But how do we ensure this collaborative construction in various educational contexts with different sets of goals, expectations, and institutional dynamics? And how can we utilize the inherent traits of digital humanities projects to further inclusion not merely in the classroom but also beyond the classroom?
Digital humanities scholars such as Roopika Risam and Moya Bailey provide useful insights about ethical inclusion in the classroom and collaboration with students. While Risam's work on postcolonial digital humanities pedagogy offers a guide for engaging students in hands-on digital humanities scholarship with critical making, Bailey focuses on how such practices also can disempower them unless mindful, reminding us that digital scholarship has no set ethical code, only a collective commitment to continually asking questions about what is the most generous and thoughtful way to approach these research questions.
This roundtable presents four papers that will expand upon, and add nuance to, the current understanding of inclusive digital humanities pedagogy. In particular, they will examine the innovative ways in which attention to collaborative practices guides students to rigorous ethical questioning of DH practices. Each paper discusses a different educational context including a typical English literature classroom, an interdisciplinary course setting, a DH lab led by undergraduate students, and a community-engagement project. The consideration of a variety of educational settings will help the panel address the possibilities as well as the challenges of modeling collaborative construction in DH pedagogy.
Dr. Stringfield presents on Black feminist approaches to digital humanities pedagogical methodologies in the classroom, particularly as it pertains to questions of ethics and digital expression on social media. Her presentation considers the pedagogical benefits of creative digital practices in the classroom. Using social media as a pedagogical tool is useful, but raises questions of ethical production. How does one prioritize student safety when making the decision to utilize social media in class projects? Dr. Stringfield ultimately argues that communicating to students the Black feminist priorities of safety, care, and community-building is essential for inclusive classroom.
Drawing on her digital mapping project, titled “The Monster Map,” Dr. Oh discusses the meaning of inclusion in creating numerical data out of literary texts. Developed with a group of undergraduate students in an English course at Michigan State University, this project it explores fictional characters’ spatial patterns by using ArcGIS, a geographic information software that visualizes and analyzes spatial information. Despite the power of the software, the project involved subjective coding of textual data on the students’ part that often challenged—and later encouraged—the practice of inclusive collaboration. Here, Dr. Oh examines the process of developing an inclusive coding/scoring system in order to show how turning text into numbers through inclusive computational methods extends the “traditional English skills."
Dr. Wigard discusses using Wikidata, the world’s largest open-access linked data repository, as a major platform for community-based learning (CBL) in a course on “Introduction to Digital Humanities.” In this course, designed to increase visibility of black and queer cartoonists, CBL manifested in three avenues: external community partner focused on visual culture from VA, and Wikidata community specialists; student-driven Wikidata work; and public digital humanities projects. Drawing this pedagogy-driven case study, Dr. Wigard shows how the intrinsic nature of the platform (Wikidata's community-driven) allows for inclusivity within the DH classroom.
Cho brings her experience of mentoring students at the Digital Humanities and Literary Cognition Lab; specifically, how the lab’s non-hierarchical structure has translated into the Mellon Just Futures grant project titled, Creativity in the Time of COVID-19: Art as a Tool for Combating Inequity and Injustice. Working beyond ADA compliance, the project creates an access infrastructure across all venues and their associated programming including a global survey that is accessible in plain English, 14 foreign languages, American sign language, and braille packet. Cho shares how in each step of the project, a team of student researchers across majors and disciplines worked as equal collaborators and key leaders—a practice that encouraged the process of collective participation, and that allowed horizontal relationships.