This is the text of a keynote I gave last month at the “Digital Humanities and the Undergraduate Experience” conference hosted by the IRIS Center at Southern Illinois University – Edwardsville. My thanks to Jessica DesSpain, Kristine Hildebrandt, and their IRIS colleagues for inviting me!
Architectures for Digital Pedagogy: User-Centered and Collaborative Frameworks for Enabling Student DH Research
Hello all, thank you for joining us today for another exciting day of discussions about digital humanities and undergraduate education.
The undergraduate experience is now more experiential than ever: There are service learning courses, creative research projects for scholarly products, students traveling abroad to more places around the world, and all of this is framed by the digital environment that students are constantly immersed in. Digital humanities is now a scholarly avenue that offers similar experiential learning in the digital realm. But how do we build partnerships for undergraduate digital humanities that not only integrate innovative and interdisciplinary strategy, but are also built for sustainability?
In this talk, I hope to illuminate the ways that we can engage in partnerships that are critical to sustained success of digital humanities in the undergraduate experience.
What is Digital Learning?
First, what do we mean by digital learning or pedagogy? I often refer to this quote by Adeline Koh that brings things refreshingly into perspective:
But while digital humanities may seem like an intimidating, exponentially growing field with varying ideas of “insiders” and “outsiders,” you and your students are all already digital humanists, because you all use technology in your daily lives. At its best, the digital humanities is about engaging more critically with the intersections between technology and how we act, think and learn.
When we consider how the digital influences our personal interactions, learning, and daily lives, we see that it consistently opens up new landscapes. To bring digital humanities into the classroom means that we must attend to the full spectrum of experiences that the digital enables. The affordances of the Digital, as proposed by renowned media and technology studies scholar Janet Murray in her book Inventing the Medium, consists of particular key elements that highlight the rich opportunities of digital media for learning and engagement:
- Digital media is Procedural – Murray notes that it requires that the user execute algorithms and programs of logic in order to create, either by the user themselves or silently in the background;
- Digital media is Participatory – it demands that the user be engaged and interactive.
- Digital content is also Encyclopedic as it enables access to enormous amounts of information and digital content, as well coverage of comprehensive breadth of knowledge.
- And Murray argues that digital content enables users to expand the Spatial bounds, such that digital scholarship can be explored as a virtual space and repository of multi-layered knowledge.
According to Murray, the first two elements describe the interactivity of digital media and the second two elements capture the immersive nature of digital media. Altogether, these elements describe how digital media enable engaged and expansive forms of learning.
Thus when we incorporate digital scholarship in curricular work, how do we deliberately build experiences that enable students to experiences these affordances in the most effective way?
Collaborations in Academe
I am a librarian, and so my talk will be framed in part by my experiences and the history of my profession with its deep roots in collaboration. Libraries have long collaborated with each other around the core essential functions of sharing research materials to enable access by users, storing books, and most prominently in recent decades, the technologies of cataloging, automated processes, and digitization. The technological aspect I’d like to particularly focus on, as it reveals the ways that the digital spaces are centered around collaborative networks of knowledge.
It’s notable that collaboration has long been a must for digital humanities scholarship as well: From the large scale grant funded initiatives to the individual student’s capstone project, engaging in digital work requires multiple types of expertise, technical know-how, and scholarly scope in order to make such digital scholarship as richly complex as the technology enables.
A key challenge for digital humanities, however, is sustainability: The half-functioning husks of large and small scale digital projects are littered across the Web; all too few tools have a relatively robust open source community around them, and many more are supported by a small band of hardy souls who have canvassed grant money or have been able to convince their university to give them a few dollars and a server to keep things going. And while this is passable for research projects, DH in the classroom requires a critical level of stability and coherency that needs to persists beyond the students and even teachers. The 2017 “Building Capacity for Digital Humanities” report from the Coalition of Networked Information (CNI) and EDUCAUSE notes that to build capacity for digital scholarship and data science requires partnership:
A more mature DH institutional culture is one that recognizes that many forms of DH work — particularly those that involve computationally intensive and/or data -intensive analysis — are most effectively implemented through partnerships between individuals with diverse skill sets. In these cases, the role of librarians and IT professionals is not simply to provide access to resources or to produce code according to predefined specifications. Instead, DH work becomes a partnership that provides access to a different kind of valuable expertise, starting with the project design.”
