About Us
Our project sought to build upon our emergent network of collaboration across
San Diego institutions of higher learning in order to build and strengthen
Digital Humanities in our region. This Level I start-up grant supported a
series of workshops that focus on distributing DH to institutions and student
populations usually left out of the Digital Humanities (DH) movement-large state
"teaching" schools and community colleges, and particularly those that serve
largely Hispanic and other historically underrepresented groups. The goal is
to assess the barriers to implementing DH across a wide spectrum of institutions
and diverse student populations with the goal of developing work-around strategies
for implementing DH by drawing upon the resources of multiple institutions within
a single region. The outcome will be a much-needed set of protocols that can be
adapted and scaled.
This year-long initiative included a two-day workshop about DH pedagogical
innovation in early fall (October 2015), during which participants develop
specific goals and pedagogical prototypes that they then test out at their
home institutions over the academic year. A final meeting, at the end of the
year (May 2016), brought participants together to assess, refine, and publicize
findings. The workshops provided space and support for participants to develop
and test concrete approaches to teaching DH. They were carefully organized to
build upon each other but also to allow flexibility within the sessions for
hands-on activities, free-flowing discussion, and a sense of ground-up community building.
There is much work to be done to distribute DH teaching and learning beyond
R1 and liberal arts campuses, and the impetus of this project is to use DH
to readdress social inequality. DH-trained humanities majors can help meet
employment demand in STEM fields, especially in jobs that require critical
thinking and innovation about digital media. Broadened opportunities for DH
education can prepare diverse students not only to enter but also to critique
and transform the digital and data economies. DH pedagogy also has the potential
to change how scholars and teachers engage with and contribute to the larger community,
through community-based research projects and regional commitments.
We envisioned this effort as providing a model that can be scaled and replicated
to develop efficient ways of teaching DH in the context of particular institutional
challenges not yet the central to DH discourse. That is why we are making all of
our planning, process, and products available on this website.