“Textual Data and Digital Texts in the Undergraduate Classroom” is a 2018-2019 NEH Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities. This institute is designed for those who teach or support undergraduate text-based humanities courses and are interested in learning ways to implement digital tools and methods in their pedagogy. The institute welcomes professors, graduate students, library faculty and staff, and instructors.
Comprised of introductory readings on digital pedagogy, a week-long in-person session in July 2018, and virtual sessions and online communication in the year following through July 2019, the institute is structured to give participants the time and space to learn new approaches as well as integrate them into teaching. Throughout the institute, participants will explore methods for digitally examining texts, the primary object of study for many in the humanities. Participants will learn quantitative, visual, and computational means to analyze texts, approaches that require thinking about texts as digital objects and data. They will experiment with these methods to query texts at both a micro level (isolating and analyzing information contained within texts) and macro level (analyzing multiple texts at once). Participants will then consider and develop their own workshop, course, or assignment to showcase how these approaches be productively incorporated into undergraduate humanities classes.