Why Our Digital Humanities Program Died and What You Can Learn about Saving Yours

Revising the Traditional Curriculum

The University of Illinois Springfield is a regional public liberal arts institution in the Midwest. With an enrollment of about five thousand students split somewhat evenly between on campus and online liberal arts and professional programs, UIS is the smallest of the three campuses in the University of Illinois system. Our student population is nontraditional and increasingly diverse. Graduate programs typically enroll part-time students who attend to increase salary and broaden professional opportunities. In the UIS Department of English and Modern Languages (henceforth English department), graduate student enrollment had seen variability, but it was a small program with a brief period of expansion followed by quick contraction.1 Early in its history (from 1993 to 2001), enrollments ranged from one to fourteen students per year with a mean of six and a median of five over these eight years; there were two outlier years with thirteen and fourteen students, respectively, according to the formal self-study conducted in 2003 by the English department. There was also a five-to-six-year period (from 2003 to 2009) that saw much larger enrollments with an influx of many part-time students, increasingly women and teachers who were seeking credit hours, if not the MA, to secure a better salary and career advancement in their school districts. Enrollments during this period ranged from a high of forty-three early in fall 2003 but began falling steadily in the first four years and then dropping precipitously the two following years so that enrollment totaled twenty-two by fall 2009 (formal department self-study, 2011). With this pattern of enrollment change, the mean of thirty-four and a median of thirty-six during our program self-study in 2011 were poor indicators of enrollment potential that contributed to our administration’s perceptions of the department as declining and less than fully productive. The recession of 2008 and the subsequent changes in reimbursement by local school districts had a profoundly negative impact on this unusual era of growth, but these were not addressed as factors in enrollment patterns. Teachers from local districts no longer benefited from a state program that would pay for graduate courses. We hoped to see more enrollments by increasing direct marketing and outreach on our own, with minimal resources and pressure to improve metrics, but these efforts were ineffective. We maintained an enrollment of twenty-one to twenty-two students each year for two more years (from 2010 to 2012), most of whom were part-time.

During the next three years, we saw enrollment numbers revert to earlier levels of the 1990s to the early aughts, that is, we had six, eleven, and sixteen students, respectively, from 2013 to 2016 in the MA program. In retrospect, with the value of another departmental self-study in 2018 in which we compared the enrollments in our graduate program with the enrollments at other Illinois public universities, it became clear that by the numbers, we were not unique. Our enrollment numbers for MA programs in English placed us within the median of regional public institutions in midsize cities and followed trends observable in these programs between 2007 and 2016, according to the 2018 formal departmental self-study. Yet we felt we were paddling as fast as we could to respond to questions about the future of our MA in English, questions that required answers or efforts beyond our purview. We could not change larger trends in the number of humanities majors. We could not undertake additional marketing and outreach efforts alongside our regular responsibilities as faculty. We were also baffled by the undue emphasis given enrollment numbers from an unusual period of expansion in the department’s history for which external support in school districts no longer existed. Enrollment urgency increased when the dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences began talking about closing our graduate program altogether. Thus, in academic year 2010–11, our faculty of ten unanimously agreed to revise the graduate curriculum to leverage the institution’s reputation as a leader in online education and integrate digital methods with our other fields of expertise to pivot our entire MA to focus on DH. We assembled a committee of four faculty members and a graduate student. After two years of research about other DH programs, our market, and best practices, our department submitted the revised MA curriculum to governance in academic year 2012–13.

Although the curricular change was undertaken because of enrollment pressures, there were also strong, positive reasons for a radical reframing of the English MA to focus on digital humanities. Some faculty had already begun expanding their scholarship into these areas. We argued at the time that faculty across the university had felt the impact of digital culture and technologies and that the impact was particularly significant in English studies. The myriad changes in reading, writing, and textual production of the past few years were as profound as those initiated by the printing press in the sixteenth century. We anticipated a sea change in the skills our students would need and the projects they could complete. Our curriculum would provide marketable textual analysis and data visualization skills, a deep understanding of classroom technologies, and a facility with digital publishing and editing. In addition to the traditional skills of a graduate degree in English, these digital methodologies could open doors for our students. The world was going digital, and we wanted to provide a conduit to the changes in resources, methods, and occupations at the forefront of this change. It was an exciting time to be working in a new field whose practitioners were learning together and doing so in an inspiring, generous, and collaborative fashion.

