Introduction

If you wanted to pick a moment that established some of the key debates in digital humanities (DH), you could do far worse than a Friday-afternoon session at the 2011 Convention of the Modern Language Association. In “The History and Future of the Digital Humanities,” Kathleen Fitzpatrick presided over three-minute provocations. Among others, Bethany Nowviskie discussed the crisis in academic employment and how the mashup of expertise and experiences within DH might provide new, alternative academic employment pathways.1 Alan Liu laid the groundwork for the then-decade-to-come when he asked very directly, “Where is cultural criticism in the digital humanities?” and argued that while DH practitioners “develop tools, data, metadata, and archives critically,” they had thus far “rarely extend[ed] . . . into the register of society, economics, politics, or culture.”2 And Stephen Ramsay dropped perhaps the biggest bomb of all when, upon articulating the “Who’s In and Who’s Out” of DH, he claimed that, as far as he was concerned, doing DH meant you “have to know how to code.”3 Throughout the session, the filled-to-capacity room gasped and tweets flew. But in the stories that we have since heard told of this session and its impact, we have found that a particular talk—that of Katherine D. Harris—almost always goes overlooked. What was its subject? Pedagogy.

It is perhaps not surprising that Harris’s short presentation on pedagogy was less noticed than other contributions. After all, she reminded the session’s audience that “teaching is often invisible labor, [even] though it’s the largest part of our jobs.”4 Teaching and learning are hard to see not because of their size but instead because the institutions that employ us have chosen to value research and its outputs (publications, chiefly) rather than pedagogy and its results (spread of knowledge, chiefly, and often enlarged and even changed minds).5 This undervaluing of educational effort continues despite the fact that it is the students, through their tuition dollars, who make possible the time faculty have to research. Is it any wonder, then, that in memories of the annual conference of a scholarly society, Liu, Nowviskie, and Ramsay stand out, as they, respectively, address the need to open new avenues of DH research, the fate of DH graduate students (a.k.a. researchers), and the requisites for doing DH research? Meanwhile, Harris’s appeal to turn all the “creativity, discovery, [and] playfulness” inherent within DH “back to our students” “both in the classroom and in our scholarship” slips through the gates of our ever-faulty memories.6

Why start What We Teach When We Teach DH with a story of forgotten DH pedagogy? A likely explanation for this rhetorical approach would be for us to say that this book will right the wrongs of the past, finally making visible the pedagogical thought and praxes within DH. As tempting and rhetorically satisfying as that approach may be, it would be disingenuous. No, Harris’s presentation did not catapult permanently into the collective imaginary, but the fact that she was invited to talk about “teaching and learning in Digital Humanities conversations” on a panel on “the history and future” of DH points to the reality that pedagogy has long been a part of the conversation and that it was anticipated to continue to play as much a role in the future as, say, Liu’s cultural criticism.7 And when you step back, it is plain to see that this is a far fairer interpretation of how pedagogy has been treated within DH.

Before Harris’s presentation in 2011, for example, one could have found teachers of DH discussing their work during Day of DH. Begun in 2009 at the University of Alberta, this social media project documents the work of DH practitioners on a particular day, making it plain what exactly they do. It turns out that the second most frequently cited activity during the first of these events was “teaching.”8 You could find further evidence of DH pedagogy in ProfHacker, a group blog that began after a discussion of pedagogy at the 2009 THATCamp (the Humanities and Technology Camp). In September 2010, Lisa Spiro began a Zotero library to track syllabi and other instructional ephemera. She presented her research at the 2011 Digital Humanities conference and simultaneously opened up the Zotero library for others to contribute resources for the study of DH pedagogy. As we write this introduction, over 150 individuals have joined the library and contributed more than 2,700 objects.9 Of course, in her presentation, Spiro acknowledged that she was building on work conducted in 2005 by Melissa Terras and subsequently published in a 2006 issue of Literary and Linguistic Computing. Further searching in that journal (which was renamed Digital Scholarship in the Humanities) surfaces even earlier pedagogical efforts, such as role-playing as Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims, using the internet to teach paleography, or discussing William Shakespeare over early email lists.10

