HASTAC 2015: The Art and Science of Digital Humanities

While digital scholarship -- be it in the humanities or the natural sciences -- has become a fixture on many liberal arts campuses, its shape differs as greatly as the institutions that have fostered it. As a group, though, these varied institutional cultures have affinities that recommend their grouping as a "Digital Liberal Arts," (DLA) a term suggested by William Pannapacker and seconded by Raphael Alvarado, both in early 2013. As institutions or consortia have explored ways to knit digital work into the fabric of their academic communities, they face the question: how does one do the Digital Liberal Arts?

As an interdisciplinary activity focusing on students’ experiences and producing digital projects, the question of how to do Digital Liberal Arts is important not only to the future of liberal arts colleges (LACs) but also to the development of higher education.

Our panel will bring together representatives from three different models for exploring digital practices and pedagogies in LACs. Andrea Rehn at the recently formed Digital Liberal Arts Center (DigLibArts) of Whittier and Janet Simons at Hamilton College’s long-established Digital Humanities Initiative (DHi) will speak to doing DLA from a center-based perspective. Jacob Heil, the Mellon Digital Scholar for the Five Colleges of Ohio, works with faculty to develop digital projects and pedagogy from a consortial perspective. Alex Galarza, a Digital Liberal Arts Fellow at Hope College, works with students and faculty to support digital projects and pedagogy across the campus as part of a three-year, Mellon-funded honors program. Bill Pannapacker is the Director of the Mellon Scholars Program at Hope College and can speak directly to how DLA work fits into institutional structures and regional partnerships.

We hope that our panel’s diversity in experiences and roles doing Digital Liberal Arts will spur conversation about fostering students' digital research, about institutional infrastructures, and about sourcing teams to build projects. Indeed, we erred on the side of variety in terms of our panelists’ perspectives; we hope that modest-length, formal presentations by each panelist will provide a number of paths for ensuing conversation. The panelists all balance faculty research projects and pedagogical practice at LACs focused on students’ experiences. They also face the challenges of limited time, resources, and a wide set of demands on technological expertise to facilitate digital projects and learning.