Given the enrollment pressures that initiated the program revision, we requested an economic feasibility study from the associate provost of Budget and Administrative Planning, the chief financial officer for our campus. We envisioned a five-year timeline for establishing and growing DH programming in English, with assessment toward the end of this period for further revision. The economic feasibility study assessed potential tuition and course fee revenue based on assumptions of breaking even or perhaps beginning to see a slight return on investment by the third year of this new program. This analysis was predicated on increased credit hours generated over a four-year period, which entailed two enrollment periods (fall and spring), with cohorts taking a full-time load. It also was based on the increasing numbers of applicants with a yield of full-time registered students that would increase our ten-year historical average of eight to ten graduate students per year by 40 to 50 percent each year over four years. Costs taken into account included allocating substantial funds for a faculty hire (estimated $60,000 per annum for a tenure or tenure-track position) and for faculty training (estimated $10,000) and for marketing and other material support (estimated $10,000) during the first three years. With these investments, we hoped that this would be a strong option in the Midwest region, a “destination” program that would attract strong applicant pools over time. We had hopes, not unjustified, yet not borne out in enrollments, of attracting applicants both within and outside our region who might enroll full-time or nearly so.

Another early step was surveying DH programming at relevant cohort institutions, specifically Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges (COPLAC) institutions, as well as the offerings at much larger sister University of Illinois campuses at Chicago and Urbana-Champaign (UIC and UIUC) and at large midwestern and coastal universities where DH curricula were emergent. We reviewed these institutions, in addition to assessing the local, regional, and national landscape in DH, a first step toward DH capacity (Educause Center for Analysis and Research, “Building Capacity,” 6–8). However, the initial survey, according to ECAR, should inform an institutional needs assessment. Ours, however, stood alone and untethered from any institutional focus on DH. We determined that although a smattering of specific DH courses was offered, no fully developed DH-focused MA programs existed at institutions similar to ours in the Midwest at the time, suggesting a gap we could fill. Because we had surveyed DH programs in other institutions, we knew DH at a teaching institution would be unique. As Brett D. Hirsch observes in his introduction to Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles and Politics, despite the early grounding of digital humanities in pedagogy, the programs that thrive exist largely at research institutions where pedagogy often plays second fiddle to scholarship. He posits a “(Re-)Turn” toward pedagogy (6), but, unfortunately, structural reasons for the research-pedagogy divide continue to make implementing DH curricula in an institution such as ours a fraught endeavor. We knew that we could not create a program comparable to those at larger research-oriented institutions. We instead focused on our faculty’s strengths, the teaching mission of our institution, and its potential as a small, personalized program. We had hoped this focus would recruit students more broadly from the state and beyond. Although we could envision our students going on to PhD programs in DH or at least using DH methods in more traditional English PhD programs, we anticipated that the MA, the terminal degree for most of our students, would enhance their professional skills in education, publishing, and other sectors where they would have the advantages of using digital tools to understand the logic and aesthetics of print and virtual literacies, literary production, and the increasingly complex relationship between them.

Because employment in education and in publishing is important to our students, we constructed a curriculum with two tracks, one in digital pedagogy and one in digital publishing (see Appendix). The digital pedagogy track was built upon a burgeoning graduate certificate program in pedagogy marketed to community college teachers who needed eighteen hours of graduate credit in English to secure their employment and to high school instructors teaching dual credit or advanced placement courses. In the revised English MA, all graduate students took a common core, including courses such as Computing in English Studies, an overview and hands-on analytic approaches to using computers in English studies; Digital Humanities Research, an introduction to research methodologies for using digital resources, including online archives, practice in textual markup, and web design/editing; and Textual Criticism, a study of editorial, archival, and analytic tools and methods for English studies that pertain to digital texts and online modes of publication in an interdisciplinary context. Students selected either digital publishing or digital pedagogy as a concentration and then completed additional coursework. Digital publishing required courses including Rhetoric and Composition in Digital Media, The Business of Creative Writing, three creative writing workshops, a literature elective, and a closure project. Digital pedagogy required courses including Teaching Writing, Teaching Literature, sociolinguistics, Teaching Technologies, a teaching practicum, two literature electives, and a closure project. The faculty all agreed that they would infuse DH methods and technologies into all of their courses.

