Our DH Students: A Demographic Snapshot

In 2012, Matt Gold provocatively asked:

What can digital humanities mean for cash-poor colleges with underserved student populations that have neither the staffing nor the expertise to complete DH projects on their own? What responsibilities do funders have to attempt to achieve a more equitable distribution of funding? Most importantly, what is the digital humanities missing when its professional discourse does not include the voices of the institutionally subaltern?6

The majority of college students in the United States fall under Gold’s rubric of “institutional subalternity.”7 For instance (see figure 19.1), in 2015, 36 percent of U.S. undergraduates attended public two-year colleges; 15 percent attended public institutions with a teaching focus; and 27 percent attended public or private research-intensive universities.8 A 2017 survey of DH programs found that the vast majority of American institutions offering digital humanities degrees, certificates, minors, and concentrations were housed either at research-focused universities or private liberal arts colleges.9 In sum, the distribution of U.S. undergraduates does not reflect the distribution of American DH programs; and institutions that serve the majority of our students do not offer learning experiences that might enhance digital literacy and combat the digital divide.

Complicating this discrepancy is that the majority of U.S. college students do not inherit from their parents the educational capital that is useful in claiming institutional support. In the 2011–12 academic year, nearly 60 percent of students who enrolled in higher education institutions came from families where neither parent completed a baccalaureate degree.10 First-generation student status also has racial dimensions. Hispanic students are more likely than their peers to be the first in their family to attend college, and nonwhite students are more likely than their white peers to be first-generation.11 In short, first-generation students are overwhelmingly present in American higher education, and nonwhite students are heavily represented in the population of first-generation students.

Also, while first-generation students are heavily represented in non-degree-granting and technical schools, they are not confined to those institutions. Four-year colleges with programs that offer master’s and doctoral degrees also enroll a considerable number of first-generation students. In the 2011–12 survey (see figure 19.2), first-generation students represented 69.1 percent of students enrolled in associate degree programs; 75.8 percent of students enrolled in non-degree-granting programs; 65.3 percent of students enrolled in technical schools; 50.4 percent of students enrolled in baccalaureate programs; 48.8 percent of students enrolled in master’s programs; and 36.2 percent of students enrolled in research and doctoral programs.

The growing majority of college students in the United States are also overwhelmingly represented at MSIs, which include tribal colleges and universities, historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), Asian American and Pacific Islander serving institutions (AAPISIs), and Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs). While HBCUs have received varying levels of private and federal support since the late nineteenth century, some Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs), HSIs, and AAPISIs are less than thirty years old and were born from demographic changes within certain regions, shifts in job needs, and increased access to higher education.12 Collectively, these schools educate 40 percent of currently enrolled underrepresented students.13 Beginning in 2020, “approximately 43% of the U.S. population will be comprised of minority populations.”14 These statistics reflect that institutions serving minority and first-generation college students already numerically dominate the higher-education landscape in the United States.15

Many of the students who attend these institutions have received little parental knowledge about what to expect when completing their degrees. As a result, they lack access to the technological capital that we assume of first-time DH students. Thus, just as higher education is teeming with initiatives and efforts to diversify the professoriate, so too must we think critically about how to mobilize the cultural capital of this incumbent generation to ensure long-term diversity within DH. This means developing pedagogical practices that increasingly center the students that MSI and nontraditional institutions serve. 

At California State University Fullerton (CSUF) in the 2016–17 academic year, of the over forty thousand students, more than twelve thousand (about 30 percent) of all enrolled students were first generation. In the College of Humanities and Social Sciences where the CSUF DH Initiative currently resides, that number is a bit higher—nearly 40 percent of all of our students come from families where neither parent went to college. CSUF is also an MSI and, more specifically, an HSI. CSUF’s Hispanic student enrollment regularly exceeds 40 percent (institutions must have at least 25 percent total full-time enrollment of Hispanic undergraduate students to be considered an HSI). Consequently, the institution continues to rank number one in the state of California and number two in the nation for the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded to Hispanic students. Thus, our approach to DH pedagogy is substantially influenced by the demographic profile of CSUF’s student body.16

