can alleviate these anxieties is by explicitly addressing them. The description of Digital Divides lets students know that this course is “perfect for beginners; no advanced knowledge of digital technologies is necessary.” Another helpful strategy is making “increasing our digital literacy” one of the course objectives. I always tell students upfront that the only guarantee in this course is that things are going to go wrong. Whether they’re learning how to use WordPress or figuring out how to edit Wikipedia pages, things are inevitably going to be confusing. Tools and platforms are not going to work as they ought. Students will hit dead ends. But by making “increasing our digital literacy” a course goal, we can help students recognize these obstacles—and the strategies they develop for navigating them—as part of the learning process.

Begin with relevant texts that give students new perspectives on their everyday lives

Digital Divides begins with books like Safiya Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression (2018) and Virginia Eubanks’s Automating Inequality (2019), which highlight the often invisible ways that platforms mediate our everyday lives, in ways that can reproduce dominant power hierarchies. These readings establish a sense of urgency for the course, a sense that what students will learn this semester matters. Students’ reactions to these readings are intense. Many are, to use their term, “shook,” by these revelations about automated decision making. After reading, the devices glowing in their palms begin to look different. As early as the third week of class, students begin to ask questions like: “Why do people with authority in Google (as a company) not address the situation of racism and conduct more exams on their search engines?” “Do they change anything on their search engine to help fix this issue?” “How are algorithms created in the first place?” Many express frustration at not having been taught this earlier on and a belief that these readings should be required of all students. Beginning with compelling readings (or viewings or listenings) increases student interest and investment, which they then carry with them throughout the semester.

Help students identify their intellectual investments in the course material

Having students write blog posts and comments and lead in-class lessons on the assigned reading is one of the most effective tools in a minimalist DH pedagogy toolbox. As we read research about social media, algorithms, and surveillance technologies, these assignments create opportunities for students to connect the readings to their own particular experiences, situations, and contexts. In their blogs, comments, and facilitations, students identify potential applications and extensions of the research we read and begin asking deeper questions about digital platforms, some with the potential to turn into highly original research projects. For example, my students have shared stories about the unreliable internet connections in their rural home communities and how the college’s surveillance software identified a fake ID scam on campus. Through these assignments, students generate the observations and ideas they might later build on in their projects.

Some quick logistics. These blogs, comments, and facilitations are a major focus of our course. Depending on the course level and the number of students, they are worth anywhere from 30–75% of students’ final grades. For most classes, two students write blogs about the assigned reading and then serve as in-class discussion leaders. Their blogs can focus on whatever interests them, and we discuss how good blog posts help us see an aspect of the reading in a more complex and nuanced way. Every other student leaves a comment on at least one of the blogs prior to class (we discuss how effective comments advance the conversation, often by bringing in an additional example that further supports or complicates the blog author’s main point). In class, the two bloggers stand in front of the classroom and each teach a ten-minute lesson related to their post. We call these “facilitations” rather than “presentations” to emphasize their interactive nature. Though this assignment can take place on an institutional learning management system, the next section discusses the additional benefits of utilizing WordPress for the course’s digital learning environment, provided one is able to do so.

Yet we also need to consider how to evaluate these assignments, since they can leave us, depending on our teaching loads, with upwards of ten blog posts and seventy comments to read prior to each class. I have navigated this by providing written feedback on only two comments throughout the semester and using a rubric for all others. You can choose to spread out the evaluation workload by selecting different days to provide feedback to different classes or concentrate this feedback on a few particular days, blocked off for grading, as one would for a midterm or final essay. In addition, though I don’t always have time to closely read each comment prior to class, I try to highlight at least two excellent comments each class to incentivize thoughtful comments.

