“Introducing Digital Humanities in the Undergraduate Classroom"

Abstract: This paper explores the practical aspects of teaching digital humanities skills to undergraduate students primarily from humanities and social science backgrounds. The results are presented in the form of a case study of a course titled Introduction to Digital Humanities taught at the University of Washington between 2015 and 2018. While many students who took the course had little to no previous experience in the field, the majority chose the course in order to become technologically proficient and remain competitive in the job market after graduation. The case study explores the lessons learned during the first three course sessions, and describes the strategies implemented during the fourth session to address many of these instructional and classroom management challenges. These strategies included the use of a cloud-based digital tool—the Gale Digital Scholar Lab—to create and manage corpora of primary source material related to the class research topic. Students worked to clean up OCR text in the platform, before using the integrated digital tools to conduct quantitative and qualitative text analysis. These analyses included topic modeling, n-grams, named entity recognition, and sentiment analysis. Students exported their results either as raw data (CSV/JSON) to explore further using external tools including Google Fusion Tables and Voyant, or as image files to include in their final Omeka exhibits.