#dariahTeach has been a DARIAH Working Group (WG) since 2017. The focus of the WG has been the #dariahTeach project and platform, which hosts some 30 Open Educational Resources. The platform was developed as part of an ERASMUS+ Strategic Partnership (2015-2017), in which eight courses were produced on what were core topics in digital humanities, including text encoding, data modelling, research infrastructures, and project management. In 2018, the project received additional funding through Creative Europe. The guiding principle behind the #dariahTeach platform is to create reusable teaching materials that could easily be integrated into university courses, or could be used by ‘lone learners’, meaning individuals who do not have access to digital humanities expertise. #dariahTeach has since diversified its content beyond the technical to provide courses in areas such as the integration of social justice into digital scholarship and taking a design thinking approach to project design.
The #dariahTeach WG is now expanding its focus beyond the #dariahTeach platform to embrace the wide range of teaching being undertaken by the DARIAH community, from traditional face-to-face teaching, to the development of open educational resources, to workshops, summer schools, and hackathons.
This initiative comes at a time when the DH community at large offers a wide variety of training and teaching, from formal degree courses to less formal shorter training, e.g. for archivists and librarians. (Wils et. al., 2017) Rather than a consolidation of the curriculum, we see an ever widening scope of what is being taught under the big tent of digital humanities. While in the early days of DH, training and degree programmes often focussed on the basics of digital editing, web history and basics of web technologies we now see a broad range of DH courses including statistical methods, 3D modelling, geohumanities components, or – most recently – working with artificial intelligence. As a consequence, more informatics-oriented scholars like Burghardt and Müller-Birn (2021) prefer to describe their work as “computational humanities”. Digital humanities teaching has also diversified in terms of theoretical approaches and heuristic reflection. (Handelman & Mapes, 2018) Moreover, as computational analysis is more accessible for different subject areas and non-expert users, we have to reconsider the skill sets that digital / computational humanities students are expected to acquire. This creates the challenge for both individuals and teaching programmes to keep pace with technological and societal developments while navigating national education guidelines, institutional structures, and limited resources.
To create a space where we can discuss these challenges and brainstorm solutions, the Chairs of the #dariahTeach WG welcome those interested in teaching in the digital arts and humanities to join our WG meeting at the upcoming DARIAH Annual Event in Rome. We will use this WG meeting to take stock of the interests and needs of the community in order to plan future activities. Please contact the WG Chairs for more information on how to join in person or remotely. Below are several areas that could be of common interest, but we also welcome additional ideas.
One way to expand our working group activities is to reflect on the use of research software and the integration of coding skills into DH teaching as there is now a wide range of humanities-relevant digital tools and environments for computational tasks. While a catalogue like the SSH Open Marketplace helps to make a wide range of software and reusable workflows visible, finding what you need and using it can still be extremely challenging without bespoke training pathways. Moreover, only a small fraction of DH tools offer fully functional deployments hosted on external servers which users can simply access via their browsers. Many tools are intended for user-side hosting, which means that scholars and students either need high-end personal computers or server access via their institutions. The necessary stable computational infrastructures are frequently not provided on a local or national level. Therefore, one avenue of exploration for the WG can be the creation of cross-institutional JupyterHub instances as well as the further development of web assembly services like JupyterLite, which allow sharing executable code and team work.
Even before there were Digital Humanities programmes at the university level, there was a host of less formal teaching: summer schools, workshops, and training events. Such events continue but are now often targeting learners outside academia (e.g. professionals in heritage institutions) or staff and students in disciplines that are otherwise not engaging much with technology. It could be worthwhile to discuss the relationship between more formalised DH degrees and the more occasional forms of DH teaching. This topic is closely related with our wish to make open educational resources produced by the DH community easier to re-use, but the topic also implies that the crediting and evaluation of individual DH teaching offers has to be improved on an EU-wide scale. Recent initiatives such as the Dutch national pilot on microcredentials (2021–2023) have demonstrated how flexible, modular forms of certification can be linked to verifiable digital badge infrastructures. These developments are particularly relevant to better integrate short, practice-oriented learning units into existing curricula.
Perhaps the most controversial development affecting teaching at universities is the wide-ranging availability of AI-powered tools and Large Language Models (LLMs). While AI tools raise many concerns about identity-proof examinations and the replacement of human workers in administrative roles, the progress made in artificial intelligence also offers new opportunities for research and teaching if the workflow is transparent and well-documented. (Armaselu, 2024) For instance, advanced vision models promise to solve remaining issues in optical character recognition and handwriting recognition, which are key to the text-based Digital Humanities and currently still a bottleneck in many heritage projects. A focus of the discussion could thus be to develop best practices for responsible AI use in DH teaching, especially because artificial intelligence may “engage students traditionally underserved by conventional STEM courses.” (Chun & Elkins, 2023)
Armaselu, F. (2024, June 5). Documenting the Use of Generative AI in Digital Humanities Workflows. Dariah Annual Event 2024: Workflows: Digital Methods for Reproducible Research Practices in the Arts and Humanities, Lisbon, Portugal. Conference presentation. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11483527
Burghardt, M., & Müller-Birn, C. (2021). Methoden und Anwendungen der Computational Humanities. In R. H. Reussner, A. Koziolek, & R. Heinrich (Eds.), INFORMATIK 2020 – Back to the Future, pp. 1269–1270. Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V. https://doi.org/10.18420/inf2020_118
Chun, J., & Elkins, K. (2023). The Crisis of Artificial Intelligence: a New Digital Humanities Curriculum for Human-Centred AI. International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing, 17 (2), pp. 147-167. https://doi.org/10.3366/ijhac.2023.0310
Handelman, M., & Mapes, K. (2018, June 27). Question, Create, Reflect: A Holistic Approach to Teaching Digital Humanities. Digital Humanities 2018, Mexico City, Mexico. Conference poster. https://doi.org/10.17613/M6ZG6G65T
Wilms, L., Cock, M., & Companjen, B. (2017, July 5). 3.2 Digital Humanities Clinics – Leading Dutch Librarians into DH. LIBER 2017, Library & Information Centre, University of Patras, Greece. Conference poster. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3610195
