This is an ongoing idea/critique about pedagogy and Digital Humanties, one that doesn’t have enough airtime from my type of institution. (And I’m feeling very cantankerous lately.) So, I’m logging a conversation in my research blog to keep track of my thoughts on this topic. (When my latest book project is done, I will return to these ideas to see if I can amass a cogent article out of this mishmosh):
I’ve been watching the #tilts tweets from the Texas Institute for Literary & Textual Studies. Three symposia were planned for 2011, one of which happened over a March weekend — the one focusing on Digital Humanities, Teaching and Learning. From afar, across Twitter, it seemed that the conversation didn’t really focus on pedagogy, a turn that has been endemic to conversations in Digital Humanities. Julia Flanders, Amy Earhart, Rebecca Frost Davis, Jeremy Douglas and others highlighted ideas about a collaborative classroom experience using the tenets of Digital Humanities, but other tweets seemed to focus on infrastructure. (And, let me note here, though Twitter is a fantastic backchannel, it doesn’t always capture the conversation, passion, breadth and excitement of the room.)
At one point, there was a call for ProfHacker.com to offer reviews of the tools listed on DIRT, or to have graduate students write those reviews. (Note: my undergraduate honors DHers did this in Fall 2010 but it’s difficult to find a location where these can be broadcast.)
I would like to see more process pieces about DH in the classroom — more publications or videos. Something more dynamic than leaving the pedagogy at the conference in a face-to-face conversation. The recent open-access collection, Learning Through Digital Media, is a great start, but it’s focused on explanations in print when the classroom is much more dynamic. In this age when we must conform to the administration’s call for assessment, in these process pieces for DH in the classroom, it would be helpful to offer language, actual syllabus or assignment language assessing the successes and failures of the assignment. And, to highlight that failure is productive, not necessarily, well, the end of an experiment.
I think ProfHacker has been fabulous, but I suspect that many people write those articles and then post them in the community service area of their CVs. Is perhaps the issue also that DH needs to help change old-fashioned T&P for what counts? [But, then I would be going against my call to Digital Humanities to stop saving everyone and just get to work.] Pedagogy and process articles should count; considering that lots of DH happens at research-intensive universities, I suspect that these kinds of articles don’t count. But, we need more. I need more from my colleagues. My students need more from me if we’re to be playful and successful in our DH endeavors. But, with workloads increasing, I want to do what I’ve always done: ask my colleagues at large for help with assignments, specific assignments.
Rebecca Frost Davis‘ presentation (on Prezi) represents a great conversation about liberal arts education and Digital Humanities: Digital Humanities and Liberal Education on Prezi
There seems to be a defensiveness among all of us about workload issues — as if we all need to prove that we’re busy, over-tired, and over-worked. I accept that. I’ll put my 4-4, 4-prep load up against anyone, any day. But, I’ll also come to the table to talk to someone who’s teaching 2-2 with more 150 students per section. Let’s collaborate instead of engaging in a pissing match.
triproftri 
Umm, I’ve been writing for Prof. Hacker since September 2009, and I do not put it under service. It’s under Scholarship and Professional Development, which is how my university titles it and where they tell me to put it.
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That’s awesome about placement! Thanks for speaking up. Still, others I bet are not doing this — especially those at research universities.
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It really depends on the university. Some are counting it as scholarship at research universities. It’s much more individualized.
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Thanks for this post, Kathy, and for your thoughts about increasing the conversation about digital humanities in connection with pedagogy. This is one of the reasons that I’ve linked repeatedly to Chris Forster’s post defining DH at HASTAC: http://www.hastac.org/blogs/cforster/im-chris-where-am-i-wrong. Although almost all of my DH work has been in the classroom and I’d given talks about it, I hadn’t really framed it as a necessary part of the conversation until Chris put things so eloquently.
I’m not quite sure what you would like to have happen, however. We do have ProfHacker, as you’ve noted, and I’ve written some posts about how my assignments play out in the classroom, particularly this one. Although you could rightly say that social media does not DH make, it’s what I’ve got to go with. And I’ve posted assignments for DH-like/lite projects on my own blog, like this one on Zotero. Is this what you’d like to see more of from the DH community? Or are you looking for more dynamic discussions? Or something that isn’t so text heavy, where we go to recording/capturing class and our reflections in more real time? For my own self, I’ll say that I prefer the text stuff, just because it’s faster for me to consume than other formats. But that doesn’t mean it’s what I’d find most useful if we were to change things up.
As a closing note for now, I’ll note that I list ProfHacker under my publications. But I have a separate area of publications that I call “Public Writing.” I’ve listed other things that I’ve done for the Chronicle there, and it seems to me to strike a balance of what PH is out to do. I can’t speak for the other PH authors, although we have occasionally had discussions about how to list what we write.
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Brian, thanks for your comments. Well, there’s been movements afoot to collect syllabi and create a centralized area for DH pedagogy. Some of it is massively funded while others are more grassroots. And, there is most definitely a bias in DH about pedagogy. I’ve been sitting in on Project Bamboo meetings for the past 3 years to represent my kind of institution (teaching-intensive). It was a struggle at first to convince those in charge that pedagogy and students were important to the cause, but the Project Bamboo consortium heard and altered their mission (really, this was an admirable and completely worthwhile effort).