We recognized a successful DH program housed in the UIS English department and oriented to English studies would still need to build connections across disciplinary boundaries and develop faculty skills. We quickly secured $5,000 through a UIS internal funding source, the Strategic Academic Initiative Grant (SAIG), intended to promote interdisciplinary initiatives. Our goal was to introduce ideas and methods of new curricular DH initiatives in our respective programs, focusing on revision of the MA curriculum in English and establishing courses or projects relevant to the graduate public history concentration in the history MA. This grant funded an initial workshop and faculty training led by a specialist from a research university with a new but strong DH center. The workshop was successful and well attended by faculty in English, history, communications, and computer science divisions and by specialists and support staff in the UIS Center for Online Learning and in information technology. Our beginning looked promising.

Expectations and Reality

Our graduate students created strong DH projects from the first years of the program initiation as they worked with a small but carefully curated set of methods and tools most relevant to their specific professional goals for teaching literature, creative writing, linguistics, or composition. We aimed to see students acquire a sufficient understanding of the various tools and methods to apply them broadly. In this, we saw success. Our core classes provided opportunities for students to apply their DH skills.2 For example, in Digital Humanities Research Methods, the gateway course to the MA for both DH pedagogy and DH publishing concentrations, students planning to teach composition courses did sentiment analyses of composition and rhetoric texts often used in first-year writing courses. In one excellent project, Daymon Kiliman, then a graduate student in the fall 2016 DH methods course and now the director of a community college writing center, performed a textual analysis of the “model” summaries and paraphrases provided to students for a compare and contrast assignment. He found that the assignment contained lexical and syntactical features that implied a set of expectations both complementing and diverging from the written instructions, creating conflicts with assignment grading rubrics (Kiliman, “Composition Textbooks”). This had implications in the evaluation of textbooks and faculty and instructor training. In a course specific to the pedagogy track, Teaching Literature, students created syllabi and assignments using technologies and DH methods. Sheri Wingo, an experienced high school teacher, created a class about literature in digital culture. In a project that would become the basis for her thesis, she focused on “the potential of digital formats to examine questions of readership, authorship, embodiment, and power” through analysis of “content [. . .], form, user interface, interactivity, and platform” (Wingo, “Using a Hybrid Flipped-Blended Approach”). The course, then, was inclusive of both traditional literary forms, such as the novel Ready Player One, but also the rhizomatic structure of digital poetry and the interactive narratives of video games. If our curriculum had not provided the imaginative space for such a project, it is doubtful that she would have created assignments for students critically exploring connections between digital texts, modes of production, and critical analysis. These are but two of several sophisticated projects we were delighted to supervise. We had hoped to create stronger connections to undergraduate programming using transitional 400-level coursework and connections to the library and to peer tutoring, but these aspects of the program did not have a chance to develop. Nevertheless, our students have found their graduate work useful in their careers. In this respect, our revised curriculum met our objectives.

In the time we had, we were unable to capitalize immediately on these student successes for recruitment. Besides hiring an additional creative writer and filling a vacant line with a digital humanist or compositionist, the success of the new curriculum hinged upon four primary needs: faculty development in digital research methods and pedagogy; aggressive program marketing; one course release for managing and building the program; and a “story” (digital) lab for teaching and collaborative work. Although our hires were approved, the other needs were only partially addressed or ignored completely following the curriculum approval in 2014.

Finding faculty who fit our graduate program, the liberal arts mission of the university, and the needs of our undergraduates was more challenging than anticipated. The term “digital humanities” was new, and we struggled to write job descriptions that matched how potential candidates would describe their expertise. Searches failed for many reasons, but a primary cause was that we wanted candidates with DH expertise combined with another, more traditional field in creative writing or composition. Attempting to combine multiple areas of expertise proved unproductive. Many candidates either did not demonstrate substantive knowledge in at least one specialization in DH pedagogy or scholarship or, if they did, they were snapped up by a research institution before we could complete an initial interview. We needed candidates with experience in the analytic use of DH tools and methods who were committed to directing student projects. Ideally, we wanted someone who could also teach and learn from other faculty, working collaboratively with us and graduate students. It took longer to find those candidates than we anticipated.

