POST: Digital Humanities and Undergraduate Library Instruction

Rebecca Bliquez (Seattle University) has published an article (.pdf) in the ACRL Instruction Section Instructional Technologies Committee’s Tips and Trends. Bliquez outlines some common ways digital humanities tools and methods can be integrated into undergraduate classrooms, such as digital exhibition creation, Wikipedia editing, digital mapping, and text analysis. Bliquez concludes:

Given the challenges of engagement in this field why should librarians consider investing their time and effort? Although DH pedagogy is relatively untried in the greater library instruction community the potential for rewards, especially those linked to student learning, is significant. Students learn to work effectively in teams and become more
reflective in their creation and use of digital resources. Also, there is evidence that DH
pedagogy prompts more creative and experiential thinking in general approaches to problem-solving (Green 2016, 191-92). Opportunities for faculty-librarian collaboration are on the rise as DH research and instruction becomes increasingly common on college campuses. As a result, librarians can become more authentically embedded in the curriculum and liaisons can develop more subject area expertise.

Bliquez’s article includes a list of directories and tools for library instruction.

Author: Sarah Melton

Sarah Melton is Head of Digital Scholarship at Boston College. Her group explores and documents new tools and supports teaching and research in a variety of areas that utilize broad methodologies in the digital humanities. She is interested in questions of digital infrastructure, the philosophical underpinnings of ”openness,” and the intersection of public history and digital humanities. She has worked with Open Access Button for the past several years. Sarah holds a PhD from Emory University’s Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts.