Frameworks for DH Course Design

I’ve been thinking a bit about DH course design and the ways we construct our courses at a high level. Before we put in any content, the choices we make about course structure have pedagogical implications. There are, of course, any numbers of ways you might put together a class. But I have noticed some common patterns in how people organize things that could be helpful to point out for folks designing a DH course for the first time. One caveat - many of the syllabi I list below as exemplary of one category could also fit under another. For other, more granular discussions, I would recommend Shawna Ross and Claire Battershill’s Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom: A Practical Introduction for Teachers, Lecturers, and Students. For more example syllabi, check out Scott Weingart’s curated list or this huge zotero collection.

Without further ado, here are some common ways of structuring things along with some links to example syllabi and course sites where I can find them. Many more structures likely exist, but these are the first ones that come to mind.

• Topical organization
  • Description
    • This category comprises those courses that are divided by particular topics of interest. A course might start with a week on “What is DH?” before moving to other weeks on topics like “Postcolonial DH” or “DH Critiques.”
  • Examples
    • Lisa Spiro’s Introduction to Digital Humanities Independent Study
    • Stephen Brier and Matthew K. Gold’s Introduction to Digital Humanities
    • Carly Marino and Janelle Adsit’s course on Digital Humanities: Public History, Archives, and Scholarly Communication
• Discipline plus DH
  • Description
    • Courses framed like this take digital methods and apply them to otherwise typical disciplinary materials and conversations. Examples of this genre might be “Text Mining the Novel” or “Digital Approaches to History.” I often think of these courses as requiring special care lest they inadvertently try to cram multiple classes worth of content into a single semester. In other words, a “Hacking the Book” course might wind up being at once a semester-long intro to programming, a literature course, and also a combination of the three.
  • Examples
    • Erik Fredner’s course on Literary Text Mining
    • JJ Bauer’s course entitled alt-methods: Digital Art History
    • Fred Gibbs Programming for Historians course
• Organized by Nouns or Verbs
  • Description
    • The guiding signposts for these courses are or materials—not necessarily questions or topics. For example, a semester might be broken into three units on texts, archives, and maps. Strong overlap with topical organization, but this category feels unique enough to merit breaking off on its own.
  • Examples
    • Mackenzie Brooks’ course on Data in the Humanities
    • Kristen Mapes’ Introduction to Digital Studies in the Arts and Humanities
    • Zhaojin Zeng’s Introduction to Digital Humanities
• Yack then Hack
  • Description
    • In courses that meet twice a week, one neat structural choice an instructor can make is to designate one meeting as discussion and the other as a regular lab day. So Monday of a particular week might deal with spatial questions and then Wednesday would introduce ArcGIS. The option makes it easy to divide things up, but it can also be easy for the structure to enforce artificial distinctions between critique and method that you might not want.
  • Examples
    • Ryan Cordell’s Introduction to Digital Humanities Course
    • Zoe Leblanc’s Introduction to Digital Humanities course
    • Jeri E. Wieringa’s “Digital Humanities in Religious Studies”
• Dataset as through line
  • Description
    • In this framework, students are assigned a particular dataset that is flexible enough to be applied to a variety of different methodologies. So a dataset on Smithsonian works of art might be used for mapping, social network analysis, and archiving. The process pays dividends but can require a lot of upfront work to find datasets that can work.
  • Examples
    • Miriam Posner’s DH 101 course
    • Alison Langmead’s Digital Humanities course
• Built around the final project
  • Description
    • Most DH courses probably have a final project in some capacity, but some more than others make the project work an integral part of the course architecture. For example, the first half of the course might introduce topics and methods, while the second half will shift gears to be almost entirely project work. The final project becomes an organizing principle of the calendar as much as an assignment, and work time often takes up several weeks of the calendar.
  • Examples
    • Kristen Mapes’ Introduction to Digital Humanities course
    • My own course entitled Data for the Rest of Us
    • Schuyler Esprit’s Digital Humanities Research course

Much more could be said, but hopefully these broad categories help as a starting place. I find it’s easier to rough out a syllabus when you have some guideposts like these. Models for how one might structure a course can give scaffolding such that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel unless you want to do so.