So how to enable collaborations? This is where the “architectures” part of my talk begins to come into play. In particular, I’d like to draw upon Shannon Mattern’s writings that describe libraries as a cluster of infrastructures:
Libraries are infrastructures not only because they are ubiquitous and persistent, but also, and primarily, because they are made of interconnected networks that undergird all that foment, that create what Pierre Bourdieu would call ‘structuring structures’ that support Weinberger’s ‘messy, rich networks of people and ideas.’
What if we took this framing to explore how digital humanities in the undergraduate curriculum could be developed as a network of structures that critically involve the library?
I’d like to discuss how the development of digital humanities pedagogy in a sustainable way involves partnerships in design, implementation, and curation of digital scholarship initiatives for undergraduate learning, and what makes up the architectures of those partnerships as they involve all sorts of stakeholders, including libraries.
I will draw upon examples from my own experiences, which has spanned from being a Digital Humanities Librarian who advised a number of courses to building up infrastructure as the department head for digital publishing unit at Illinois, and now as a leader of all digital initiatives and IT at Washington University Libraries. I am still quite new to Washington University Libraries—my 8-month anniversary is on Wednesday—so my examples actually will be a mix of what I did and learned at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, my previous academic home from 2008 to 2018, as well as what I’ve gleaned so far at Wash U.
Partnerships for Building Service Infrastructure
One of the most dominant avenues for building sustainable partnerships is to engage in activities and initiatives that build up service and human infrastructure. I’d like to talk about this from several perspectives.
Collaborations in Teaching
Several years ago, I collaborated with a Media and Cinema Studies faculty member Anita Chan (who you’ll hear from later today) on teaching digital scholarship tools to an undergraduate seminar Study Abroad course on food sustainability and information networks, with Scalar being used as the final project platform.
I like to highlight this project, even years later, because it demonstrates how we developed a sustainable pilot for integrating digital scholarship tools into the classroom through collaborative teaching.
Scalar served as the overarching publishing framework where all class content was produced and published, including all course communications and student assignments. They also created data analyses with several tools: Voyant, which a a web-based text mining platform (developed at McGill University ) that contains sixteen modules for conducted different types of text mining analysis. Students used Voyant to analyze the research articles they had gathered. Easel.ly was another tool that students used to create visual infographics.
The students worked with the tools throughout the weeks of the 8-week course, and steps were integrated into the students’ work throughout the course’s weekly class activities, rather than focused on final project requirements alone.
These various assignments that progressed up to the students’ creation of two full Scalar books:A mid-term project book and the final project book at the end of the study abroad program focused on comparing their corporation with a comparable food industry in Sweden. Part of these projects also included conducting video-taped interviews with people related to their larger topic, and embedding that media as well in their Scalar sites.
This was the beginning of my in-depth work into building services for digital humanities pedagogy that went beyond a workshop, and began thinking about how can the libraries and its resources for digital humanities integrate more deeply into the curriculum. From that point, I worked with classes in Architecture, History, and Information Sciences as well as training for our Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities on digital pedagogy, thus developing resources for sustained support of digital humanities pedagogy.
Collaborations in Publishing
When I led the Scholarly Communication and Publishing unit at Illinois, we soon developed workflows for supporting students who wanted to publish their works. This ranged from a pair of students who created an Omeka site that captured the history of the Women and Gender Studies center on campus, to ongoing collaboration with the The SourceLab initiative in History Department at Illinois. This is an established digital humanities program that guides students create digital critical editions of primary source materials—ranging from films to song archives to texts—publish them in Scalar. Our publishing unit worked closely with the students to help develop their editions, and more importantly, we established workflows and infrastructures that support long-term publishing and archiving of their editions.
Collaborations: Service Building
In these collaborations, the sustainable architecture was built through the development of curricular approaches that were not dependent on a single person or moment in time. Rather, I witnessed how faculty members (some of whom you’ll hear later today) built structures that embedded digital humanities into scholarly communication and scholarly work practices that they taught the students. And in so, it was a multi-layered engagement of stakeholders, and catalysted the library to build in its own architectures. My position of Digital Humanities Librarian has continued with now three successors in the University of Illinois Library, each person building in their own aspect of digital humanities services that support undergraduate research, most notably through the support of scholarly editions and digital publishing.