Organize course units around praxis

Another strategy is to organize course units around praxis: testing out and generating ideas through practice. As J.K. Purdom Lindblad, Bethany Nowviskie, and Jeremy Boggs (2020) write, “praxis-oriented pedagogy helps students engage with theory through concrete action.” Often, this involves pairing readings (or viewings or listenings) with small activities and assignments that challenge students to test out these ideas by experimenting with different digital tools. McGrail (2016) highlights two examples of praxis-based assignments that have been effective with community-college students: one on crowdsourcing and digital labor that results in a public policy paper, another on search engines that helps students explore “filter bubble” and “choice architecture.” Jewon Woo’s online course on “Intro to Black Digital Humanities” at Lorain County Community College includes additional examples of praxis-based assignments on topics such as “#BlackLivesMatter and social media” and “Distant reading of runaway slave advertisements.” The course opens with readings on race in digital space—including articles on digital blackface—and then asks students to write a digital auto-ethnography in which they critically reflect on their practices of self-representation online. In her unit on “#BlackLivesMatter and social media,” students read research on social media and social movements and then analyze a particular trend related to the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag on a platform of their choice.

Digital Divides encourages praxis through a unit on “Situated Knowledges and Wikipedia.” Students read Donna Haraway’s foundational 1988 essay on feminist epistemology alongside articles on bias on Wikipedia and then explore these ideas by attempting to edit or create Wikipedia pages. While Wikipedia might seem like it contains neutral or objective facts, these readings introduce the idea that the platform’s content actually reflects the standpoints of its authors. They discuss how structural barriers such as difficulty of the editing software, harassment of editors, and subjective standards impact who ends up editing Wikipedia. As a result, the platform’s content reflects the particular subject-positions of its predominantly affluent, white, male authors. After discussing these texts, students further explore these structural barriers by attempting to edit or create Wikipedia pages. By attempting to add information that meets Wikipedia’s criteria for “notability” and “neutral point of view,” students learned to think critically about the accuracy and reliability of online information, as well as the ways that the editing platform’s difficulty can become an obstacle to greater participation. As Risam writes, “editing Wikipedia gives students both experience with the politics that shape how knowledge is produced online and the tools to intervene in it” (2020, 107). Such assignments also help students understand the platform’s affordances and limitations. Summarizing the view of many in my class, one student described learning that the information on Wikipedia is often “useful and accurate however it does not paint a full picture” and that “Wikipedia should be used as a stepping stone for information … [and] a path to deeper research.”

Though creating a Wikipedia assignment can initially be time consuming, it is then relatively easy to reproduce in other courses. For those who may be interested in doing so, the Wiki Education nonprofit organization provides extensive support and a designated liaison to assist with setting up the project. There are also many online resources on designing effective Wikipedia assignments.4

Create opportunities for students to design a portion of the course

As educators well know, students learn best when they make decisions about the content and methods of their learning. One way we can encourage this is by dividing students into groups and having them design and teach course sessions on a topic of their choosing. Unit five of Digital Divides includes a student-led lesson assignment, in which students work in small groups to identify a topic they want to learn more about and then design, prepare, and teach a fifty-minute course session on the subject. Sample topics have included “fake news and media bias” and “LGBTQ+ discrimination on dating apps.” In Digital Divides, we dedicate a week of in-class time to research and preparation, and another two weeks for students’ lessons (though more would be warranted if you can spare it). Each group is responsible for every component of the lesson. First, they read a wide range of sources (scholarly research, news articles, videos of academic or TED talks, podcasts, etc.) to select the most informative, reliable, and relevant material to assign to their peers for homework. Often, by this point in the semester, students have internalized the praxis-based methods of the course, and the homework they assign to their classmates includes not only texts but also small experiments. For example, the group focused on “accessibility and universal design” asked us to apply key concepts from disability studies to everyday digital practice, by running accessibility checks on websites. Next, each group develops a plan for teaching this material to students, and we discuss various methods for doing so. They then teach an entire fifty-minute course (for larger classes, you could divide course sessions in half, so each group leads a twenty-five minute lesson). Through this process, students develop strategies for tracking down reliable information on new subjects, conveying ideas to others, collaboration, public speaking, and project management.