Yet, what does it mean for DH at CSUF and similar institutions, in which the majority of students neither look like the imagined prototypical DH student nor attend the prototypical DH-supporting institution? The remainder of this essay outlines three frameworks for rethinking DH pedagogy: (1) learning styles of first-generation students; (2) technical expertise of first-generation students; and (3) integrating the long history of marginalized people into our understanding of DH. We close by arguing that building DH programs around this capital, skills, and history will result in curricula that are necessarily decolonized, globally oriented, and anti-neoliberal. Instead of focusing on (often absent) institutional infrastructural support, these curricula draw on human infrastructure, which includes collaboration among groups and actors with different kinds of expertise, as well as the tools and systems within which students are already embedded.17 Hence, these curricula are not imitations or replications of DH education at more resourced institutions but are innovative ways to engage DH research and pedagogy at nontraditional MSIs. 

First-Generation Students’ Learning Styles

Writing on first-generation students often adopts a deficit-based model. When compared with continuing-generation students’ graduation rates, GPAs, and overall success integrating into postsecondary education, first-generation students are at a disadvantage.18 This reason is that their continuing-generation peers often have ample familial knowledge and social capital to prepare them for higher education. These findings pose a challenge for traditional approaches to teaching DH, which have tended to emphasize strategies that can be anathema to the ways in which first-generation students learn. 

For instance, students enrolled in DH classes are often presumed to have some level of technological expertise (otherwise, we might ask, why are they in DH classes?), but first-generation students are among the least likely to have the time and resources to develop those skills. Furthermore, DH classes often require skills that fall outside of the traditional humanities practices, but we know that first-generation students are among the least likely to seek out institutional support. This means that students enrolled in these classes are asked to explore new terrain but are ill equipped to find help in traversing it. Finally, DH classes tend not to be part of general education courses and are often elective, so they do not fall within a prescribed career path, and they often require students to take a risk on material that might not come naturally to them or might unsettle a student’s carefully planned academic career. A central principle of our approach to DH pedagogy is that it is unfair to ask students to take risks without providing them with support. 

An asset-based model (exemplified by Eduard Arriaga’s and Margaret Simon’s work in this volume) centers the skills, practices, and knowledge that first-generation students bring to DH classrooms. For instance, research shows that first-generation students are significantly better at some learning tasks than their continuing-generation peers. In contrast to a prevailing postsecondary education context that privileges independence and individual motivations, first-generation college students are more likely to succeed in interdependent, collaborative work environments.19 Strengths in collaboration are particularly conducive to DH pedagogy. Much recent work has called for a greater emphasis on collaboration—both within and across disciplinary boundaries.20 In sum, while first-generation students are less likely to seek institutional support or experiment with new subjects, they are more likely to excel at collaboration than their continuing-generation peers—a skill that has the potential to make them more adept digital practitioners. 

Students’ Digital Expertise

Much of the writing on minority and/or first-generation students and DH has been vexed by assumptions about digital “natives” and their ability to engage with educationally appropriate technologies. Marc Prensky originally coined digital “native” as a metaphor to describe why many people in some generations, whom Prensky calls digital immigrants, feel “at sea” when faced with digital technologies.21 Usually, digital “native” is used to signal a discrepancy between what instructors expect of students and what the students themselves know.22 There are some very real problems with this model. Digital “native” is often used to criticize students who belong to a “native” generation, but who are less conversant with the workings of technology than their teachers and mentors. These critiques invoke students who might know how to manipulate an iPhone but do not know what file structures signify or cannot conceptualize the difference between print and born-digital publications. This model also presumes a homogeneous digital experience and that students coming from this metaphorical “digital country” all have the same access to technology and expertise.23 It also has the potential to undervalue skills that students have developed on their own but that are not emphasized in classrooms.

