What is the goal of this DH course?

Second class in the books, with more students! Even if it cut some of the time I had planned to use on the readings (more below), I decided to start with a repeat of the “We Data” exercise with the two new students that joined today, and had the two previous student guide the conversation around data. Once again one student had a harder time than the other in thinking about themselves in data, but that didn’t stop them from creating and sharing data with some thoughts and questions about it.

After getting to know each other better, we switched to knowing the course better. I had assigned them two articles for today, with the request to annotate them in any way they find useful¹:

• Dombrowski, Quinn. “Does Coding Matter for Doing Digital Humanities?” The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Digital Humanities, edited by James O’Sullivan, Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350232143.
• Walsh, Brandon. “The Three-Speed Problem in Digital Humanities Pedagogy” What We Teach When We Teach DH, edited by Brian Croxall, Diane K. Jakacki, University of Minnesota Press, 2023. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/jj.1410591.21

I led the conversation to model what a discussion can look like in this course, but also to see if they had already connected the readings to their personal experiences and to make sure that I made clear the purpose of the course: To learn about the importance of drafting a workflow and documentation about one own’s research, by learning with examples relevant to them, and kind of at their own pace; rather than learning programming or multiple tools and methods.

Quinn’s article is fantastic for this purpose, specifically, I believe -and my students thought so too-, because it has clear examples of what a workflow is (Quinn, did you write the steps of my dissertation?) and makes an argument for documenting all the steps in said workflow for maintenance, re-use, and sustainability; without getting too much into detail. At the same time, they are very clear about where the argument is coming from (coding or not coding?). I added a few questions along the way to help them connect ideas with their work. For example, I asked: “If I requested it, could you tell me how the files in your computers are organized?” They all responded “yes I can!” but upon asking further, they all confessed that they had to figure how to do it themselves and will probably not work forever. With this, it kind of clicked that writing detailed documentation of those decisions would help them in the future, specially if they need to share files with someone else.

Brandon’s article, on the other hand, gave me the perfect entryway to assuring them that

• we won’t do buttonology to learn tools for the shake of learning them
  • A student brought up how the article made her think differently about the worth of learning a tool first, then figuring out how to use it for research
• we won’t run over content until all of us are on the same page
  • Collaboration and sharing knowledge and skills is necessary in DH so we will help each other
• designing a workflow will be applicable to their own research and interests, so they can create documentation about something that is really going to help them this semester: MA thesis research, dissertation, a final paper in another class, a hobby!

Overall, a great second day of class with good questions to start the course will clear expectations from everyone - and for me to give more thought about content for future class sessions. I am very grateful to Quinn and Brandon for crafting these two thoughtful articles that are very accessible to anyone who might come into DH without having heard much about it or not having a clear idea of what we do.

Next day we are going to chat about how DH has changed over time and I look forward to that discussion.