Utilize group work to teach collaboration

Group work is key to minimalist pedagogy for several reasons. For one, it helps students develop skills they can draw on beyond the classroom. Unlike individual assignments, group work more closely parallels the ways projects are completed outside of classrooms. The ability to work with others toward a goal is essential for success in any endeavor, whether that’s organizing a protest, solving a problem in the workplace, or arriving at an accurate medical diagnosis. In addition, group work decreases the volume of work instructors must evaluate, thus allowing us to increase the depth of feedback and attention we give. It also frequently results in stronger projects.

Ensuring these outcomes requires carefully structuring the collaboration process. I try to start from the premise that we don’t inherently know how to equitably distribute work and work effectively with others. Why would we, when so much of education teaches us to compete, rather than collaborate, with the students sitting next to us? We also address upfront the common yet dreaded phenomenon in which one student does all the work, while everyone else receives credit. Instead, we treat collaboration as a skill—like writing a thesis statement—something that we can get better at with practice. In class, we use an adapted version of Arola, Ball, and Shepherd’s “Guidelines for Successful Collaborations” in Writer/Designer (2022) to discuss strategies for dividing up large projects into small components, equitably distributing work, and setting deadlines for various components. (Students often have additional suggestions to add.) In class, students decide what each group member will do for homework, and I check in to ensure they remain on track. For any group assignment, students write a “collaboration evaluation” where they reflect on both their own and their peers’ contributions (this can be a simple, ten-minute warm-up writing exercise). Below is an example of what such an evaluation can look like:

Collaboration evaluation

• Write your project name, your name, and group members’ names on a piece of paper.
• How would you evaluate your own contribution to the final project?
  • Were you prepared for each group meeting and working session? Did you listen and contribute to conversations? Did you try to make sure everyone was included?
  • What else would you like to share about your participation? Were there any circumstances that prevented you from being an ideal contributor? Keep in mind that no one is perfect!
• How would you evaluate your peers’ contributions to the final project?
  • Were your peers prepared for each group meeting and working session? Did they listen and contribute to conversations? Did they try to make sure everyone was included? Did you all contribute equally to the project? Keep in mind that no one is perfect!
• Remember that contributions to a collaboration can take many forms: setting up a Google Doc, sending reminder emails, printing drafts of the project, writing, editing, finding images, formatting citations, transfering the project from Google Docs to your platform, etc.

Course Website

For educators with high teaching loads (and those prohibited from teaching on alternative platforms), the institutional learning management system (LMS) may be the best platform to use for the course website. Yet for those who may have pre-existing knowledge of website-building platforms like WordPress (or a desire for a hands-on opportunity to learn more about them), using alternatives to the LMS as a course website presents exciting and effective opportunities for helping students increase their digital literacy and awareness of the ideologies embedded in different platforms.

Rather than using our LMS (in our case, Blackboard), I create customized course websites using the open-source software WordPress.org. While some schools provide WordPress to students and faculty through platforms like Commons in a Box and Domain of One’s Own, Reclaim Hosting offers affordable server space for educators at schools that don’t. Creating these sites can be labor intensive (readers who are already spread thin, feel free to skip ahead to the next section!). But the pedagogical benefits are impressive. One reason I teach with WordPress is because it’s the platform on which 34 percent of the world’s websites are built. Unlike with Blackboard, when students learn to use WordPress they are developing a transferable digital skill that they can utilize beyond the classroom. Even a basic understanding of WordPress is valued in many workplaces: former students have gone on to use it in their internships and jobs. Using WordPress for a course website also catalyzes what Paul Fyfe (2011) calls “defamiliarization”: a productive estrangement from the LMS students are accustomed to. From this alternate vantage point, we can better apprehend how learning management systems like Blackboard are not neutral. Rather, like the other digital platforms we analyze in the course, they shape our relationship to learning. Often, and with minimal prompting, students begin to reflect on the ways learning looks and feels different in our digital environment: the online counterpart to the creative, student-centered community we work to cultivate in the classroom. On our WordPress class website, in a very literal sense, students’ words take center stage: their blogs are the home page. This contrasts sharply with Blackboard, which foregrounds the instructor’s content and reinforces hierarchical models of teaching. This opens up broader conversations about how educational technologies reproduce what Paulo Freire (1970) refers to as a “banking” model of education, in which expert professors deposit knowledge into students, who are then evaluated on their ability to memorize it.