Alongside anxieties about how digitally “native” students are somehow unknowable by digitally immigrant faculty is a concern that some groups, inclusive of some students, are separated from their more privileged peers by a digital divide. The idea of a digital divide or even a series of digital divides premised on educational background is not new. Sociologists and education scholars note that this divide takes two forms. The first-level digital divide is occasioned by different degrees of access to new technologies. The second-level digital divide is occasioned by different degrees of experience or proficiency. Though these divides have different origins, both are the product of social and economic inequalities.24 These digital divides have obviously global dimensions; inequalities in internet infrastructure around the world are well documented. However, the concept also has implications within national spaces and, for the purposes of this essay, within the United States.25

For our purposes, concerns about the digital divides between students and about the degree to which students are digital “natives” both point to a set of troubling assumptions about who DH students are and how much they have in common. For instance, first-generation students often have trouble navigating the unspoken technical norms of bourgeoisie higher educational spaces, which has the potential to reinforce assumptions about digital “nativity.”26 Additionally, compared with peers from families with college or professional education, first-generation students are less likely to use digital tools for “capital-enhancing online activities.”27 Put another way, students from more privileged backgrounds are more likely to reap the economic benefits of the internet. Finally, first-generation college students are less likely to have more developed “internet user skills,” which is mostly related to information-seeking activities on the internet but is also correlated with owning laptops, having multiple spaces to access the internet, and having the time to access the internet.28 Students from households where neither parent attended college are more likely to rely on smartphones for their internet access, and many more households have access to smartphones than have access to personal computers.29 These characteristics should not lead us to lament the degree to which students do not live up to our (often bourgeois) technical values but should instead cause us to question whether these values are necessary for DH education. 

Expanding the History of DH

Finally, we need to adopt Roopika Risam’s call to tell “alternate histories of the digital humanities . . . through intersectional lenses” and keep in mind the ways in which structural inequality has already conditioned the development of DH.30 This also makes manifest the ways in which DH does not always need to be nor has been entirely the purview of people who are white, privileged, and male. After all, the earlier works of Anna Everett, Tyrone Taborn, and Chela Sandoval remind us that digital humanists and their proponents have always been multi-dimensional and have long grappled with questions of race, identity, and access in the digital realm. Everett argued in 2002 that 1995 was the “watershed moment in the transformation of the Internet from a predominantly elite, white masculinist domain to a more egalitarian public sphere.”31 This transformation was ushered in by Yahoo’s creation of a separate category for Afrocentric content on the web. By championing an increased African diasporic consciousness in what was then termed cyberspace, while interrogating its absence, Everett and other early scholars of race and digital technology/digital media helped to usher in the problem spaces we know today as the Digital Black Atlantic, Black DH, critical DH, and postcolonial DH.32

Similarly, in 2008 publisher and communications CEO Tyrone Taborn recognized that simply providing historically marginalized students with access to computers and other technology would do little to close the digital divide or increase minority participation in computing and technology fields, because these issues were related more to the narratives and mythologies that surround these fields rather than just the socioeconomic position of the student. More specifically, he advanced the idea that minority representation within narratives of America’s technological history are scarce and often hidden and that “The lack of visible role models in science and digital media technologies represents an enormous problem for closing the technology gap.”33 Taborn calls for the (re)insertion of racial and ethnic minorities into founding narratives on science, technology, invention, and innovation in America. He also advanced more structural solutions including providing students in science, technology, and in this case, DH courses, with living and nonliving role models to whom they can relate, thus helping to increase feelings of self-confidence, belonging, and inclusion within the discipline. To this end Taborn relocated race within narratives on technological innovation through the stories of racial and ethnic minorities such as Katherine Johnson, Edson de Castro, and Tianna Shaw, to name a few.34

Early digital humanists rightfully perceived that the issue of scarcity and lack was not simply the burden of the historically marginalized digital public sphere, but that it was representative of a rather anemic technological infrastructure predicated on espousing incomplete histories, engaging fragmented publics, and creating limited spaces (both physically and theoretically) for innovation. As such, we want to close by offering some concrete solutions for building DH pedagogy that centers first-generation college students at minority-serving institutions. These solutions focus on how to develop programs that support students; how to build assignments that foster DH skills; and how to reframe our understanding of DH in response to critiques of neoliberalism, globalization, and colonialism.

