Despite its claims toward openness and community-building, the Digital Humanities is still a largely expensive and often exclusionary practice. Projects both large and small depend on grants and costly tools, and many of those projects still focus on canonic, white (often male) figures. As such, the idea of access in digital pedagogy is increasingly material as well as ideological. How do we ensure that students are acquiring and practising digital skills without the use of cost-prohibitive tools and hardware? What strategies can we employ to avoid taking students’ access to and understanding of digital tools for granted? Do we risk alienating students when our projects don’t take elements like race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality into consideration?
This session will encourage participants to discuss best practices for ensuring (free, open) access to technology as well as strategies for inclusivity, both in terms of what projects we create with our students and, more broadly, in terms of the intersection of identity and digital humanities. This session also aims to invite participants to share free and open-source tools they have used in their own pedagogy.