I scaffold students’ interaction with WordPress to gradually familiarize them with the platform. First, students learn to write blog posts and comment on each other’s work. In lower-level courses, the next scaffolded interaction involves using WordPress for a collaborative class project in which we co-author a digital glossary of keywords for literary studies. In the context of an upper-level course like Digital Divides, once students are familiar with the WordPress Dashboard, they then work in small groups to create their own sites. While students are accustomed to using platforms like Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and TikTok, for many, this is their first time creating their own website.

As professors, we often try to strike a delicate balance between introducing students to new tools and platforms that will help them increase their digital literacy and relying on traditional ones so as not to overwhelm them (or ourselves!). Sometimes the benefits of using a familiar platform will outweigh those of introducing a new one. For instructors who choose not to go rogue, there are other ways to help students think critically about the required LMS. Students can research where these platforms came from, who holds decision-making power over them, how much they cost, and how they treat student data. We can assign work by Jesse Stommel and Sean Michael Morris, which questions whether learning management systems facilitate—or actively impede—our pedagogical goals of creative, consciousness-raising education. We can also discuss what assumptions about learning and the student-teacher relationship are embedded in the platform and invite them to imagine better alternatives, for example, by drawing what their ideal digital learning environment would look like.

Digital Humanities Project Assignments

Today, collaborative projects are one of the most common features of DH pedagogy—and for good reason. Extensive research by scholars like Kathleen Blake Yancey (2009), Tanya Clement (2012), Mark Sample (2012), Cathy Davidson (2017), Roopika Risam (2019), and Jeffrey W. McClurken (2020) has demonstrated that teaching through digital projects increases student motivation, learning, and the quality of their work. As McClurken writes, students “invest more effort, time, and attention on public class projects because they know that their creations are viewed by an audience that goes well beyond their instructors” (2020). Among their many benefits, project assignments give students the opportunity to reflect on what they’ve learned and share it with an audience beyond the classroom. In doing so, they teach students to use what they are learning, not just for personal gain, but to contribute to the public good. In Clement’s words, digital projects increase students’ “sense of creative control and … desire to participate in society” (2012). Cathy N. Davidson calls this making “a public contribution to knowledge” (2017, 267). Building on this research, this section explores how we can guide students in creating public projects worth sharing with audiences beyond the classroom. I focus, in particular, on how we can design such assignments both for teaching-focused institutions and in ways that prompt deeper critical engagement with broader issues related to the politics and ethics of technologies.

When designing project assignments it’s important to consider students’ distinct learning styles, skill levels with different technologies, and the materials (hardware, software, bandwidth, and equipment) they have access to, both on campus and at home. If, for example, we’re asking students to create a podcast, what kind of recording hardware (such as microphones) and editing software are necessary? Will students be expected to learn these on their own time or will tutorials be given in class? Jennifer Guiliano recommends “setting up loan programs for devices, creating low-bandwidth versions of course content, and providing alternative assignments that scale up to the resources available to your students” (2022, 8). Another key factor is the time that students have to complete the assignment, including how much of it will be completed inside and outside of class. In 2020, 40 percent of full time students and 74 percent of part time students held jobs while attending college (NCES 2022). They might also be commuting to campus or have family obligations, both of which make collaborative work outside of class difficult. For students who might be juggling multiple jobs as well as family obligations, scheduling in-class working sessions is paramount. So too is giving credit for this lab time. If possible, it’s helpful to reserve the computer lab to ensure that students have access to the technologies they need and have time to work together in groups. In situations where there aren’t enough computers to go around, students can be asked to bring in their own devices or double up in pairs or groups. As we design project assignments, we want to make sure that every student is equipped to succeed, regardless of prior experience, material constraints, and the amount of time they have to work on projects outside of class.