Concrete Solutions

Rather than designing DH programs that fix the problem of first-generation students’ not learning or using the internet in ways that researchers expect of them or not fitting the traditional notions of digital practitioners, we argue that DH courses and programs should embrace the ways in which students are already using the digital to explore humanistic questions. This shifts the focus away from lamenting underresourced institutional infrastructure to utilizing students’ own human infrastructure. In doing so, we support the model outlined in the chapter “Manifesto for Student-Driven Research and Learning,” which centers student voices and builds on student needs and expertise.35

More than their continuing-generation peers, first-generation students engage in augmented reality through smartphones and mobile devices. They are adept practitioners of flexible and collaborative work, both because they are generally more proficient in collaborative work and because many work across multiple desktops or mobile devices instead of a single dedicated computer. Many first-generation students are also already engaging with the long history of nonwhite DH. For example, first-generation students of Hispanic descent are more adept with the Spanish-language internet than they are with the English-language internet.36 Similarly, indigenous digital practitioners have been developing DH projects that speak to the unique needs of indigenous communities.37 The suggestions that follow emerged in response to students in DH classes at California State University Fullerton. This means that they sometimes emphasize the specific needs of students who are both first-generation and Hispanic. However, we anticipate that many of them will be generalizable to first-generation populations at other institutions and, more broadly, to other student populations.

In order to address the disparities between first- and continuing-generation students’ familiarity with DH as a field, institutions that serve minority and first-generation students should work to introduce DH modules in lower-division general education courses, so that students develop early familiarity with DH concepts, tools, and practices such as experiential learning. In so doing, students can “test drive” DH without the risk of committing to an entire course, and yet these modules can act as a bridge for students who want to engage in more robust DH courses and pedagogy in the future.

Several strategies will help to ensure that students’ access to tools matches pedagogical expectations. This includes incorporating Global Outlook::DH’s call “to help break down barriers that hinder communication and collaboration among researchers and students of the Digital Arts, Humanities, and Cultural Heritage sectors in high, mid, and low income economies.”38 As part of this approach, we need to explore the possibilities of minimal computing, which interrogates the “dichotomy of choice vs. necessity and focuses the group on computing that is decidedly not high-performance and importantly not first-world desktop computing.”39 As several of the chapters in this volume on infrastructure demonstrate, not all DH projects require complicated and expensive tools. In fact, we may do our students a better service by talking about the structure of digital tools and introducing them to tools that they will be able to access for free when they leave our campuses. For example, in our DH practicum we ask students to explore a number of low-stakes and free or low-cost tools, such as Voyant, Palladio, Google Earth Web, and WithKnown, which allow them to participate in DH practices without committing funds or hours to mastering technology for the sake of mastery.

Another approach should include carving out physical spaces for DH on MSI campuses. This means labs with hours that extend beyond the 9 a.m.–5 p.m. work day, computers loaded with required software, and the ability to check out machines for home use. We cannot assume that all students have access to all technology at all times and must give them space to explore in institutionally supported arenas. We must also consider developing assignments that make use of hardware with which students are already proficient. This might mean assignments that foreground work that can be done on smartphones. These kinds of assignments might build on recent studies that have shown that increased smartphone usage can help develop users’ abilities to master tasks that demand sustained attention and multitasking.40 These kinds of assignments also decenter institutional infrastructure in favor of the human infrastructure in which students are already embedded.

In order to capitalize on students’ connection with nonwhite DH in classrooms, faculty should begin by designing projects and assignments that introduce students not only to DH, but also to new ways of looking at themselves or their communities by using digital storytelling or personal mapping modules. It is not surprising that Gina Garcia and Otgonjargal Okhidoi’s 2015 study underscores the powerful role that culturally relevant curricula play in shaping academic engagement and achievement, particularly at HSIs. They argue that for minority and first-generation students culturally relevant curricula are essential for fomenting a sense of belonging within the institution and also for “affirm[ing] the existence [of] Latina/o and other underrepresented groups, while validating their experiences.”41 Although their study focuses specifically on Chicana/o studies programs and Latina/o support services, their claim can and should be applied to DH courses that provide new tools for engaging diverse perspectives within new and old problem spaces.

