Digital Humanities Pedagogy in Theory and Practice

Abstract

Although the digital humanities has become increasingly important for scholarship, it is still rarely practiced in the undergraduate classroom. Professors fear they don’t have the knowledge to instruct their students in the use of digital tools, that it will consume valuable time, or that digital assignments will distract from critical thinking and writing. Dr. Jessica DeSpain, an associate professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, who has recently co-edited a collection of essays about using the digital humanities in the nineteenth-century American literature classroom, will discuss how to introduce digital scholarship to undergraduates to enhance traditional methods like close reading. DeSpain has spent nine years training undergraduates to work on digital humanities projects, integrating DH methods into her classes, and developing a minor in the digital humanities and social sciences. She will discuss best practices for introducing DH into a variety of learning environments and share her most successful assignments.