Even more has been written and said about DH pedagogy following Harris’s presentation in 2011. The landmark volume Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles and Politics, edited by Brett D. Hirsch, appeared just a year later. Hirsch argues that “pedagogy should not be parenthetical to the experience of higher education” and charts how teaching has “held pride of place in the digital humanities” throughout its history.11 The essays in the volume discuss, variously, teaching text analysis and digital historiography, the integration of DH into first-year writing classes, and cross-campus teaching experiments. Later that same year, the first volume of Debates in the Digital Humanities included a section titled “Teaching the Digital Humanities” and the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy published its first issue. In 2013, a course in “digital humanities pedagogy” appeared at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, taught by Harris, Jentery Sayers, and Diane K. Jakacki, and Jakacki continued teaching it until 2019. A similar course was taught by Lee Skallerup Bessette and Amanda Licastro at the Humanities Intensive Learning and Teaching (HILT) institute in 2016. In the meantime, the annual Digital Humanities Conference of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) had begun to host a mini-conference titled “Innovations in Digital Humanities Pedagogy” in addition to the several papers and posters on teaching that appeared in the conference proper. Other DH conferences—ranging from the national level of the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities / Société canadienne des humanités numériques to the regional level of Digital Humanities Utah to the very local THATCamp or city-based approaches like New York City DH—saw pedagogy take a central role in their offerings. Simultaneously, twenty countries in the European Union created the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH) to support digital teaching and research. Their dariahTeach initiative hosts open educational resources (OERs) that include several on digital humanities pedagogy. The 2016 volume of Debates in the Digital Humanities saw the inclusion of two important essays on pedagogy, one by Paul Fyfe and the other by Ryan Cordell, the latter of which has the distinction of being the most frequently cited piece among all our authors. A special issue (11.3) of Digital Humanities Quarterly appeared the following year, with a focus on “undergraduate education in DH.” Editors Emily Christina Murphy and Shannon R. Smith selected essays that discuss models for DH curricula, that explore how DH fits into different disciplines, that advocate for tool development with undergraduate pedagogy in mind, or that consider the all-too-frequent intersection between those who do digital pedagogy and those who are adjuncts. Additionally, 2017 saw the publication of Claire Battershill and Shawna Ross’s Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom. As the subtitle indicates, this is a “practical introduction.” The authors intend the book not for “digital humanities specialists” but instead for “anyone who would like to increase, rethink, or complicate the ways they incorporate technology in the classroom.”12 Battershill and Ross’s definition of digital humanities is admirably broad—what might have problematically been called a “big tent” at a certain point in time—and while their “book is not concerned specifically with teaching DH itself as a subject field,” the volume is very useful for those who want to get started.13 The following year, the edited volume Teaching with Digital Humanities: Tools and Methods for Nineteenth-Century American Literature appeared. The goal of the book, as editors Jessica DeSpain and Jennifer Travis write in their introduction, is to “mov[e] from a focus on digital humanities writ large to how particular DH methods and practices operate at a field-specific level.” They hope that their very specific focus will encourage others to “imagine new uses for digital pedagogy in their own subject areas.”14 In 2020, the Modern Language Association published Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities, a peer-reviewed collection of pedagogical artifacts. Organized around keywords by the editors, Rebecca Frost Davis, Matthew K. Gold, Katherine D. Harris, and Jentery Sayers, it “highlights the stuff of teaching,” allowing it to “focus on concrete models of pedagogical practice.” The collection, to which we both contributed, “provides 573 unique artifacts that are both direct samples of digital pedagogy in action and models of teaching ideas that can be reused and remixed.”15