Another strategy involves meeting students in their own digital vernacular spaces. Many students are already engaging with DH through social media, and pretending that TEI is real DH whereas tumblr archives are not real DH does a disservice both to the profession and to our students. In fact, the need for students to critically engage with social media was recently underscored by the African American History, Culture and Digital Humanities (AADHum) Initiative’s inaugural Social Media Corps Fellowship, which trains undergraduate and graduate students to produce digital content or artifacts specifically for social media. One way to discover which web 2.0 tools and technologies students are already working with, as well as assess their fears and/or expectations for the course, is to administer a prelearning self-assessment during the first week of class. This does not have to be a major assignment but rather a “lite” opportunity to learn more about your students and their interest in DH. The prelearning self-assessment is typically four hundred words maximum and asks students to (1) provide brief background on how they came to take this course and how it fits into their overall academic plans for this semester/school year or beyond; (2) detail any prior academic background or life experiences that have allowed them to interact with digital history; and (3) describe what they hope to learn throughout the semester and how they plan to meet the learning objectives outlined on page 1 of the syllabus.

Although we complete ice-breakers and “get to know you” exercises in class, we often discover more about our students and their personal and academic lives in this short exercise than in face-to-face exercises. Instructors can also use this assignment to help troubleshoot potential areas of concern that students may have. This assessment can also be followed up with a postlearning self-assessment at the end of the class, but it is not required.

In the first five weeks of our Intro to Digital History course, students were asked to prepare a two-minute script for a podcast or multimedia blog post that shared the history of an object. The objective of this assignment was for students to weave a compelling historical narrative around an artifact using digital tools that they had never accessed before. Not surprisingly, many students chose objects that had personal significance, including a great-uncle’s postcard sent home from the front lines during World War II, which gave a glimpse of a young soldier’s experience in war. Another student featured a guitar used to play Mexican corridos in her home, which also disclosed personal stories of migration, and another student selected a “joint,” which symbolized a friend’s arrest for possession of marijuana and his subsequent introduction to U.S. drug policy and the historical disparities within the “war on drugs.” All these “Two Minutes in History” submissions, as they were called, served to acclimate students to new digital tools and methods for moving historical work off the printed page and also to contextualize and disseminate important local and family histories to a wider public.

As we design new assignments, we need to think about how to assess both those students who prefer individualistic, independent work and those who work better in collaborative environments. This might mean scaffolding assignments. It might also mean borrowing the paired programming model from computer science, which requires students to collaboratively tackle new skills, and adopting lab time for experimentation with new tools. It also requires an explicit discussion about how to work in academic groups, mechanisms for dividing labor, and rules of engagement for collaboration. After all, assuming that collaboration looks the same for students and for instructors, or even for all students, would be a mistake.

To this end we find that pairing collaborative assignments with reflexive writing exercises helps to build comprehension and alleviate some of the fear that students have that group work will not adequately reflect their individual contributions or, worse, that a lack of participation from other group members will ruin the quality of the assignment and thereby bring down their course grade. For this reason, we make collaboration itself a unit of study within the Intro to Digital History course by analyzing critical readings and examples of collaborative and participatory research. Throughout this unit, students learn that the value of collaborative design is not simply in the final product that it produces but is also in the process itself. Following the completion of the collaborative assignment, all students are asked to assess their experience in two ways. First they are required to submit an online peer-evaluation and self-evaluation form, which serves as a brief “report” disclosing the quality and frequency of individual engagement with the team during the completion of the project. This form asks students to evaluate on a scale of 1 to 3, with 3 being the highest, each group member’s cooperation, availability for communication, and contribution to the overall success of the project including their own. The second assessment asks students to write a blog post that earnestly reflects upon their collaboration process.

Finally, we who are building DH programs at MSIs must remember that it is not necessary to automatically adopt a neoliberal framework that says that the digital is an avenue to better jobs but also not to assume that our students are not interested in the economic value of their labor. Rather, we should make clear that some DH labor is highly valued and may help students navigate the labor market. For instance, students might be interested in learning GIS as a way to get into state and county jobs that require spatial analysis. These students should not be discouraged from learning ArcGIS simply because it is a valued skill but should also not be encouraged to learn it only because it is valued. Rather, DH classes should discuss the analytical payoff of these tools and introduce students to ways of thinking with digital humanities. As potential and future DH practitioners, students should have the opportunity to reframe traditional discussions about DH pedagogy and in the process make the digital more open and accessible to all.

