By Raena Hunter Doty Arts & Features Editor Arts & Ideas hosted Roopika Risam, professor of digital humanities at Dartmouth College, who presented about the importance of integrating digital humanities (DH) into a humanities curriculum Oct. 8. Bart Brinkman, director of the Center for Digital Humanities at FSU and professor of English, introduced Risam as one of the “leading” figures in the DH field. He said she’s given many public lectures, written over 50 articles and essays, and authored several books about DH in education. Risam said she wants to share her experiences teaching DH with the FSU community, and added most of her strategies for teaching DH were developed at Salem State University, where she became involved with the field. She said the goal of her talk was to inspire people - both faculty and students - to get involved with DH, and to answer questions about why DH is important in a curriculum. Risam said, “We are in the midst of yet another one of the unending crises of higher education and the humanities,” and added higher education is also grappling with the question of who belongs in its system. She added there are a lot of concerns about higher education, including how valuable it is, and because of this, students tend to gravitate toward majors with a “self-evident career attached to them, where the name of the department, the name of the major, is the name of the career,” such as education, social work, and nursing. Risam said in her time as a professor of English at Salem State, she saw enrollment in the English major drop from 300 majors in a single year to 130. She added this is possibly because of the state of the economy - universities tend to see lower enrollment when the country isn’t in a recession - but that either way, the Northeast is seeing lower enrollment nationally than the rest of the country. This lowered enrollment disproportionately affects humanities disciplines, Risam said. She said students who want a major with a direct link to their careers won’t major in something like English or history unless they want to teach it, but she thinks this is a mistake, because majors in the humanities learn a lot of important skills necessary for any job. Risam added humanity professors can often shut down conversation about the value of a humanities degree because it’s supposedly obvious. She said professors think “the value of an English major should be self-evident and prospective students and their families should just understand why an English major can change your life.” She added that an English major can change someone’s life, but this isn’t always communicated to students very well. Majors in the humanities teach students critical thinking, communication, and analysis skills. “In our information economy, our students need to be prepared to engage in these vast amounts of texts, a large quantity of data - they need to be able to read it, interpret it, analyze and be skeptical of it, and to write about it,” she said. Risam added technology is a huge part of this, and not only must students learn how to use it - “they need to learn how to learn how to use technology,” she said. She said DH has the ability to make the humanities more relevant to the contemporary workforce and engage students in what they’re doing more. Risam said she wanted to define DH because many people don’t have a clear definition about what it is. She said her definition is “using digital or computational tools to study literature, history, and culture,” and this can manifest in two different ways - using the tools “in the research itself,” or using the tools as a medium to publish the research. “Digital humanities is a really useful way for helping our students gain the capacities that are going to be essential to their success as thinkers, as leaders, as workers, as community members, in the 21st century,” she said. She added DH can prepare students “for jobs that we don’t even know yet,” and said for example, when she was young, she never could have dreamed of becoming a social media content creator, but now that’s a very normal job title. “If humanists are willing to have these conversations - to talk to students about how to translate the skills and the tools that they learn from a humanities degree for a job interview, on a résumé, in a cover letter - then perhaps there’s a path toward increased interest in the humanities,” Risam said. She then shifted to talking about examples of DH pedagogy in her classroom, beginning with an analysis of Frederick Douglass’s speech “What, To The Slave, Is The Fourth Of July?” using a software called Voyant. Voyant created a word cloud of common words in the speech, and Risam said students were “invariably” surprised by the prominence of the word “God” within the speech, given that it isn’t a speech about religion in the traditional sense. She said once students saw how much the word “God” was used, they could then question why it might be so prominent, and said she believes Douglass was “tying into this genre of puritanical lamenting sermons, and his use of religious language is part of invoking this tradition. “The digital tool really reveals a layer of interpretation that [students] may not have paid attention to otherwise,” Risam said. She said an important part of teaching about and with DH in the classroom is giving students the room to “play around” and allowing students to see what they can discover when they do this. This can also help build confidence, she added. Risam said contemporary culture has perpetuated “the myth of the digital native” - a person who grew up immersed in technology and therefore doesn’t need explicit instruction in it. She added the digital native myth is untrue for a number of reasons, including a number of factors that affected how people interacted with technology growing up, but also “just because you use the technology doesn’t mean that you’re a critical user of technology.” Risam said DH projects can engage students in the technology more critically, especially when their projects center around communities of people from different backgrounds and cultures. “This is a way to help students understand the power of the technologies we have at our disposal,” she said. She said her integration of timelines in classes can engage students particularly much, as students tend to love them, and suggested using timeline.js, which is a very user-friendly software allowing students to create relatively sophisticated timelines. Risam added she’s involved her students in a lot of projects to engage them in the local history of their school, and often encourages them to interact directly with archived material. She brought up an example of a student timeline project tracing the history of students of color at Salem State and what they wanted from their administration going back to the ’60s, which largely overlapped with what students of color wanted in 2018 when the project was made. Risam added this had resonance at the school, as the Salem State alliance of Black and Latino students started showing this timeline at events. She said she doesn’t teach her students to use the software directly and instead cultivates a list of materials and tutorials to help them learn because she wants to assess student learning based on their processes rather than their products. By not teaching students step-by-step tutorials, Risam said she gives students the foundation to learn on their own. Risam said DH assignments are not just useful for DH classes - they can be integrated into a number of different courses to help engage students. When giving key takeaways, Risam said it’s often best to start integration of DH into the classroom on a small scale. “One activity is totally good enough,” she said. “Don’t panic. Don’t stress. It’s far less overwhelming to test the waters with something that’s small.” She added help is always available and projects can be collaborative. Anyone who’s confused about how to do something or what the next step is can ask a colleague in DH or a DH-related discipline. Students may also respond to projects better when they’re doing them collaboratively, Risam said. Teachers can assign a part of a larger project to a student to help them get started. Finally, Risam said it’s very important to assess the process of learning over the end product if a teacher really wants to promote student learning. She said by encouraging “our students to really engage with us and the complications that come out of internet-based textuality questions of information … we’re really putting our students in the position to demonstrate the value of the humanities.”
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