Unfortunately, we did not have as long to build the program as we thought. Although our faculty had genuine pedagogical and research interests in DH and digital rhetoric, college-based economic interests shaped implementation and compressed the timeline in ways we did not anticipate. Indeed, our program did not exceed the “early stage” or “grassroots initiative” stage of capacity because we were forced to take a “catch-as-catch-can approach to resource acquisition and maintenance” (Educause Center for Analysis and Research, “Building Capacity,” 17). We created and delivered a curriculum mostly in isolation and cobbled together the support and services necessary for the program. As ECAR describes, “In the absence of institutional support, grassroots initiatives tend to be siloed” (17). Although we reached out to other campus entities, building stronger capacity and alliances institutionally would have sustained our momentum and increased the potential for program success.

The first sign that we would not receive the promised resources was the lack of consistent funding for faculty development. We predicated the MA revision in part upon securing commitments for additional training, which unfortunately were not made available after the initial year except very occasionally. A few among us were the scrappy teachers who were taking on the considerable “invisible labor” of “self-pedagogy” that Brian Croxall and Diane K. Jakacki describe in their 2023 volume (“Introduction,” What We Teach). We wanted to advance as teacher-scholars by training the next generation to use digital humanities methods in their professional paths and by reaching out to our colleagues to work collaboratively as much as we could. Although Bussell attended conferences and workshops to prepare to teach Digital Humanities Research Methods and was using campus resources such as our GIS lab in her own research, no one else was provided funding or time to do so. We hit a limit quickly after some success with a training presentation from UIUC that followed the SAIG workshop. However, we were unable to fund other workshops or “training the trainer” resources. Our faculty would have to go out to regional symposia and larger sister universities for limited resources and to national or international trainings. Unfortunately, only one—Bussell—was able to use faculty development funds for this on a limited basis. Funding dried up quickly due to state budget woes and was never reinstated. After the initial institutional interest lagged, we were unable to negotiate and secure specific budgetary commitments, nor did we continue to see faculty coalitions from various departments in these discussions on resource allocation.

The faculty time needed for leadership and program development in these efforts was not taken into account, as we had requested in the proposal. This proved to be a critical loss. Without this provision, no resources were allocated even at the college level after the first year of implementation. Nothing was committed at the provost level. We had no one on point to remind administrators of the commitments agreed upon when the proposal was accepted through multiple levels of governance. At UIS, the English department chair (Helton) was tasked with much of the implementation and follow-up. With only two course releases for the year, the chair could not also administer a newly developed graduate DH program, nor could the full-time faculty member providing much of the instruction (Bussell) do so, although we were both as active as possible in advocacy as well as training, marketing, and seeking resources. A program director could have applied for grants to develop the program’s reach and collaborate across campus with units with interest in digital methods, especially computer science, communication, history, and the library.

Providing equipment was a necessary part of our initial proposal as well. We had requested a designated DH lab to include dedicated computers, printers, iPads, and software focused on data visualization, authoring, and creative design. The lab would have also supported the department’s online journal, the digital work evolving in the composition program, and incentivized the integration of the digital into projects throughout the major and the graduate program. Despite several requests, however, the institution never committed the space, hardware, or software. Because our curriculum had been approved, we directed our students to use the media lab in the library, which could serve until the program had robust enrollments and created a larger demand for dedicated lab space. Those enrollments did not materialize. The better approach would have been for UIS to develop a DH lab in a central hub such as the library to support the scholarship of both faculty and students across multiple disciplines to incentivize the use of the lab.

Administrative support faltered generally, especially as DH became connected to broader visions of market-oriented innovation initiatives. Interest periodically arose in working collaboratively with computer science or business in various courses, but these were not developed. We saw intermittent interest from academic affairs in DH training and lab funding years after our program began and after our request for a “story lab” had been set aside. We tried again to secure both lab and training resources in the context of the University of Illinois system through a competitive grant process in academic year 2018–19 when we sought to be integrated into UIUC library advancements in training for DH with “training the trainer benefits” for UIS English, history, and communication departments. Unfortunately, this particular application was not funded. Several subsequent transitions in administration and research leadership, along with further budget constraints, continued to limit support for DH scholarship and teaching. Another key item on the list of must-haves, which did not materialize, was support through active marketing. In our initial proposal, we requested start-up funds for advertisement of the program at the national and regional levels. Although those funds were allocated, the dean’s office did not communicate their availability or how to expense them. This resulted in delays in advertising, which meant our dollars were not as effective as they might have been if we had produced ads and direct mailings earlier in the graduate student recruitment cycle. Without such support, getting a DH foothold at an institution is a challenge, and moving beyond the early grassroots stage is nearly impossible.

