The Digital Classroom: A Digital Humanities Primer on Tools, Methods, and Resources

Abstract

This article will focus on teaching with digital humanities (DH) methods and tools as they relate to their practicability in the context of the classroom. It will concentrate on the specific challenges that the teaching of computational methods pose to educators who are experts in their discipline but might feel that they lack the technical know-how to steer their students towards DH. In particular, the article will introduce a number of tools that allow school students and educators to access digital approaches and to start appreciating their relevance for research. These include online resources for literary analysis, simple programs that may be used for research into media, and archival projects that stem from the collaboration of students and staff and bring neglected histories to an outside audience. While these tools do not demand any practical programming knowledge, I will also present resources that teach widely used coding languages such as Python and R on a step-by-step basis. The third and final part of the article will introduce a number of methods and services that empower educators to create a digital classroom with quantitative approaches and distant learning as their primary characteristics. Teaching these methods might prove challenging at first.; yet the hands-on, collaborative, quality of DH also leads to classroom situations in which students and staff become co-learners, and therefore leads to a democratizing effect.