To circle back more directly to Amanda’s query, I do think a _loose_ set of guidelines for aspiring graduate or undergraduate digital humanists is in order.

Integrating the production rather than the consumption of digital humanities scholarship and tools is another matter altogether–and I think this is what you’re talking about, Amanda. I can’t help thinking of Bill Turkel’s comment recently in a JAH exchange (http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/95.2/interchange.html): “I’m occasionally dismayed to meet people who describe themselves as digital humanists but don’t do any programming.” (That piece, by the way, has a great exchange about the method vs. medium vs. field question.) The production of substantive digital humanities scholarship undeniably requires deep technical skills, whether those be in programming or GIS or 3D visualization or whatever. I’ve been thinking about and wanting to develop a digital history methods course to teach at the undergraduate level. There are some great courses to emulate–Bill’s (http://digitalhistory.wikispot.org/UWO_History_9808_2008-09) and Dan Cohen’s (http://www.dancohen.org/clio-wired/) and Jeff McClurken’s (http://digitalhistory.umwblogs.org/syllabus/). While I dream about my students producing sophisticated digital projects, I don’t see how I could ask them to do that. To do that students would either either need to bring with them or acquire some technical expertise, and that’s of course unrealistic. Even in a methods course I think I’d have to focus on the medium, teaching my students to be critical consumers and users of digital scholarship rather than producers of it. (Which isn’t different from more conventional undergraduate methods courses, it seems to me. We teach our students to recognize, appreciate, and criticize Marxist scholarship, but we generally don’t ask them to produce Marxist analyzes themselves.)

Having said that, I’m a little uncomfortable admitting this. Few would debate that it’s not enough to teach undergraduate students to be critical, appreciative readers. They need to learn how to write thoughtfully and clearly. And, it seems to me, the same is increasingly true of digital projects. It’s not enough to teach students to be critical, appreciative consumers and users of digital scholarship. They need to learn to be producers too, to be able to author a multimedia presentation or a visualization or to write code to tackle an historical question. How do they get those skills? Is this something that needs to be incorporated into humanities curricula? Or is this something that should be tackled in other disciplines that students generally have to take courses in as part of most colleges’ and universities’ GER requirements–in computer science courses, in geography courses, etc.? In other words, if we as humanists deem digital literacy (and, again, by that I’d emphasize not just the ability to read but the capacity to write) an essential skill for our students to possess, are “digital skills” something that needs to be tackled within humanities curricula or more broadly within the liberal arts curricula, more likely than not by faculty outside of the humanities?

- Many faculty members don’t have a basic grasp of what internet and other computing technologies mean socially and cognitively, nor a good idea of what digital resources exist that are directly relevant to them.

- Convincing those faculty members to learn new things, new skills, new skillsets is non-trivially difficult. They’re already overloaded with work, and those who haven’t already bought in don’t tend to regard digital humanities as something crucial to their careers.

- Teaching students the basics of digital humanities is an excellent goal that should probably be accomplished in different ways in different disciplines.

- In any discipline, DH is a highly applied (as opposed to theoretical) field, at least insofar as its basics are concerned.

- Without faculty buy-in, which involves learning and understanding and excitement enough to re-work syllabi, teaching digital humanities seems to me impractical.

- And here again we get to reluctance to learn, no time to take on all this work, etc. As a non-faculty staff member, I’ve had a tremendously difficult time with attempts at organizing workshops for faculty; they just don’t come no matter what we build, not in numbers.

There’s got to be some curricular material that’s applicable across the humanities and teachable in a very short time. The challenge is, it needs to be taught in the context of specific courses, otherwise people won’t show up. I like the idea of modules, which are practiced in some institutions but not in others. Something like: before a semester begins, working with a faculty member to identify a couple of key concepts and/or skills that would benefit students in a particular course. Then, sometime early on in the semester, doing one or two guest practicums in that course, taking up precious class time but in return equipping students with more tools for chipping away at their subject(s).

Right now, I think we’re still in the phase of the very basics of internet research, search engine tricks, subject-specific sources, and technologies that are needed in order to use those resources. Students can’t learn everything about DH even if they try, so I’m curious to talk with folks about this: developing a list of general DH topics that would be nice to teach, and strategies for picking relevant bits of that list and applying them to specific situations.