Digital project assignments can take many different forms, such as:

• creating something for the college community
• (co-)authoring a piece of public writing (like a blog post)
• creating a digital resource for a particular audience or community
• contributing to an existing digital humanities project
• improving an existing digital resource (such as editing Wikipedia articles)
• creating a particular product which might relate to the broader course goals (producing a map in a geography course or a digital exhibit in art history)
• open-ended projects in which students select a digital platform and create a project based on something they have learned in the course

For now I’m going to focus on the last one—open ended projects—as a key component of minimalist DH pedagogy. Rather than dictating the form their projects will take, students select their own form (such as website, podcast, timeline, or lesson plan) and choose an appropriate platform for their project. One key requirement is that the project should be useful to an audience beyond our classroom.

Open-ended projects have many benefits, especially for students at under-resourced institutions. They create space for student creativity. This is especially important, given the inequities of our tiered US education system, which readily provides affluent students with learning that nurtures their creativity, and leaves standardization and teaching to the test for everyone else. Open-ended projects also honor the experiential knowledge that students bring to the classroom. In addition, they require students to think critically about which platform they will select to fit the goals of their project—a key component of digital literacy. Open-ended projects are also well suited for heterogeneous students with a range of different skill levels, abilities, and levels of comfort with technologies. They allow students to determine whether they will use the project as an opportunity to learn a new platform or create something using a tool they’re more comfortable with. Such assignments are also easy to reuse and adapt for other courses—especially important for instructors with heavy course loads.

In Digital Divides, students work in small groups to create a public digital project related to our course content or their own interests (here is the full assignment sheet). This project is the product of a scaffolded assignment sequence that first introduces students to the field of digital humanities, then asks them to review an existing DH project, and then challenges them to create their own project. The set-up for the assignment begins on the first day of class, when students are informed that the course will conclude with a project. Throughout the semester, we look at examples of projects created by former students so that they can start thinking about what kind of project they’d like to create. About halfway through the semester, students are introduced to the term “digital humanities.” I wait until the middle of the course so that it can become not an intimidating new field but a term to describe the work they have already been doing. The definition we use is adapted from Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s statement that digital humanities involves 1) using digital tools and methods to perform humanities research (on culture, language, history, society, art, education etc.) and 2) analyzing technologies by asking humanistic questions (about power, representation, ethics, politics, labor, etc.) (Fitzpatrick, Lopez, and Rowland 2015). We also use the paradigm in Risam’s New Digital Worlds (2019) to think about how “the digital cultural record” both reproduces and can challenge existing power hierarchies. Next, students use these ideas to review an existing DH project related to social justice (assignment sheet). I provide options based on the students’ interests, and they’re welcome to find their own. They write a review of the project and present it to the class. In the future, I plan to assign sample reviews in Reviews in DH as models for student work.

This review sets up the project assignment, which has three stages:

1. a tool parade to evaluate the affordances and limitations of different platforms and
   select the best one for their project
2. drafting project proposals, voting on top choices, organizing into groups
3. planning and executing the project

While the amount of time devoted to such projects will vary depending on the scope of the assignment, I have found that a minimum of four weeks is necessary for a project that includes a proposal, rough draft, peer review, and then the submission and presentation of final projects (more would be warranted, again, if you can spare it).

1) Tool parade

The first stage of the assignment involves what Jesse Stommel calls a “tool parade,” which introduces students to a range of potential platforms that they might use for their project. Over the course of one fifty-minute course period, students are introduced to about eight platforms, with time at the end for students to do more research on ones that interest them. We meet in a computer lab if one is available, or students bring laptops to class (doubling up if devices are in short supply). Figure 4 illustrates the note-taking format I suggest students use as they evaluate the affordances and limitations of different platforms in order to select the most appropriate one for their project. Through this activity, we distinguish between form—as in, type of project, such as podcast, website, timeline, or blog post—and platform, or software, that they’ll use to create their project. Key here is the notion that different platforms can be used to produce a particular kind of project (a timeline could be built on an open-source platform like Timeline.js or a proprietary platform like Tiki-Toki) and that some platforms, like WordPress, can be used to create different kinds of projects, such as a blog post or website. Hesitant students may choose to stick with a platform that they know, perhaps using the project as an opportunity to increase their basic knowledge of WordPress, while technologically-savvy students may select a platform beyond those covered in class. As instructors, we are not responsible for teaching students how to use each platform; rather, we can guide them in their efforts to learn these new tools for themselves.

