Austin-area folks can join the UT-based Digital Humanities Discussion List to stay connected to (and help build!) the Central Texas DH community. Monthly happy hours are promoted via this list, and subscribers are encouraged to post updates, events, inquiries, grant announcements, calls for papers, opportunities for collaboration, etc.

Texans (and friendly neighbors) are invited to create a profile on the Texas Digital Humanities Consortium website. We are currently working to improve the site and build out the Consortium itself. A post-TCDL mini-conference is being planned, and the Steering Committee is developing a governance structure for the group. Join us!

As everyone who has participated in a THATCamp knows, successful unconferences depend upon the interest, collaboration, and generosity of numerous individuals and institutions. We feel especially fortunate to have received a lot of support from local and regional sources in both the public and private spheres:

THATCamp Digital Pedagogy ATX 2016 is hosted by the University of Texas Libraries. The free registration, food & drink, and commemorative schwag are all funded by generous contributions from UT’s College of Liberal Arts, Department of Classics, Harry Ransom Center, Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services, LILLAS Benson Digital Scholarship, & Program in Comparative Literature, and FromThePage, Southwestern University Smith Library Center Department of Research and Digital Scholarship, and St. Edward’s Office of Information Technology.

The planning committee is an inter-institutional group composed of UT’s Jessica Aberle, Hannah Alpert-Abrams, Cindy Fisher, Jennifer Hecker, Elon Lang, Adam Rabinowitz, Fatma Tarlaci & Ece Turnator, and Rebecca Frost Davis, Kim Garza & Brittney Johnson (St. Edward’s University), Charlotte Nunes (Southwestern University), and Ben Brumfield (FromThePage).

Finally, we would like to thank all of our participants for traveling from around the country and around the region to join us in making THATCamp Digital Pedagogy ATX 2016 such a productive and compelling time. We hope you all have enjoyed Austin in the new year and will keep in touch!

Meta-scholarship in Digital Humanities has largely focused on defining the field and what counts as a DH program, project, or tool. However, spurred in part by Alan Liu’s 2011 MLA presentation and 2012 article, “Where is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?” recent studies of the field have sought to identify the qualities of digital humanists themselves as well as to propose how they should interact with larger or external cultures, such as those of science technology, and business. Attention is now being given to the roles of race, gender, class, and place in DH. Given the geographical distribution of higher-ed institutions across the nation, most American DH programs are based in college towns rather than major metropolitan areas. This session asks, how might DH programs and/or projects involving students at urban colleges or universities reflect big-city cultures, concerns, and/or communities? Are digital methods well suited for projects that take cities, ongoing projects in their own right, as subject matter?  Can digital pedagogy increase civic engagement and/or enhance fieldwork for students living in or near major cities?

New to the field? Recent graduate? Current student? Let’s connect!

I’m proposing a session where newbies (like myself) talk about what’s working for them, what’s not working for them, and how we’re “making it” as budding digital humanitarians through small group discussion.

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.

What is Academic Entrepreneurship?  How can one become a Humanist Entrepreneur? What does that mean?

AE education – How do we adapt and how do we apply to a Humanities ecosystem the training and resources about becoming an entrepreneur that are available to scientific disciplines? Why is AE so important to those disciplines? Is it equally important to the practice of DH?

Is the marriage of DH and AE a powerful instrument of democratization of cultural values? Does AE contribute to the scientific debate of a Humanities discipline? What are the major roadblocks, psychological, cultural, and institutional that make it challenging to blend Humanities research with business?

For a number of years now, labor-intensive DH projects–especially those involving text editing and transcription, data tagging and markup, image and text analysis, metadata and data creation, etc.–have incorporated crowd sourcing tools and methods into their workflows. In this session, we propose that participants investigate, discuss, demonstrate, or design methods for integrating this DH building work into teaching practices and student learning objectives.  What are best practices for incorporating DH-scholarship into the classes we all teach or facilitate as members of the academic community?  How technical can these projects be? How can DH-crowdsourcing engage students at multiple levels of humanistic study? In what ways can involvement in DH-crowdsourcing projects develop students’ academic skills both within and beyond the scope of a particular humanistic discipline? How can DH projects open themselves up to pedagogy in the most productive ways (without sacrificing quality work)? And what ethical standards should we use when we incorporate student labor into our projects?

What affordances does the network model provide pedagogy?

Questions to be examined could include (but not be limited to):

• What is the difference between a network and a concept map?
• Under what situations is a network representation more appropriate or useful than a concept map?
• What affordances are provided pedagogically when student work in a particular class is modeled as part of an extensible network of students’ work in that and other classes (within the same and possibly even different) institution(s)?

If there is interest, the “Translation Networks” system used currently in translation-related classes at the University of Michigan could be considered as a case study.

Considering the recent developments and initiatives seen at universities around the world, it seems evident that interdisciplinary collaboration will be defining the future of higher education. Digital Humanities perfectly fits this scheme with its interdisciplinary nature; digital projects are often collaborative and promote interdisciplinary partnerships. Collaborative projects cross disciplinary borders to connect seemingly disconnected disciplines, such as empirical sciences and humanities. However, interdisciplinary communication is not effortless since the parameters of such conversations are not well defined. In this session, participants will share challenges, ideas, and examples of successful as well as unsuccessful interdisciplinary digital projects.

What supplemental objectives or learning outcomes might be added to core courses incorporating digital humanities?

This question is meant to focus discussions on pedagogy toward a practical end. At both the undergraduate and graduate level, much of what is done in the college and university classrooms often reflects concern with assessments that echo course objectives/outcomes and align with program requirements and accreditation justification. Do objectives for undergraduate courses–English 1302, for example–need updating to enable one to incorporate digital humanities into the pedagogical repertoire?

I would like to explore how strategies for teaching through and/or learning with digital humanities might already coordinate logically with existing objectives/outcomes and how objectives/outcomes might need to be expanded or tweaked so that courses may be refurbished and made more relevant to students.