The fatal blow to our MA program was pressure from the administration and our college dean to show higher enrollments in the second year and produce “proof” of a growing program in its third year through enrollment numbers and credit hour production. This unreasonable demand and conversation about closing the program emerged significantly before the end of the initial five-year framework on which the program’s financial feasibility study was based. We needed a substantial number of cohorts to graduate, allowing us to assess curriculum and placement. The economic feasibility study, moreover, was based on problematic assumptions that needed to be revised; the study was too ambitious and did not reflect the realities of a program with a much slower growth curve. We were not resourced to recruit from the broader Midwest or nationally as we had hoped. Applications and inquiries increased by the end of the third year but nowhere near the number desired. Although our students produced fascinating projects, they were not enrolled full-time and were unable to complete the program in two years. Many took only one or two courses per semester. With the economy continuing to slide after the 2008 recession, graduate students had to focus on their paid jobs. Teaching fellowships that had been approved went unfunded. Without the commitment to building the program’s marketing and to supporting its management, enrollment in our MA remained primarily local. Still, we enrolled five to eight new students per year. We had enough time to see about seventeen students graduate, most with the MA and a few with the one-year certificate. A few more have yet to finish, and we are teaching out these students. Some graduates were employed in sectors that highly valued their skills in DH, such as managers of social and digital media; some brought their expertise into more traditional jobs such as those in teaching; others went on to advanced graduate work in teaching, publishing, and library and information science. Finally, we found that a modest cohort split between two concentrations was not workable. It resulted in class sizes too small to teach as robust seminars. This exacerbated the enrollment inefficiencies and was institutionally and economically insupportable. Even so, by mid-spring 2018, applicant numbers had increased, and our reach was broadening. We offered admission to ten applicants. But our time was up. By May 2018, we suspended our MA program for new admits.

Moving Ahead

In hindsight, we would have done several things differently and would suggest that others consider the following as they build their DH programming.