Recent years have seen more attention paid to pedagogy and the cultural criticism that Liu called for. For example, Roopika Risam’s New Digital Worlds (2019) includes an entire chapter on “postcolonial digital pedagogy.” She articulates the point of DH pedagogy—“not an attempt to teach students particular technical skills, applications, or platforms but a pedagogical approach that enables them to envision a relationship between themselves and knowledge production”—and discusses how a postcolonial angle enhances DH’s ability to draw “attention to the vexing relationship between culture, power, technology, and education.” She closes her chapter by discussing the work that she and multiple classes of her students have done to build a Cultural Atlas of Global Blackness; she describes the difficulties and benefits of developing a “process-driven” assignment alongside her students.16 In an essay in Bodies of Information (edited by Jacqueline Wernimont and Elizabeth Losh), Kathryn Holland and Susan Brown discuss how the collaborative feminist theory and practice that steers the long-running Orlando Project necessitates a pedagogical aspect to their work. The workflow of Orlando is explicitly “designed around the training and mentorship of students,” whose roles, like the women described in Orlando, “are transformative, always emergent.” The project has developed clear ways of both giving credit for and making visible the work that various students contribute as part of its feminist praxis, and it has continued to be supported by its two institutional homes over its twenty-plus-year life in large part due to “the high pedagogical value of the experience students gain on the project.”17 Essays by Janneken Smucker and Anne Rice in The Digital Black Atlantic collection (edited by Risam and Kelly Baker Josephs) do similar work in discussing hands-on work that has engaged them and their students. Smucker recounts how her students work with oral interviews of African American women who relocated from the American South to Philadelphia as part of the Great Migration. These interviews, which had been recorded in the 1980s and then abandoned, are digitized by her students and tagged with metadata, all according to a style guide that the students collaboratively created. Such work not only enables the “recovery of narrators’ voices,” which had gone unheard for decades, but also makes it possible to find shared experiences among the women. The recovery of texts from women and other minoritized groups has long been an important aspect of digital humanities, but Smucker’s students revive “those who did not leave behind extensive paper trails.”18 Rice discusses her efforts to create an OER on African American literature. The work took a significant effort, in part because none of the OERs that had been published when Rice began her work featured “Africana studies [in] any meaningful” way. As debates about college affordability (fortunately) continue to be on the minds of instructors, Rice argues that “we owe it to our students to ensure that marginalized students do not find their histories, cultures, and lives again excluded from the curriculum”; we must instead “insist that Black voices, histories, and knowledges are part of this [OER] movement.”19

So, as you can see, pedagogy has not been forgotten within the debates about digital humanities. Even Ramsay’s Twitter-shattering answer to his question about the necessity of coding in DH was actually a pedagogical argument: “Do you have to know how to code? I’m a tenured professor of digital humanities and I say ‘yes.’ So if you come to my program, you’re going to have to learn to do that eventually.”20 Ramsay was not saying that everyone in DH needed to learn to code but that those in his university’s program would. He clarified the pedagogical intent of his comments in a follow-up blog post a few days later: “Most of the readers of this blog know that I have devoted my life as a teacher to teaching other humanists how to code. . . . Like any passionate enthusiast—indeed, like any teacher worth their salt—I’m inclined to say that everyone should do as I do. But really, that’s as far as it goes.”21 If, despite all the misreading of his comments, it turns out that even Ramsay is talking about teaching, it seems fair to us to say that as long as there have been discussions about DH—what it is, who is doing it, who is in and who is out—there have been questions about the role of pedagogy within the field. In a way, then, while many of us have remembered that 2011 MLA session as being about research and coding, it was just as much about teaching. Indeed, these two streams have always commingled, and many of us sought to make sense of the first by means of the second. For this reason, we have thought of our pedagogy as scholarship while also harboring a deep belief that teaching is a critical, professional, and deeply scholarly practice.

One impetus for compiling this volume, then, was to stage the equivalent of that conference session, but with a clear focus on pedagogy, allowing us to put a number of people together in one space to say provocative things in short amounts of time. Of course, the advantage of a book is that we can invite thirty-eight different “presenters.” What is more, just as in a conference session, our Platonic and published pedagogical symposium makes space for an audience, readers who might not be as steeply invested in the subject at hand but are hoping to learn. This book provides, we hope, a space for our authors to write about teaching DH as scholarship and, at the same time, a space for readers to imagine themselves teaching DH.

