Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom: A Practical Introduction for Teachers, Lecturers, and Students

Classroom Activity Sets

Successfully incorporating digital humanities activities in the classroom requires careful preparation. You not only have to design the activity, but also have to familiarize yourself with the tool, ensure that you have access to the right equipment, provide instructional materials for your students, and know where to find help or documentation in case you run into problems. But because DH activities are fun, productive, and memorable, they are well worth the effort.

To jumpstart your digital pedagogy, we have provided sample sets of the materials you need. Each set below features a full description of the activity (including what kinds of preparation is required, as well as tips for exploring the software further), a prompt that you give to your students (it contains an overview of the steps the students will take, as well as an explanation of the purpose of the activity), and a slideshow tutorial (which you can download as either a PowerPoint or a Keynote file). The tutorial is pitched to a general audience, so you can use it yourself if you are not familiar with the technology, as well as choose whether or not to distribute it to students.
 

VideoAnt Activity Set

Explanation of activity for the instructor 
Prompt to disseminate to students 
Tutorial for how to use this tool (PowerPoint)
Tutorial for how to use this tool (Keynote)

In this activity, students add explanatory and interpretive annotations to video clips that are already on the Internet. 

ScannerPro Activity Set

Explanation of activity for the instructor 
Prompt to disseminate to students 
Tutorial for how to use this tool (PowerPoint)
Tutorial for how to use this tool (Keynote)

In this activity, students learn how to use a smartphone application to take high-quality images of physical texts and generate plain-text (OCR) from them.

Twitter Activity Set

Explanation of activity for the instructor
Prompt to disseminate to students
Tutorial for how to use this tool (PowerPoint)
Tutorial for how to use this tool (Keynote)

In this activity, students remotely stage a Twitter event that dramatizes course readings or concepts in a public setting.

Voyant Activity Set

Explanation of activity for the instructor
Prompt to disseminate to students
Tutorial for how to use this tool (PowerPoint)
Tutorial for how to use this tool (Keynote)

In this activity, students use Voyant, a simple, in-browser, most-frequent-word analysis visualizer to investigate the thematic and grammatical structure of a course text.