Digital Jumpstart Workshops - October - 24-25, 2024

The Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities and the Center for Teaching Excellence are proud to announce the Fall 2024 Digital Jumpstart Workshops, “Digital Technologies in the Classroom.”

“Digital Technologies in the Classroom” is an intensive two-day series of workshops, panels, and a keynote presentation, all aimed at equipping teachers at the University of Kansas to integrate the tools of the digital humanities into their classrooms and to think critically about them. All sessions will be held in-person in Watson Library, except the Friday podcasting session, which will be held in the Makerspace in Anschutz Library.

“Digital Technologies in the Classroom” provides three levels of support for KU teachers who want to integrate digital humanities tools into their classrooms.  

1. Instruction. Workshops will cover a range of student-friendly technical tools, from text-mining with Voyant, to critical digital mapping, to AI literacy in the classroom, to creating digital archives, and more. See full schedule for details.  
2. Support. Any workshop attendee who uses a digital humanities tool in a 2025 KU classroom will have the support of the IDRH and the CTE as they teach the course and implement the tool. Support entails pre-assignment and mid-term consultations as well as a measure of troubleshooting.  
3. Funding to use digital humanities tools in the classroom. Through the generosity of the Center for Teaching Excellence, a selection of workshop attendees will receive $500 stipends to support implementation and evaluation of a digital humanities tool in their classroom in 2025 (spring, summer, or fall). Because of limited funding, applicants will be selected competitively.

Keynote presentation
Danica Savonick, Assistant Professor of English, SUNY Cortland

The Transformative Possibilities of Digital, Project-Based Pedagogy in the Humanities

How can digital project assignments enhance learning in the humanities? How can we design such assignments in ways that help students increase their digital literacy while minimizing stress for both instructors and students? In this talk, I draw on my ten years of experience teaching digital humanities, as well as my research on student-centered and feminist pedagogy, to explore these questions and offer practical advice for instructors interested in incorporating project-based learning into their classrooms.  

Dr. Danica Savonick is an Assistant Professor of English at SUNY Cortland.Her research and teaching focus on multicultural and African American literature, feminist theory, and digital humanities. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the CUNY Graduate Center and a B.A. in English from Rutgers University. She is the author of Open Admissions: The Poetics and Pedagogy of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich in the Era of Free College (Duke University Press, 2024). Her research has also appeared in MELUS, American Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Keywords for Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities, Digital Humanities Quarterly, and Hybrid Pedagogy as well as Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicle. She is an editor of The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy and Reviews in DH.