• Foundations. Securing essential resources is a vital lesson of our experience. Promises of investment in hiring new faculty, training current faculty, marketing, and other support should have been formalized beyond the initial feasibility study and in discussions in governance and with our dean and the provost’s office. At the institutional level, promoting DH specifically as an area of teaching and scholarship could have moved our individual program from the grassroots stage to the established and (later) the high-capacity stage where DH moves beyond individual “championing” to full support of the university, including “sustainable funding, support, and academic and political commitment” (ECAR, 19). In their IDHMC white paper for Texas A&M, Maura Ives and Amy Earhart outline hiring needs and space and infrastructure supports that, if scaled appropriately, could have improved our feasibility study and proposal, as would have more realistic expectations for enrollments, timelines, internal and external funding, and managing program responsibilities. Although individual DH practitioners’ projects are important to generating excitement about using DH methods, a program director is crucial to the effort to get institutional buy-in and to hold the administration accountable for promised resources. These resources should have been itemized and included benchmarks, timelines, and processes for using these resources, reviewing progress, and assessing and revising curricula. These should have taken into account a candid discussion about return on investment from growth in credit in hours from admissions, enrollment, and time-to-degree for graduate students managing work and family obligations. Support for additional, staged assessments of interests and needs in our local economy and regional workforce would also have been helpful, especially as students graduated and began using the knowledge and skills from our program in their careers and professional development. We suggest preparing an outline of the administrative tasks and project management skills important for building and sustaining digital humanities initiatives, as A. Miller has done, whether centered in a library or elsewhere. Administrative support, including advising and faculty development within the department is important at every step. Written commitment of release time and reimbursement is crucial.
• Curriculum and Capacity Building. Scaling programmatic ambitions to fit resource allocation is another important piece of advice we can offer. We were unable to sustain two tracks. Having a more integrated, slender curriculum would have helped ease some of the enrollment pressures. A mixture of online and on campus delivery would have had a broader appeal and probably attracted more students. Ives and Earhart argue for strategic investment in building capacity of DH and emerging technologies based on existing campus initiatives. If other campus initiatives had existed, we may have been able to more effectively share resources and build capacity. It would have been prudent to begin more slowly and expand as we went. This might have started with a concentration with transdisciplinary connections in coursework to other departments or with a minor for advanced undergraduates more clearly linked to the one-year graduate certificate program. This may have helped build capacity within the college and create opportunities (and pressures) for cross-program investment. It is important to develop stakeholders outside as well as within the department. Surveying campus as well as college programming would have been helpful on this front. The opportunities will vary depending on the campus. For example, we have an honors program with a history of co-teaching its lower division core courses. There may have been some interest in piloting upper-division honors capstone courses or seminars within departments desirous of developing or expanding DH coursework.
• Consortium-Building on and off Campus. Identifying and creating working relationships with multiple consortia partners would help at every stage. This is slow and time-consuming work but vital to creating and sustaining any curriculum over the long term. Working with our career center, library, and learning hub, we would like to have seen the creation of internships, tutoring, and teaching opportunities. The library could have been a key partner in building on and off campus collaborative efforts. Planning for costs should include the library, an important center in development of DH initiatives institutionally. John White and Heather Gilbert’s overview of libraries as DH hubs, especially at research institutions, and Lijuan Xu and Benjamin Jahre’s case study of an example at Lafayette College, a small private liberal arts university, suggest different approaches to consolidating resources and providing support to students and faculty across disciplines. Developing complementary skill sets that are adaptable and creating support for collaborative multi-instructor teaching between departments and various units is essential (Jakacki). One of the authors (Bussell) worked on a section of an NEH grant application (on the possibility of creating a cross-disciplinary DH minor based on existing courses) in which the UIS library would serve as a central hub. At our institution, with its long history of effective faculty-driven programming in online learning, we could foresee integrating the UIS Center for Online Teaching and Learning into this hub. Costs to be taken into account include those for student workers or interns, software subscriptions and other materials, as well as space and hardware that may be purchased through and located in the library.

Currently, more opportunity exists to work with University of Illinois institutions, regional DH symposia, and COPLAC institutions. One of our frustrations was being unable to access the resources of the University of Illinois, although we found individual faculty and academic professionals very accommodating and helpful. We would have liked to see more specific planning and advanced agreements for “training the trainer” resources, as well as shared system-level funding and shared faculty development. Lisa Spiro, in her discussion of the problems of scalability and equity for faculty and students at institutions of more modest means, proposes an alternate model of networked and open program development that is very promising and becoming more feasible (“Opening Up”). Today, online opportunities exist for DH training that could have been used for faculty development and provided knowledge and skills that would have aided in student and faculty research projects. Our small program may have suffered from being at the leading edge of the curve because we did not have access to these resources now available as options. Resources such as Texas A&M University’s continuing education through Programming4Humanists and its Center of Digital Humanities Research Advanced Research Consortium, as well as The Programming Historian, have emerged and continue to make it possible for those with limited resources to learn needed skills and find collaborative communities and support. The Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory (HASTAC), cofounded in 2002 by Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo Goldberg, remains an invaluable resource and learning space focused on graduate students and advanced undergraduates as well as scholar-teachers. The ability to effectively use these resources for faculty development and retraining, much less for teaching and connecting students to others in an external community of fellow students and scholar-teachers, nonetheless requires commitments for curricular support, funding, and release time at one’s home institution order to make it possible to use such resources. Greater access to resources across institutions within a given university system or consortia is also necessary. We have seen that putting primary or sole responsibility on individual faculty or departments for developing this open networked model in the absence of support is a recipe for failure. Even a basic, open certificate program must be grounded in meaningful material institutional resources for teaching, advising, mentoring, and program administration at the home university if the potential that Spiro envisions is to be realized (“Opening Up”). Teaching, research, and strategic implementation cannot be farmed out.

