Multilingual Pedagogy in the Digital Humanities Classroom: Case Studies from 2020
Channel: MSU Digital Humanities
Date: 2021-05-21

Quinn Dombrowski, Courtney Hodrick, Lakmali Jayasinghe, Eric Kim, Victoria Rahbar, Merve Tekgürler (Stanford University), Cecily Raynor (McGill University)

Digital humanities pedagogy—be it through online materials, afternoon workshops, week-long institutes, or full academic courses—often frames rhetorically as immediately applicable by students for their own research. The examples used in these teaching contexts are meant to be relatable in their structure, even as the instructor acknowledges that the specific details may vary. And yet, even as DH pedagogy has become more prevalent worldwide, the examples used in teaching frequently remain in English, even when the language of instruction is not. This has particularly detrimental results for students who want to apply DH methods to materials in other languages, which provide different technical impediments (e.g. the necessity of lemmatizing highly-inflected languages for word-count methods to “work”) and potential avenues of analysis (e.g. diminutives, levels of grammatical formality) than English.

All panelists have been involved with Digital Humanities Across Boundaries, a course held at Stanford University that centers non-English DH. Each student in the course brings their own materials in a non-English language of their choice, and learns how to apply DH methods to that language. Some languages are better-supported by existing computational tools than others, but students learn to identify and, where possible, work around the challenges specific to their language.

In lieu of formal individual presentations, we will begin with a brief description of the class in both its COVID and non-COVID iterations. Student panelists will then discuss what aspects of the class worked well for them, and where it faltered, based on their particular languages, projects, and circumstances. We will reflect on potential revisions for the next version of the class, and open the panel to the audience to discuss how we can all better support work on non-English languages in DH courses.


For more information about the 2021 Global DH Symposium visit msuglobaldh.org.