Supporting Undergraduate DH Research
Another key avenue for building up support structures is the aspect of undergraduate research. You’ve already heard and will hear quite a bit more about how undergraduates carry out research and I just wanted to highlight a couple examples from past and present.
Collaborations in Research: Emblem Scholars
I worked briefly with undergraduates who were Emblem Scholars on the Emblematica Online research project, led by Professor Mara Wade at Illinois. Emblematica Online itself is a multi-institutional research project that has built, over the past 15-plus years, a digital repository of digitized rare Renaissance emblem books (as seen here). Over the years, many emblem books have been digitized to varying extents, and Emblematica Online seeks to bring these disparate collection together via a single online portal that we call the Open Emblem Portal.
Emblematica Online has been funded by a 2009 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)/DFG Bilateral Digital Humanities Grant, and then a NEH Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant from 2012-2015, which is when this pedagogical activities took place. The first phase of Emblematica Online focused on the development of the Open Emblem Portal with the digitization of the rare emblem book collections at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel, our original German partner for the NEH/DFG grant. But the second phase of Emblematica Online not only included expanded digitization of emblem books from additional rare book collections and development of research tools, but we also focused on the users–including student learners to work with this digital collection.
The students were called Emblem Scholars, and participated in an independent German Studies seminar, and pursued research in digital humanities and Renaissance Studies. They also contributed critically to the project by stitched together the digitized emblem books into digital representations that were used in the Open Emblem Portal, and they also did research on the emblem books themselves. The students presented on their work via the Undergraduate Research Symposium and even participated in a research meeting at the Newberry Library.
Collaborations in Research: Mapping LGBTQ St. Louis
In current work, Mapping LGBTQ St. Louis is a digital humanities research initiative led by a faculty member from Women and Gender Studies department and Washington University Libraries, with the support of the Center for Humanities “Divided Cities’ Initiative. Led by the faculty member, and by Special Collections Curator for Local History Miranda Rectenwald and GIS and data specialists in Data Services. I strongly urge you to visit the site and talk with Miranda for the key details, but I wanted to highlight this project as an ongoing research initiative that critically involves undergraduates.
In this project, the students are identifying and mapping spaces for LBGTQ communities in the latter half of the 20th century. This required the students to not only do archival research, but also learned basic GIS skills such as how to geocode and build out maps–using the StoryMaps application in ARCGIS Online—that display the historical sites. They received a grant from the “Divided City” initiative led by our Center for the Humanities and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. But this is a quite sustainable digital humanities research project that students will continue to participate in as it involves a critical partnership between our Libraries and collections, and the Women and Gender Studies faculty member.
Collaboration in Research: HDW Summer Fellows
Also, the Humanities Digital Workshop (HDW) at Wash U sponsors a summer fellowship program that involves intensive research collaborations between a faculty member, students, and librarians, all as research fellows. These are a range of projects, from classical studies to text mining early modern works to text encoding poetry, and critically involve multiple faculty and academic staff working with students to build digital humanities research. This is now an established collaboration with HDW and the Libraries, and enables us to embed multiple stakeholders in the research process.
Collaborations in Embedded Research
These examples are ones that necessitate active involvement of undergraduates in critical phases of the research. These aren’t necessarily one off projects, but rather build sustainable long-term research engagement with the undergraduates as this research develops. And from the library perspective, we are able to provide support for this embedded research engagement for the undergraduates because it’s in alignment with the resources and goals of the institution: We have dedicated staff, resources, and expertise in these computational approaches and disciplinary knowledge, and in this alignment, everyone can work toward shared research outcomes.
Collaborations with Adaptive Spaces
At Washington University, one key element that has emerged for us is the transformation of the physical spaces. In 2018, the WU Libraries concluded a large scale renovation project called the “Transformation” that expanded the Libraries with thousands more square footage of space, and with the exception of a new secure vault, the vast majority of the space was dedicated to user spaces.
