Educational Technology
The future(s) of the digital humanities obviously depends to a large degree on the educational experiences of future scholars. Some digital humanists formulate the problem in terms of “control” of the paradigms and platforms used in humanities pedagogy. They also point to a gap between education, research, and scholarship. Humanists, like scholars in many disciplines, tend to concentrate innovate tool building for research purposes, but for pedagogy, existing approaches are adopted without the corresponding level of adaptation found in scholarship. The level of control and direction that humanists exercise over technological tools in research, as contrasted to education, is uneven. This situation was also seen in the 1950s and 1960s, with educational television being used in pedagogy, but, with few exceptions, humanists were not the creators of the material on the new medium. Although there were efforts to employ new audiovisual materials to supplement pedagogy, large-scale experimentation with innovative electronic audiovisual systems was not broadly undertaken and dwindled even further starting in the early 1970s (Fletcher, 2019). Starting in the early 2000s, similar issues were observed with large-scale technological pedagogical innovations like digital textbooks, virtual classrooms, virtual laboratories and studios, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), and feature-rich learning management systems. The development and adoption of these multimedia technologies, like their technological predecessors, are unpredictable (Fletcher, 2019).
These issues, in turn, imply that more funding and resources is needed to build and maintain digital humanities educational technologies and platforms specifically adapted and tailored to humanistic work. These tools should be built by humanities scholars, and humanists “cannot continue to just use what is lying around” (Fletcher, 2019). Media studies and educational technology researcher Curtis Fletcher describes the situation as follows: “…using the right tools and platforms out there is simply not enough. If we truly want to control our fates as technology-driven humanities educators, given the long-standing and problematic nature of our relationship to educational technologies, we must build our own network of shared services and infrastructure for digital pedagogy that is commensurate with, and indeed intimately tied to, the already existing ecosystem of resources, tools, and platforms built for digital humanities research and scholarship” (Fletcher, 2019).
In addition to resources built by and for humanities scholars, there is also a pressing need for good datasets, primarily for pedagogical purposes, but also as “ground truth” data for exploring research questions. There is an underlying challenge, both in digital humanities pedagogy and research, in accessing suitable data sets. Many existing corpora of texts are unsuited for answering interesting questions in teaching and scholarship. Good datasets for pedagogy are scarce, and, consequently, the DH community needs to put more effort into creating them based on current research in the field (Goldstone, 2019). However, one of the most pressing needs in digital humanities pedagogy is the acquisition of quantitative knowledge. Although programming knowledge is very important, skill in programming does not substitute for knowledge of quantitative methods.