Another intention of ours when we first started talking about this book in the summer of 2017 was to focus on teaching perspectives and experiences while avoiding the creation of a compendium of case studies and syllabi. Surely others, such as the editors of Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities, had already done this hard work. DH practitioners have already spent a lot of time sharing case studies and assignments and rubrics on personal websites, at conferences, and at workshops.22 Our original advice to authors in the call for proposals was clear: “While we expect that the essays in this volume will draw on the practical experiences of its contributors, it is decidedly not a series of assignment or course case studies.”23 And the authors abided by our restriction. But a curious thing happened. As we received and read their preliminary drafts, we realized that the authors were in some ways hobbled by not being able to foreground those kinds of specifics. In truth, it is impossible to isolate one from the other, and what we were missing from those early drafts was that spark of individual experience that can be demonstrated well through specific examples. So we adjusted course a bit and encouraged authors to reinject their personal experiences along with their revisions. Such details make plain the positionality of our contributors, who work at different institutions, with different advantages and disadvantages.

Teaching is shaped not only by one’s disciplinary training but also by one’s students, surroundings, and institutional infrastructure, and the organization of the volume reflects this as we focus, in turn, on teachers, students, classrooms, and collaborations.

We begin the volume with teachers, who until recently have had to first teach themselves and only thereafter could design courses, develop learning goals, and establish minors, majors, and graduate programs so that others, in turn, could learn. Considering this history of self-pedagogy, Emily McGinn and Lauren Coats discuss “born-pedagogical” digital humanities; they urge readers to embrace the potential of learning DH through the teaching thereof rather than trying to acquire a perfect knowledge before bringing it into the classroom. Gabriel Hankins asks where or what the standard texts are that these DH new teachers should use, proposing values that such textbooks should embody to make the issues and concerns of DH legible to students. Through an unusual cotaught course, Alison Langmead and Annette Vee question what can be gained by integrating DH into general education requirements, providing an opportunity to examine the ethics and experience of living in a world shaped by digital computing. James O’Sullivan ponders whether teaching DH abets the dark side of the humanities in a postindustrial university or whether such pedagogy presents a socioeconomic opportunity for those living in the age of late capitalism. Jacob Heil contemplates the liminal teaching space he occupies as one whose job designation and teaching affiliation are split between the library and academic affairs, and the impact that such a position has on his work in the classroom. Finally, Rebecca Frost Davis and Katherine D. Harris reflect on what it takes to teach DH at teaching-intensive institutions and the work they have invested in getting their universities to understand the distinctiveness of teaching DH.

If each teacher works in a different context from all other teachers, the same is also true of those we teach. In the section on students, our contributors contemplate what it means to teach DH to different students who have different needs. Kathi Inman Berens reflects on the changes she had to make to her DH curriculum and classroom praxis when she transitioned from a research-focused institution to an access university with an incredibly diverse student population. Jonathan D. Fitzgerald discusses the need to balance the teaching of humanistic interpretation, a hallmark of his small liberal arts college, with the desire of students (and administrators!) to have a curriculum that focuses on concrete skills that can lead to employment. Scott Cohen, also at a small liberal arts college, describes how his college responded to both fiscal and identity crises by focusing efforts on a student-driven, cross-disciplinary lab grounded in a DH ethos and by rallying around the praxis of DH pedagogy as a means to revitalize a liberal arts education. Having considered undergraduate students, the second half of this section focuses on graduate students. Asiel Sepúlveda and Claudia E. Zapata discuss their experience designing a PhD exam on digital humanities in an institution that largely lacked faculty with expertise in the subject; their attempts at self-pedagogy, a frequent enough practice in DH, had to be negotiated alongside the needs of their department and larger institution to evaluate them as scholars. While knowing that self-pedagogy is common among DH practitioners, Catherine DeRose offers that the field has progressed enough that graduate students should be taught more about DH pedagogy and proposes that this instruction take place within DH labs or centers as part of graduate professional development. Finally, Elizabeth Hopwood and Kyle Roberts contemplate the value of a master’s in digital humanities and, drawing on end-of-course evaluations and survey data, describe how their students parlay their DH master’s degree into a wide array of employment paths after completing their program.