Alternative Pathways

In hindsight, we can see more clearly why our graduate DH program failed. From the remains, however, we can develop different initiatives, such as an undergraduate DH minor that uses the expertise we have gained, serves students, and more appropriately matches the mission and resources of our small, liberal arts college. Although most DH programs are housed in graduate programs at research universities focused on deliverable scholarship (the “production” model), there is still much room to maneuver at the undergraduate level at a small college. Bryan Alexander and Rebecca Frost Davis recognize the challenge of doing DH at small colleges but have found multiple examples of institutions that are “establishing their own centers, finding preexisting structures with analogous functions, and forming strategic partnerships with each other and larger institutions” (“Should Liberal Arts Campuses Do Digital Humanities?”). These are sustainable, however, when the work fits the mission of the institution, and for small, liberal arts colleges, as Alexander and Davis argue, the mission is undergraduate education that develops “student-professor interaction rather than more public, outward-facing types of sharing and publication” (371). Alexander and Davis further state that DH at small colleges capitalizes on the tradition of student-professor collaborations and encourages applied projects from problem-based assignments: “This process-over-product focus distinguishes the digital humanities as practiced at small liberal arts colleges from the production focus in much of the digital humanities community” (“Should Liberal Arts Campuses”). This may be a much more productive pathway for DH in the UIS English department, something broader in scope than the UIS History Department’s successful participation in the History Harvest project (curating online exhibitions of local and regional artifacts using Omeka as part of their public history emphasis) and more similar to scope to the minor cohoused in History and Political Science Department at Saint Xavier University in Chicago. With careful scaffolding, resourcing, and time, undergraduates will still learn important and practical humanities skills applicable to multiple careers through a curriculum transformed by interdisciplinarity and digitalization.

Digital humanities methods, projects, and processes already exist at the undergraduate level. Caitlin Christian-Lamb and Anelise Hanson Shrout detail how DH is integrated with traditional curricula, even if not formalized as DH. They identify a distributed model in which undergraduate programs use “DH methods and tools throughout several courses and on smaller, more discrete projects” (“Starting from Scratch,” para. 24). Indeed, this is how DH occurs at UIS: in the English department, digital literacy and DH have lived in many composition classrooms for over two decades, and DH continues to be incorporated in both freshman composition and in upper-division coursework at UIS in English. Creative writing courses have encouraged our students to design and produce online zines in collaboration with visual arts students. The faculty mentors for our literary magazine, The Alchemist Review, have helped students to recognize the importance of digital editorial processes and publicity, essential because we have a significant enrollment of online students in the major. Our core research class incorporates quantitative methods for language and literary analysis. At our institution, we also see initiatives in digital humanities integrated into DH and non-DH courses in history, communications, and visual arts.

Promoting student DH projects in writing, if properly curated, can help to create a second groundswell and interest in DH at the graduate level in the future. But for now, focusing on undergraduates is the future of DH at UIS. We can build capacity by teaching DH methods in our core research class, by creating classroom assignments that encourage the use of technology and data analysis and visualization, and by encouraging digital capstone projects, all in the context of interdisciplinarity and a central management paradigm that can promote DH institutionally and in the community. The integration of DH methods and assignments utilizes faculty expertise and institutional resources, but the visibility of DH and its core tenets and goals may be weaker with a distributed model than a more centralized model, perhaps administered through the library rather than a particular discipline. Whether or not our institution uses a centralized or distributed model, we are certain we can retool and refocus productively on pedagogy at the undergraduate level. The success of DH should be measured differently at a small liberal arts institution such as UIS. Alexander and Davis remind us how small institutions should value DH by “emphasizing a distributed, socially engaged process over a focus on publicly shared products” (369, emphasis in original). At our small university, we hope that process—not product—will again take center stage in DH.

Our institution has embraced online education and encouraged digital modalities of learning, teaching, and scholarship, but it has not committed sustained or consistent resources to DH leadership in scholarship or teaching. Because there has been some waxing and waning enthusiasm for the fresh approaches and innovations that DH might bring to our campus, we succeeded for a while on an early wave of that enthusiasm, but we now find ourselves teaching out the program that was not given the time and resources to take root and be adapted as needed. Our conclusion is that DH programming that is faculty-initiated but limited to department resources and the efforts or interests of particular faculty may have limited success without sustained capacity building within the college and campus.

