Building and Broadening the Digital Humanities Through a Regional Network

FAIN: HD-228956-15

San Diego State University Foundation (San Diego, CA 92182-1931)
Jessica Pressman (Project Director: September 2014 to April 2017)
Joanna M. Brooks (Co Project Director: March 2015 to April 2017)

A year-long initiative bracketed by two workshops where faculty from teaching-intensive institutions would test best practices for teaching humanities content using digital methods in under-resourced classrooms.

Digital Humanities (DH) offers vast pedagogical opportunities for teachers and students, but implementation may be seemingly untenable at certain institutions, particularly large public teaching schools grappling, after years of budget cuts, with impacted class sizes and overburdened faculty. Similarly, R1 institutions or liberal arts colleges might possess a single DH expert but lack infrastructural support, limiting DH pedagogy to individual classrooms. Since our emergent information economy requires citizens to work with digital technologies and also critique them, students who do receive access to DH learning are placed at a disadvantage. We need to determine ways to distribute DH research and pedagogy widely, across a spectrum of institutional types and student populations, including students learning at night in community colleges, students taking 300-person lecture classes at large public universities, students from primarily underrepresented groups, and ESL learners. Towards this goal, we propose a workshop for faculty from regional institutions to develop pedagogical strategies and share resources.