Next, students perform further research on potential platforms they might use for the project. Depending on how much time you have, this platform analysis could range from an in-class activity to a more formal written analysis that students present to the class. We use two sets of questions to guide this activity. The first set guides students in rhetorically analyzing platforms to consider the choices that will be available to them in creating their projects.

Questions for rhetorical analysis

• What are the conventions of the platform?
• How is information organized?
• How is content structured?
• What works well?
• How are media incorporated?
• How are citations attributed?

The second set of questions guides students in analyzing these platforms in relation to broader questions about data, privacy, and power. My goal is to help students understand that platforms are not ideologically neutral, and to consider the material conditions that underlie them.

Critical platform questions

• Who created this platform? When? Why?
• Who funds the platform? Who profits from the platform?
• What software was used to create this platform?
• What is the platform’s privacy policy? How does it treat users’ data?
• What terms are you agreeing to if you sign up for this platform?
• What do we know about the users or community?

These questions encourage broader awareness of the ways that profit shapes our online experiences, as in the old adage that “if you’re not the customer, then you’re the product.” To take just one example, my students are often eager to publish their work on HASTAC.org, a free, nonprofit, academic social network and blogging platform that allows students to share their work with its 16,000 network members, “humanists, artists, social scientists, scientists, and technologists” committed to “changing the way we teach and learn.” In addition to reading HASTAC’s Privacy Policy and Legal Agreement, we discuss how, unlike many other free digital platforms, HASTAC has promised to never share users’ data with third parties, which earned it the moniker of “the ethical social network.” Through these questions, we can do more than simply teach students to use particular digital tools—we can help them increase their digital literacy. These are questions that I hope students will ask in the future when they encounter new tools and platforms.

2) Proposal

The tool parade prepares students to write a project proposal (instructions in assignment sheet) in which they identify the aims, audience, impact, type of project, platform, and a work plan. They also identify whether their project can best be achieved by an individual or by a group and explain their reasoning. Then they vote on their top choices and organize into groups.

3) Planning and execution of projects

This involves co-working sessions in the computer lab, the submission of rough drafts, peer review, and the presentation of final projects. Figure 5 contains the chart I use to help us keep track of all materials related to the project.

One key advantage that public projects offer over final papers is the fact that they can be viewed by audiences beyond the classroom. This seemingly small shift opens up a world of possibilities for teaching digital literacy.

First, the public nature of such projects presents key opportunities to help students think critically about privacy. While students are often eager to undertake public projects, we have to help them understand the potential risks of doing so (McClurken 2020; Stommel and Morris 2020). Kevin Smith, Director of Copyright and Scholarly Communication at Duke University, offers four steps for mitigating the risks of public assignments. These include 1) informing students about the public nature of assignments early on and providing opportunities for them to speak with you about issues of privacy; 2) allowing them to use an alias or pseudonym; 3) reminding students not to post private information (such as their dorm location or social security number); and 4) providing alternative ways for students to fulfill class requirements.5 My goal is always to help students make informed decisions about how much of their identity they want to disclose.6 We discuss how their work can become genuinely useful to others, but also how their writing will be attached to their names and appear in search results for years to come, including those of potential employers, internet trolls, and immigration officials. As Table 2 illustrates, I try to help students think expansively about the implications of publishing work with their real names vs. using a pseudonym, omitting their names altogether, or choosing an alternative option that won’t be made public.