In the division I lead at WU Libraries, the Digital Scholarship and Technology Services division, we are working to build out services in several of the new space for digital humanities teaching. These include a new Research Studio that contains computing workstations with advanced computational software and worktables where teams can collaborate. Students learn how to work with GIS, programming languages, and advanced analytics tools in the Research Studio. The Data Services department in my unit oversees this Research Studio, and also is launching new support for faculty and students seeking to explore Virtual Reality and interactive visualizations through use of the Data Visualization and Exploration space or the “DaVE.” The A/V Studio also allows students to record podcasts, short videos, and use other media technologies in a self-service.
And the Libraries as a whole also has instructional computer classrooms, loanable technologies, and interactive exhibition galleries that further lend themselves to transforming the Libraries into a truly interactive physical learning space inflected by digital technologies.
Collaborations in Adaptive Space
The key to developing spaces for sustained digital humanities scholarship support is first to be responsive and reflective of student needs and curricular needs. This involves assessment and interactions with users not just at the beginning, but throughout. And what you build really needs to think through what are the sustainable methods and tools for enabling students’ engagement with technology. For our A/V Studio, we had to adapt the service model and scale it to a self-service method.
And we have found that it is critical to partner with campus stakeholders to amplify and strengthen the use of the spaces: For example, more and more faculty members are working with our Data Services unit for use of the Research Studio and virtual reality, and we promote the A/V Studio through several different avenues.
Given that the Transformation has just occurred, we are continuing to experiment and refine spaces and their services, but collaboration is key to building out our support.
Collaborations: Not Just Tools
The goal throughout all of these collaborations, and the goal I believe for a sustainable partnerships for digital pedagogy is to think about the cluster of literacies that we can achieve. This quote from an EU digital literacy report encapsulates how we might think about our partnerships as we build up architectures for undergraduate digital pedagogy:
The awareness, attitude and ability of individuals to appropriately use digital tools and facilities to identify, access, manage, integrate, evaluate, analyse, and synthesize digital resources, construct new knowledge, create media expressions, and communicate with others, in the context of specific life situations, in order to enable constructive social action; and to reflect upon this process.
(Martin & Grudzecki, 2010)
Our partnership are not simply just teaching them how to use software and digital tools from multiple perspectives, but a holistic skill-building experience that enable them to “construct new knowledge…. Communicate with others…. Enable constructive social action and reflect upon this process.”
In sum, collaborative digital pedagogy can meld learning outcomes for information literacy, media and digital literacy among others, so that the students blend together with their on-site experiences, digital activities, and scholarship into a constantly collaborative learning experiences.
Nature of Collaborations for DH Pedagogy
In these experiences, I’ve learned that there are several critical elements that you might think of as the scaffolding for collaborative partnerships for digital humanities pedagogy:
- Clarify goals and priorities: Ensure a shared understanding of aims and mission
- Be flexible in approach and strategy: Be open to the variety of ways that all stakeholders can collaborate to support student research in digital scholarship in the richest ways;
- Create plan for workflows and allocated resources: Use Memoranda of Understanding, Service Agreement, project agreements to build sustainable plans for supporting digital pedagogy and student DH research
- Assess Continually: Assessment is essential to ensuring that we are fully addressing students’ learning needs and outcomes.
Ultimately, I think we can aim to build collaborations for digital humanities pedagogy that not only provides the students with initial skills, but lasting learning experiences as well.
REFERENCES
Emblematica Online, http://emblematica.library.illinois.edu/
Kirk, Anne, et al. Building Capacity for Digital Humanities: A Framework for Institutional Planning. ECAR Working Paper. May 2017. https://library.educause.edu/resources/2017/5/building-capacity-for-digital-humanities-a-framework-for-institutional-planning
Koh, Adeline. “Introducing Digital Humanities Work to Undergraduates: An Overview.” Hybrid Pedagogy. Published August 14, 2014. http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/journal/introducing-digital-humanities-work-undergraduates-overview/
Mapping LBGTQ St. Louis, http://thedividedcity.com/mapping-lgbtq-st-louis/
Martin, Allan and Grudziecki, Jan. “DigEuLit: Concepts and Tools for Digital Literacy Development.” Innovation in Teaching and Learning in Information and Computer Sciences 5, no. 4 (2006): 249-267.
Mattern, Shannon. “Library As Infrastructure.” Places Journal(June 2014). https://placesjournal.org/article/library-as-infrastructure/
SourceLab, https://sourcelab.history.illinois.edu/