Doing a Lot with a Little: Making Digital Humanities Work at a Small College

I’m interested in how one goes about integrating digital tools into the liberal arts, and my perspective is that of a long-time faculty member in a small department at a small school. The common wisdom is that today’s students know and can do more than most faculty in all things digital, and we need merely provide opportunities for them to use those skills. But that’s not true for many students. Our department’s newest faculty member has a specialty in digital media, specifically gamification. And although many students are flocking to her classes, she’s also encountering resistance from some English majors: as one said to her in the first week of her “Digital Literacies” class, “I don’t know anything about games, and I didn’t become an English major to analyze stuff like this.” I see two issues revealed through her statement: first, not all students are as digitally savvy as we think they are. Yes, they are experts at Facebook and Instagram and they can upload a movie from their iPhone to YouTube in seconds. However, they tend not to apply the digital skills they do have to their academic studies, and they usually don’t have the confidence or intellectual curiosity to explore the application of new digital tools on their own. And second, this student and others like her hadn’t received exposure in earlier classes to digital humanities techniques, so what my colleague was doing seemed outlandish to her. I want to address both issues today.

In our department, students can take multiple courses from my new colleague and gain expertise in digital media. But is that the right strategy? Most of us would not be satisfied if only one faculty member taught research skills, or theoretical approaches, or grammar. The analogy is imperfect: most of us on the English faculty have a high level of expertise in these areas while our digital expertise varies widely. English departments are filled with a mixture of dinosaurs and newbies and everything in between. We aren’t all equipped to use the same digital tools, nor do we want to. It makes the most sense for faculty members to use the tools that are complementary to what they do. Like everything else we teach, digital skills are best taught by integrating them widely and reinforcing them often. Wider exposure to digital tools, wider than what expert colleagues can provide, will help increase students’ receptivity to these new approaches.

But even after we subscribe to that principle, there’s a second problem. At small schools, resources for full commitment to digital methods are scarce. For example, at St. John Fisher College, English is near the bottom of the list for use of computer labs—even after a conversation with the dean or provost about how humanities majors need such spaces as much as communication, business, and computer science majors do, faculty in my department who request labs sometimes do not get assigned to them. This situation will likely improve over time as colleges devote more institutional resources to increasing the number of computer labs, but until it does, it’s actually an incentive for a broad and multi-level approach to digital humanities work. Not all digital work requires a computer lab or special software, so while our access is limited, why not use a wide range of tools beyond those specialized applications?

Personally, I would place myself on the dinosaur end of the digital spectrum. But interviews last year with the candidates for the digital media position intrigued me, so over the summer, I did some research into digital humanities and found interesting and useful ways to incorporate some tools into my classroom. Another impetus was discovering that our library holds a set of diaries written by Frances DeWitt Babcock (a Rochester, New York, singer and piano teacher) from 1912, when she was 15 years old, to 1970 when she was 63. I teach History of English, and I always include a unit on Present Day English, slang, dialects, etc. So these diaries...