Second, the public nature of digital projects creates space for conversations about accessibility: the ways students’ design choices might impact the audiences they’re hoping to reach, including those differently positioned amid intersecting axes of power. Often, we’ll discuss “Creative and Critical Precepts for Digital Humanities Projects,” which helps students think about how to design a project that will be accessible to a wide range of users. For instance, the list of questions on “Access” includes “How accessible is the project in low bandwidth environments?” and “How accessible is the project for people with disabilities?” If students are making podcasts, we can discuss how providing an accompanying transcript will make it accessible to audiences with a range of abilities. Through this process, students gain valuable experience creating accessible digital work.

On the final day of class, I always present students with a public, digital gallery of their projects to visualize all that we have done together. This landing page allows students to interact with each other’s projects. It also helps them to easily locate their projects, which they can then share with their friends, with their family, as part of graduate school applications, or with potential future employers as evidence of their skills in writing, editing, collaborating, project and time management, and digital publishing.

Open-ended projects also allow students to pursue their own intellectual interests and create projects that are meaningful to them. Students reflect on what they have learned, identify gaps in dominant discourse, and figure out how to use their knowledge and skills to create something that will be useful to an audience beyond the classroom. Among the projects that emerged from my Fall 2019 version of this course was an activist art project in which students used what they had learned about the exploitative labor conditions in Apple’s Foxconn factories to redesign the packaging of an iPhone box to tell the story of “The True Path of the iPhone.” Another group created a lesson plan for middle-school teachers on the sexualization of young girls online, including assigned readings and viewings, discussion prompts, slides, and class activities, which they encouraged other educators to utilize via HASTAC. Yet another student created an interactive Twine storytelling game that explores the emotional experiences of grief in an era where the digital leaves traces of everything. Such projects reinforce the idea that students are active knowledge producers with important things to say and who can use what they learn to make a positive impact in the world.

One of the most effective (and essentially free) things we can do as instructors is to help students reflect on and articulate what they have learned. This involves discussing the “why” behind any assignment: what skills or knowledge we hope they will gain by doing it. At the end of every semester, I provide students with a course rationale that explains why we did each assignment and what I hoped they would get out of it. For their final assignment, they write a reflection on the various components of the course: what they learned, what they’ll take away, what they’ll continue working on, and how assignments might be improved. For the final project, the rationale states: “This semester, you used what you learned in class to create a digital project that would be useful to an audience beyond our classroom. This assignment was designed to help you think critically about the affordances and limitations of different platforms, to give you hands-on experience with digital publishing, and to practice applying what you learn to make a positive impact on the world. Through this assignment, you developed time and project management skills by creating a work plan, adjusting your project to meet set deadlines and time constraints (often in the tech world called “scoping” a project), and equitably distributing work. Your digital projects will live forever on the internet and can be shared with friends, family members, and future employers, especially as evidence of your writing, digital publishing, project management, and collaboration skills.”

Conclusion

In this article, I have highlighted some ways we can teach digital humanities without expensive software, grant funding, or labs, and sometimes even without functioning faucets. Yet this minimalist approach won’t solve the problems of unequal resource allocation in our tiered system of higher education. At the same time that we do the best we can with what we have, we must also refuse to settle for the unjust and inequitable policies of racialized austerity (Fabricant and Brier 2016; Hamilton and Nielsen 2021). Instead, we must insist that all students, regardless of race or class, deserve small class sizes, cutting-edge technology, and adequately compensated instructors. This means advocating for greater state funding for education and the redistribution of educational resources to those who need them most. All students deserve creative, transformative, empowering education—learning that prepares them not only to navigate the world, but to change it.

About the Author

Danica Savonick is an Assistant Professor of English at SUNY Cortland. Her research and teaching focus on twentieth-century and contemporary US literature, African American literature, feminist pedagogy, and digital humanities. She is currently completing a book manuscript, Insurgent Knowledge: the Poetics and Pedagogy of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich in the Era of Open Admissions (under contract with Duke University Press).