In the third section, on classrooms, authors discuss in more concrete terms how they teach DH—ranging from general practices to philosophical approaches to individual assignments—and how this teaching leads them to reevaluate what DH means to them. Harvey Quamen proposes that one way to help students become comfortable with code is to workshop it like poetry, presenting opportunities to teach and discuss the grammar of machine languages and highlighting how code is designed to answer a specific question rather than existing for its own sake. Andie Silva also writes about adapting a course to help her students become comfortable; in this case, an intersectional, feminist approach to DH led to centering her students and their local experiences in a class that had previously focused primarily on early modern texts and their analyses. The comfort of students is again a consideration for Quinn Dombrowski, who complains that most DH instructional materials are in English and consequently provides guidelines for teaching text analysis in non-English-first classrooms. Moving in a different direction, Emily Gilliland Grover recounts her experience teaching Frankenstein with, appropriately enough, an abandoned DH tool, wondering what it means to adopt orphaned projects within our pedagogy. Working with her students to evaluate the range of tools that we use in studying the humanities—from chalkboards and desks to optical character recognition technologies and library databases—Sheila Liming cautions us not to forget the old in favor of the new. And Brandon Walsh concludes with a meta-reflection inspired by his old bicycle on the challenge of teaching when no two students learn at the same rate, requiring instructors to regularly “shift gears” to ensure all students have a meaningful learning experience.

The essays in the final section—on collaborations—address what to many is the most distinctive aspect of DH as well as its pedagogy. Chelcie Juliet Rowell and Alix Keener investigate the complex dynamics of instructional labor, drawing on interviews they conducted with librarians who partner with instructors in DH classrooms. Considering collaboration beyond the college classroom, Laquana Cooke and Andrew Famiglietti discuss their effort to teach DH principles in the context of social justice to public high school students in Philadelphia. A quartet of authors from North Carolina Central and Duke Universities—Hannah L. Jacobs, Kathryn Wymer, Victoria Szabo, and W. Russell Robinson—report on their efforts to develop a cross-institutional teacher-training program that draws on the distinctive strengths of each campus. Building a community of collaboration, Lisa Marie Rhody and Kalle Westerling discuss DH andragogy as a means of improving how we train midcareer professionals and expanding and diversifying the pool of DH scholars. Dibyadyuti Roy and Nirmala Menon similarly discuss how the particular traits of individual institutions within the sprawling Indian educational apparatus shape DH pedagogy, taking the rhizome as their most apt metaphor for presenting the nonunity that is postcolonial DH pedagogy. Examining a similar question—how is DH being taught in a non-Western space?—Lik Hang Tsui, Benjun Zhu, and Jing Chen discuss how DH is collaboratively taught throughout China, where the absence of a liberal arts model for education means that DH tends to exist in liminal, informal spaces. And finally we, the editors, argue how the collaborative nature of DH pedagogy makes possible the renegotiation of relationships between teachers and students, students themselves, and the way we think about humanities objects.

As we send this manuscript to the press, we find ourselves in the middle of a profoundly different pedagogical landscape from the one we outlined in the summer of 2017—one that would have been absolutely unrecognizable to us in the winter of 2011. The authors in this volume testify to the ways in which teaching changed simultaneously with the maturation of the method cum community cum discipline that is (are?) DH. The students, their expectations, and the facilities they can access have changed. The instructors, their confidence, and the pedagogical environments have changed—not to mention their professional designations, infrastructural support systems, and institutional expectations of them. The academy has changed radically, too, but in a way, we think it is the teaching of DH that has changed most of all in the last ten years.

The two of us sit in the midst of a pandemic trying to write our editorial apparatus on Zoom in an attempt to approximate the kind of collaborative work sessions we imagined we would carve out for ourselves at conferences. To those who claimed they envied us teaching DH in remote or hybrid modalities, assuming that it would somehow be easier or that we would be automatically more competent with telecommunications (can you say digital native?), trust us when we say that teaching DH is no less difficult than remote-teaching any other writing- and critique-centric subject. We choose not to prognosticate about what a postpandemic, (post)austerity academy will look like, or what the tools and platforms and teaching modalities will look like in another decade. And while—as with the other books in the Debates series—this volume in some ways presents a snapshot in pedagogical time, we hope that the observations and experiences of our collected authors will continue to resonate with future readers.

And with that, we invite you to read on.