Notes

1. See Allington, Brouillette, and Golumbia, “Neoliberal Tools (and Archives)”; and Litvack, “In Harlem, a Digital Renaissance Takes Shape.”

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2. Bailey, “All the Digital Humanists Are White.”

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3. See, for example, the work published by EdSurge Independent: https://edsurgeindependent.com/.

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4. See Gold, “Whose Revolution?”; and Hackney, Cunningham, and Sula, “A Survey of Digital Humanities Programs.”

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5. Costanza-Chock, “Design Justice,” 5.

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6. Gold, “Whose Revolution?”

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7. McGrail, “The Whole Game”; and Cottom, Lower Ed.

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8. Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Carnegie Classification.

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9. The findings from Hackney, Cunningham, and Sula’s study were correlated with Carnegie Classification of Institutions (http://carnegieclassifications.iu.edu) by the authors.

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10. National Center for Education Statistics, “Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study.”

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11. Saenz et al., First in My Family.

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12. For this reason Executive Orders 13592, 13555, and 13515 are aimed at increasing and strengthening the participation of American Indian and Alaskan Native, Hispanic, and Asian Americans, respectively, within higher education (U.S. Department of the Interior, “Minority Serving Institutions Program”).

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13. Institute for Higher Education Policy, Supporting First Generation College Students.

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14. Montenegro and Jankowski, Focused on What Matters.

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15. Between 2013 and 2017 the Penn Center for MSIs released over twenty publications and research reports on MSIs and awarded “$1.3 million in capacity-building grants to 26 different MSIs to support innovation, retention, and degree attainment for over 180,000 students.”

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16. Though the figures mentioned here reflect data from the 2016–2017 academic year, they are consistent with the most recent Fall 2020 Institutional Profile for CSUF, which reported that 48.5 percent of enrolled students were from underrepresented minority groups, and first-generation students made up 31.5 percent of the undergraduate population.

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17. Lee, Dourish, and Mark, “The Human Infrastructure of Cyberinfrastructure.”

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18. National Center for Education Statistics, “Status and Trends.”

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19. Stephens et al., “Unseen Disadvantage.”

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20. Chan et al., “Interdisciplinary Collaboration.”

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21. Prensky, “Digital Natives.”

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22. Shrout and Christian-Lamb, “‘Starting from Scratch’?”

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23. See Helsper and Eynon, “Digital Natives”; and Margaryan, Littlejohn, and Vojt, “Are Digital Natives a Myth or Reality?”

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24. See Stern, “Inequality in the Internet Age”; Tsatsou, “Digital Divides Revisited”; and Trültzch, Kõuts-Klemm, and Aroldi, “Transforming Digital Divides.”

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25. Robison and Crenshaw, “Reevaluating the Global Digital Divide.”

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26. Stephens, Hamedani, and Destin, “Closing the Social Class Achievement Gap.”

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27. Hargittai, “Digital Na(t)ives?”

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28. Chen, First-Generation Students in Postsecondary Education.

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29. Pew Research Center, “Mobile Fact Sheet.”

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30. Risam, “Beyond the Margins.”

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31. Everett, “The Revolution Will Be Digitized,” 126.

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32. For more on any of these concentrations see the Digital Black Atlantic volume in the Debates in DH Series and other works by Kim Gallon, Alan Lui, and/or Roopika Risam.

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33. Taborn, “Separating Race from Technology,” 40.

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34. Taborn, “Separating Race from Technology.”

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35. Miya et al., “Manifesto for Student-Driven Research and Learning.”

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36. Torrent, “Edición Digital.”

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37. LaPensée, “Games as Enduring Presence.”

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38. Global Outlook::Digital Humanities, “About.”

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39. Global Outlook::Digital Humanities, “Minimal Computing.”

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40. Wilmer, Sherman, and Chein, “Smartphones and Cognition.”

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41. Garcia and Okhidoi, “Culturally Relevant Practices.”

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