Open texts, discerning minds: Broadening critical engagement with digital humanities

This session explores resources and practices for integrating digital humanities in the undergraduate classroom. We hope not only to open new paths for student engagement with texts, but also to critically examine the purpose of digital methods, and to identify the support structures needed for this work.

Responding to the conference theme call for openness, this panel will share resources and practices for integrating digital humanities projects in the classroom. Focused primarily on text-based DH projects from text mining to computational text analysis to corpus building, this panel will highlight current applications and developing projects alongside questions about purpose and practice. We hope to demonstrate how students might deepen critical engagement with texts through DH, as well as to broaden our own critical engagement with DH as method.

Inspired by the conference question on how AMICAL members might share with each other ideas on successful integration of digital tools & methods into humanities coursework, we hope to discuss several questions:

• What are best practices in conceiving, planning, and managing classroom-based DH projects?
• How might DH projects serve as experiential high-impact pedagogical practice?
• What are challenges to integrating digital projects in more traditional classrooms? How can classroom projects be sustained? What level of support is needed?
• How can DH be integrated into undergraduate students’ research efforts? What role might undergraduate students take in DH projects outside of the classroom?
• How might faculty and institutional DH projects be engaged productively in a classroom setting?