Welcome to the course blog for LACOL’s Summer 2023 Digital Humanities class!
Through a unique collaboration between eleven peer colleges, this fully online course takes advantage of the unique affordances of LACOL’s community to teach participants the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of digital humanities while using the multi-campus corpus of archives, collections, and resources as a basis for historically and socially relevant digital research. Students will apply various humanities lenses as they learn and utilize digital tools and skills culminating in the construction of small-scale comparative analysis projects. These digital projects will collectively contribute to a growing, interconnected, consortium-wide resource.
This class will focus especially on using a lens of social justice, and coursework is designed to elicit both timely and timeless engagement or activism around social justice at the colleges. Topic areas will reflect student interest but may include the nature of the social contract at our colleges, access and equity, health justice, racial justice, environmental justice, and educational access/affordability.
Digital Humanities is an inherently interdisciplinary field, and students will bring a diverse range of skill sets, previous experiences, and disciplinary approaches to the course. This course is designed to turn this mix into an asset by consciously grouping students with complementary skill sets and backgrounds into teams greater than the sum of their parts. Through this collaborative, project-based work students will learn how to work effectively as part of a digital team—an asset for modern scholarship and future work. While not all students will necessarily come away with the same DH “hard skills” due to this focus on collaboration, every student will leave the course with a greater ability to pose humanities research questions amenable to digital inquiry and be better prepared to undertake successful team-/project-based DH learning in the future.
Diversity of views, voices, and data is fundamental to this course. The summer DH course will visibly infuse multiple modes of diversity through the syllabus, student participation, and critical thinking. Students will encounter the research, methodology, and creative work of scholars and artists of color that have been excluded from conventional digital humanities courses. They will also tackle the challenge of “missing datasets” that represent the experience of minoritized people following the model of Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein’s Data Feminism (MIT Press, 2020). The course is designed and delivered through a unique collaboration between faculty, librarians, and archivists, bringing together many perspectives.