Specifically, I’d like to see video publications of classroom DH, or multimedia productions (perhaps on Kairos?). I’d like to see the 2 panels on DH and pedagogy make it through the MLA program committee — and I think there might be other proposed panels on DH, pedagogy and something other than literature studies. I’d like to see real process pieces with all of the stuff outlined above. The new collection provides a good chunk of that material — awesome! More, we need more. And, we need to alter T&P committees to understand that these count. (Believe me, truly, it’s still difficult to get it to count no matter how many people show up here or on Twitter and say that it does.)
We’re moving forward, yes. Is it quickly enough to erase the dynamic between the research and teaching universities that do DH? Not for me.
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Always happy to read pedagogy-related posts, and even more so to read kind words about ProfHacker. That said, I do have a few concerns about the role of that site in this post and the way it serves as a proxy for larger concerns about the place of pedagogy in the digital humanities:
1. ProfHacker is not a digital humanities site. It’s a site about the profession *in general*, although each of us writes from our own disciplinary and institutional experience. While several of the writers have DH commitments, others do not–and others aren’t even in the humanities.
We have had some pedagogy- and process posts, and have more in the pipeline, and will forever, since George and I see that as a crucial part of ProfHacker. But these will not always be about DH topics. (For example, in late May we’ll be running a piece about making an online microbiology course more participatory and engaging. While I expect that to be of interest to all readers who teach, it’s not DH-y in any way.)
These posts have been, and will be going forward, in a variety of formats–text, video, etc. I’m trying to start a conversation with a couple of folks about ProfHacker’s metadata, to help make things easier to find and keep track of–but that has been delayed a bit by ongoing union-related hijinks. Hopefully soon.
2. I don’t know how to parse the sentence, “There was a call for ProfHacker to post reviews of the tools in DiRT.” As the ProfHacker editor largely responsible for guest posts, I can say flatly that I have no such *proposal* in hand. This may have been mentioned on Twitter or at MLA or some such–but I am not aware of it.
Editorially, I hope it’s clear that just because someone out there says “Oh, ProfHacker should do this,” that doesn’t really mean anything, even where “this” is an awesome idea, as reviewing DiRT tools is.
3. As Brian and Nels have already indicated, the assumptions in the post about where PH writing goes are largely mistaken–although this is good news, because it’s prompting a group post about how this works in our different institutions and disciplines.
There’s a difficulty here in that most writers for the site write about a variety of things. (Except me: I only write about The Hold Steady.) As a consequence, their writing would need to go into some catchall such as “other writing,” or whatever. However, individual process- or pedagogy-orientated pieces might well count as “scholarship of teaching and learning,” which is valued at many institutions. The proximate target there, though, is not really humanists, but getting people on college- or university-wide tenure/promotion committees to recognize that work’s legitimacy.
And, as a clarification to the comments upthread, it seems important to recognize that most ProfHacker writers are not at research institutions–a good thing, too, since most faculty are not at those institutions!
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Jason, thank you for the response. But, I think your response somewhat hijacked the purpose of this blog post — a call to action.
ProfHacker has been doing some admirable work, but this is not necessarily reflected at large in DH or at institutions. Who and what gets funded for DH work? Does the funding include pedagogy? Do institutions expect faculty to incorporate DH but not actually pay them for that revision to curriculum? Are we including undergraduates as more than minions? Are we doing the work that Cathy Davidson has been blogging about (that extreme experimentation in the classroom)? Are we thinking about all kinds of classrooms (size is relative)? Do those who teach 18 undergrads have more time/space to think about incorporating the tools? How can we help each other in DH pedagogy?
Let’s face it, TT faculty even at this point have to do the traditional work AND the DH work on top of that workload in order to fulfill themselves. If faculty have 18-25 students in class, teach 2-3 courses per semester, are relieved from teaching new preps and different preps for each class every semester, there’s way more head space to think about altering the curriculum. Then there’s all of the explaining, justifying, cowtowing to colleagues about the validity of this kind of DH work in the classroom (and beyond in the modicum of research that there’s time to perform). That constant justification of DH is the equivalent of the work performed for a monograph, in my experience. So, it’s not enough to raise our hands and say “hey, we’re doing it over here.” I’m not asking for justifications from my DH and DH-inflected colleagues. I’m asking for a wider, larger movement to infiltrate departments and classrooms that are teaching-intensive. It happens, but it doesn’t happen enough.
I want more — I’m asking for more from our community. I’m asking for everyone in DH pedagogy to have a wider conversation. I’m begging for those in a position of privilege to consider those who are not. I’m asking the DH-ers to be generous with each other, to nurture graduate students, to encourage mid-level colleagues, to listen to each other. To stop being defensive.
And I want more of this from ProfHacker, specifically: The most recent article by Erin Sells (http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/mapping-novels/32528) is a prime example of excellent writing, pedagogy, and assessment/analysis. Not all process articles provide this type of in-depth description and analysis, unfortunately.
As for the call to review DIRT tools on ProfHacker, it was exactly that, a suggestion made by some tweets from the TILTs conference (not by me).
It’s fantastic that not all ProfHacker writers live at research-intensive institutions.
It’s great that many ProfHacker writers are placing these articles under research sections of their CVs.
But, those aren’t points that I want to argue here about ProfHacker. For DH pedagogy, I want these things to be pervasive. They are not as of yet.
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