This week’s readings got me thinking about the way that undergrad students might perceive the value of Digital Humanities, and how that is bound to effect the progress of DH in the future. I think that, given Cordell’s claim that “their disinterest is right and even salutary”, the most important underlying issue of pedagogical strategy for DH instructors would be to lessen the obfuscation about what DH is, or about who does it. Cordell goes on to delineate a few helpful criteria for how to communicate the essence of it, including the cloudiness of even the name “digital humanities” (in favor of a more focalized course title like “Texts, Maps, and Networks”). I am especially drawn to Cordell’s insistence that “Humanities” can mean a lot of things, and it shouldn’t be limited to just texts or just social science, etc. when teaching a prospective batch of future DHers about the tools and methods involved.
This idea that getting students acquainted with the accessibility, and the universality, of DH lead me to the Zotero group “DH Education” in search of syllabi geared more towards other disciplines in the Humanities, like history and anthropology. I found one interesting exercise called digital ethnography, which is basically a digitally immersive style of relaying the events in a culture, via the individual (yeah… digital ethnography). I found one syllabus assignment: (http://blogs.uoregon.edu/digitalethnography/2014/05/12/concept-paper-guidelines-2/) of a course devoted entirely to digital ethnography. I think that nominal specification, though it seems a little petty, is a simple way to enhance or specify student interest/enrollment in DH courses. While this digital ethnography assignment was still flexible (both in terms of subject and digital tools used), the category of “Humanities” being replaced by “Ethnography” allows for a more guided focus, as opposed to what some undergraduate students int he humanities might consider a daunting amount of possibilities.
Here’s a salient portion of the ethnography assignment: “Recall from class discussion so far that there is much flexibility in this assignment, in that it should fit within a larger research context for each of you. As such, the above guidelines can (and should) mold to what you are actually working on; please do consult with me in order to tailor the assignment to your specific situations.”- still an overarching degree of flexibility, in the legacy of creativity provided by DH, but here with a guiding content, ethnography. I think that narrowing what certain courses mean by “Humanities” might actually broaden student interest and pedagogical possibilities.
