We’re Not Teaching the Next Generation of Digital Humanists

By Timothy A. Lepczyk. I’m looking forward to a moment in the future. That moment is when the word “digital” is dropped from “digital humanities.” This semester I’m teaching an introductory digital humanities course to undergraduates at Hendrix College and one thing we’re doing is teleconferencing with DH scholars across the country.
The learning objective is to expose my students to the many different ways digital humanities scholarship is done, to let them see the paths people have taken, and for students to imagine their own way in digital humanities scholarship, if they decide to pursue it. When speaking with our guests, one trend I’ve noticed is that they don’t care about labels. “Digital humanist” and “digital humanities” seem to be terms more useful for those on the outside to describe this technological encroachment. Is a writer a different kind of writer if she uses paper and pencil versus word processing, or publishes her own work online with multimedia? The questions being asked by digital humanists are inline with questions humanists have asked before. The only difference is using digital tools to help them in their task. More...