Introduction: Open/Social/Digital Humanities Pedagogy, Training, and Mentorship 2023

The articles that appear in this special issue were first presented as part of the online conference Open/Social/Digital Humanities Pedagogy, Training, and Mentorship in June 2023, which is an event aligned with the Digital Humanities Summer Institute. This event arises out of collaboration between the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (PI: Ray Siemens) Pedagogy Cluster, co-led by Constance Crompton and Laura Estill, and the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations Pedagogy Special Interest Group, represented by Ray Siemens. We want to sincerely thank everyone who presented in and attended the conference itself, as well as our session chairs—Jessica Otis, Gretchan Rudham, John Maxwell, and Bridget Moynihan—for creating and facilitating such wide-ranging, energetic discussions.

The 2023 Open/Social/Digital Humanities Pedagogy, Training, and Mentorship event was held virtually, hosting more than 200 registered participants from around the world. All presenters recorded their talks in advance of the synchronous meeting. Registrants were then given early access to these talks through the Canadian HSS Commons. As such, all registrants and panellists could watch the presentations at their own pace and even those who could not attend the synchronous online meeting could still benefit from the invigorating ideas offered by the presenters. These pre-recordings also enabled a conference model wherein the synchronous meeting time did not need to support the delivery of the presentations but could instead foreground active exchange and discussion among and between panellists, chairs, and registrants. As such, the conference worked to embody its foundational and interconnected ideas of open, social, and digital humanities work.

We understand this special issue as a way to continue this same commitment to open/social/digital humanities work. The journal is open-source, freely available online, makes use of the digital medium to incorporate materials and formats of submissions that might face more restrictions in print environments, and builds on the social gathering which gave the event its initial energy. Each article published here also takes to heart the other eponymous piece of the conference and this special issue: namely, the never-ending art of learning and caring that can be understood as pedagogy, training, and mentorship. The authors in this issue take seriously questions of what pedagogy, training, and mentorship mean within a context of open, social, and digital humanities. They demonstrate some of the many sites at which pedagogy, training, and mentorship are growing, adapting, and pushing for change. Each article also demonstrates that pedagogy is not a top-down practice, with a single expert imparting knowledge unidirectionally downwards towards students, but is instead a reciprocal, vulnerable practice that requires a lifelong commitment to learning, experimenting, and sharing.

The special issue opens with a collaborative article cluster, “The Search for Founding Black Mothers: Digital Humanities as Reclamation”, written by members of The Search for Founding Black Mothers (an NEH [National Endowment for the Humanities] Institutes Program). Within this cluster, Gretchen Rudham’s “A Digital Invitation to The Search for Founding Black Mothers” explicates the framework for The Search as a pedagogy, a praxis, and an invitation, as well as providing an introduction to nine Founding Black Mothers. In “Through the Looking Glass: Changing Focus with Digital Humanities,” Victoria Moten discusses the role of digital humanities and digital technologies in helping her and other members of The Search navigate new pathways into archives and research for themselves and for their students. Next, Nicholas (Nick) Kennedy’s “Between Binaries in The Search” unpacks some of the tensions that characterize The Search as he describes his own journeys, both virtual and physical, to follow the traces of Founding Black Mothers. To close the cluster, Cortnie Belser’s “Excavating Erasure: The Curious Case of Carcerality in the Archives” confronts the entanglement of archives as sites of erasure for Black people and histories with the violence of the carceral state and advocates for excavating practices like those enacted by The Search to be taught and practised as resistance. As a whole, the cluster’s pieces speak to the need to engage in work like that of The Search, especially where at risk histories, like those of the Founding Black Mothers, are concerned, while also demonstrating the power of pedagogy that keeps sight of the potential to move beyond the classroom into the lived realities of both teachers and students.

The two next articles in the special issue continue to show the wide pedagogical power of digital projects and to demonstrate an investment in keeping an eye on that which is in danger of being lost. In “Training MLIS Students in DH: Hands-On Consultation Project,” Helene Williams discusses the importance of bridging traditional information work with developing digital humanities skills in the University of Washington’s Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) degree. Through both the article and its supplementary materials (including a course syllabus), she focuses on her course, Digital Humanities Librarianship, in which she asks students to seek out existing but struggling digital humanities project websites that have social justice lenses in order to assess how a digital humanities librarian could assist these projects, while also allowing students to learn from engaging with these projects’ knowledge claims. In “Connecting the ‘Scattered Illogical Dots’: The Ely Green Digital Variorum and the Digital Praxis of Un-editing,” Hannah Huber details the development of a digital variorum that will allow for the little-known manuscript pages of Ely Green’s autobiography to be compared with heavily edited versions of his story published by white presses. Huber describes her own learning and mentorship journey to develop the skills needed for this project, as well as her methods of bringing transcription, textual encoding, and “unediting” work into interdisciplinary classrooms as ways of helping her students understand the power dynamics and processes involved in knowledge creation.

Building on the understandings of pedagogy as a form of committed learning and shared practice that run throughout this issue, the next two articles explicitly focus on offering practical resources and models that can be applied to other classrooms. Yanyue Yuan’s “Diversifying the Canon of Design Cases: Reflections on Documenting, Sharing and Curating Students’ Work” discusses Yuan’s approaches to teaching design thinking, including her pedagogical commitment to facilitating relevant class discussions, empowering students to bring their own real world experience into the classroom, and building co-created repositories of design examples. She also offers a preliminary look into a digital platform she is developing to support these co-curation activities. Katrin Fritsche’s “Creating Sonic Immersiveness: Sound Generators and Digital Audio Workstations for Generating Sound and Music for Digital Stories” presents a video tutorial that demonstrates the use of GarageBand as a viable digital audio workstation (DAW) for teaching purposes. Fritsche also provides supplementary material to the tutorial through assignment examples with an .mp3 file, a sample course outline, and written instructions for other DAWs that can be used to generate music digitally.

Our special issue closes with two pieces that bring into focus something that each of the articles across the issue also recognize, namely, the practical benefits of a clearly articulated and philosophically grounded approach to pedagogy. Sarah Laiola and Anna Mukamal’s co-authored “Critical Making-Focused Undergraduate Digital Humanities Programming: Digital Culture and Design at Coastal Carolina University” provides insight into the Digital Culture and Design (DCD) program in which they both teach, including discussing the philosophies that back their teaching, the projects that students have undertaken, and the mentorship and training models that their program offers. Laiola and Mukamal highlight student work throughout their article and demonstrate the value of the program to its students, while also keeping visible the intellectual frameworks and approaches that they are using to guide their own approach to the program. Katherine I. Knowles’s “From Student to Teacher: Learning then Implementing DH Pedagogical Practices” nicely rounds out the issue by drawing a direct line through Knowles’s own pedagogical journey from attending DH 861: Digital Humanities Pedagogy as a graduate student through to teaching a redesigned digital humanities undergraduate course. She discusses the value of embedding digital humanities values into the course assignments and outcomes, both for the coherence of the class and the range of skills that the students can develop.

Collectively, the articles that comprise this special issue show a deep investment in the open, social, and digital aspects of humanities education praxes and a nuanced understanding that these praxes depend on multidirectional and continuous modes of pedagogy, training, and mentorship. Each article is attuned in its own way to the impact that these praxes can have on classrooms, certainly, but also on the wider lives of everyone involved in these classrooms. It is this attunement to the human effects of the variously linked open/social/digital pedagogies, training, and/or mentorships that, above all and for all their multiplicities, makes them instantly recognizable as being humanist. We are grateful to every author in this issue for individually and collectively building this open point of access to foster future pedagogical discussions and developments in these humanist directions.