Praxis Lecture: Teaching Scholarly Agency in a Digital Humanities Context

The University Community is invited to attend a new series of lectures called Praxis: Doing Scholarship Digitally. Praxis conversations are designed to create opportunities for researchers from a variety of disciplines to come together to hear about and discuss how digital tools are being used to aid discovery and visualization across diverse fields and forms. The Praxis Conversation series is co-sponsored by the Simpson Center for the Humanities and the University Libraries.

In this 2nd Praxis talk, we will look at the reasons we planned the Demystifying Digital Humanities workshop series, and the content that we are presenting. This content is a mixture of specific skills and broader perspectives. As a field, digital humanities (DH) is often closely associated with skill acquisition (i.e., programming languages). Our experience, however, is that the broader perspectives, though harder to define concretely, and thus harder to teach, are crucial to helping DH learners develop a sense of agency as scholars.

We will explore what agency might mean in the digital humanities; and address some of the complexities of teaching and modeling agency in an academic context. In addition, we will share what we've learned so far about teaching digital humanities in the format of an intensive quarterly workshop series: what works, what doesn't, and our plans for adapting the series for future iterations.

Featured speakers: Paige Morgan and Sarah Kremen-Hicks