Yet our students and our teacher-scholars deserve the opportunity to participate in digital humanities in all areas of our discipline and across the curriculum. The process of designing and resourcing digital humanities initiatives that survive long term at modestly resourced teaching institutions is a complex undertaking requiring substantial commitment and planning. The good news is that there are many more resources and models now for doing so than we had available to us eight years ago. Moreover, we are beginning to see overdue discussions of diversity, access for BIPOC students and scholars, and work across disciplines taking place, all of which also must be integral to creating and managing DH initiatives (Posner, “Digital Humanities”; Risam, “Diversity Work and Digital Carework”). We hope that this account of our early effort will help bring about a better outcome for others going forward.

Appendix: Proposed English MA Curriculum Structure

Notes

1. 1. The graduate program was eventually suspended and then eliminated as of 2023 along with Modern Languages, and we became the Department of English once again in 2024.

2. 2. All student projects are cited by permission. We would like to thank them for their contributions and also acknowledge the many original, thoughtful, and pragmatic projects we have seen from many students over the last three years, which we would happily discuss if space permitted.

Bibliography

1. Alexander, Bryan, and Rebecca Frost Davis. “Should Liberal Arts Campuses Do Digital Humanities? Process and Products in the Small College World.” In Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold., 368–89. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctttv8hq.24.
2. Christian-Lamb, Caitlin, and Anelise Hanson Shrout. “‘Starting from Scratch’? Workshopping New Directions in Undergraduate Digital Humanities.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 11, no. 3 (2017). www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/11/3/000311/000311.html.
3. Croxall, Brian, and Diane K. Jakacki. “Introduction.” In What We Teach When We Teach DH: Digital Humanities in the Classroom, edited by Brian Croxall and Diane K. Jakacki. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023. E-book.
4. Educause Center for Analysis and Research. “Building Capacity for Digital Humanities: A Framework for Institutional Planning.” Accessed June 2, 2020. https://er.educause.edu/~/media/files/library/2017/5/ewg1702.pdf?la=en.
5. Hirsch, Brett D. “Introduction.” In Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles, Politics. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2012. E-book.
6. Kiliman, Daymon. “Composition Textbooks and the Construction of Student Identities: A Computer-Aided Textual Analysis of Model Summaries and Paraphrases.” Student presentation, English 501: Digital Humanities Research Methods, University of Illinois Springfield, Springfield, Ill., December 2016; StARS presentation, University of Illinois Springfield, Springfield, Ill., April 2017.
7. Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. “What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?” ADE Bulletin 150 (2010): 55–61. https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled-88c11800-9446-469b-a3be-3fdb36bfbd1e/section/f5640d43-b8eb-4d49-bc4b-eb31a16f3d06.
8. Miller, A. “Innovative Management Strategies for Building and Sustaining a Digital Initiatives Department with Limited Resources.” Digital Library Perspectives 34, no. 2 (April 2018): 117–36.
9. Posner, Miriam. “Digital Humanities.” In The Craft of Criticism: Critical Media Studies in Practice. Report no. 27, 2018. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1558k4vg.
10. Risam, Roopika. “Beyond the Margins: Intersectionality and Digital Humanities.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 9, no. 2 (2015). http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/9/2/000208/000208.html.
11. Risam, Roopika. “Diversity Work and Digital Carework in Higher Education.” First Monday 23, no. 3 (March 2018). https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/8241/6651.
12. Spiro, Lisa. “Opening up Digital Humanities Education.” In Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles, and Politics, edited by Brett D. Hirsch, 331–63. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2012. https://books.openedition.org/obp/1654?lang=en.
13. Svensson, Patrik. “The Digital Humanities as Humanities Project.” Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 11 (2002): 42–60.
14. White, John W., and Heather Gilbert. “Introduction.” In Laying the Foundation: Digital Humanities in Academic Libraries. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2016. ebook.
15. Wingo, Sheri. “Using a Hybrid Flipped-Blended Approach in an AP Literature and Composition Course, Digital Pedagogy.” Student project presentation, Teaching Literature 551, University of Illinois Springfield, March 21, 2018.
16. Xu, Lijuan, and Benjamin Jahre. “From Service Providers to Collaborators and Partners: A Nondiscipline-Based Approach at a Liberal Arts College.” New Review of Academic Librarianship 14, no. 3–4 (July 2018): 418–29.