What are the “digital liberal arts”?

We use “digital liberal arts” as an umbrella term covering digital approaches to pedagogy and scholarship, in particular where they reflect and enhance the international inflections of liberal arts practiced at our institutions. Our use of this term includes digital humanities, digital literacies, and the use of technology to enable new forms of interdisciplinary scholarship or pedagogy.

Listed below are some examples of digital methods and types of digital projects. AMICAL aims to support the use of such digital approaches in the liberal arts classroom. In practice, this often means projects based in humanities disciplines, or projects involving interdisciplinary collaboration that is not based solely in the sciences.

Example digital methods and project types

• Text analytics
• Network analysis
• Data visualization and analysis
• Mapping and spatial analysis
• Timelines and temporal analysis
• Blogging
• Annotation
• Online exhibits and digital storytelling
• Digital editions
• Podcasting
• Digital oral history

Methods, tools and pedagogical choices

See the following for descriptions of such digital approaches, including pedagogical goals that might motivate choosing that method and examples of specific tools for each approach.

• Digital Assignment Guides from Princeton’s McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning
• Choosing Digital Methods and Tools from Harvard’s Digital Arts and Humanities

Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities, a peer-reviewed, scholarly collection of pedagogical artifacts.

Program history

We organized a number of programs in support of the digital liberal arts as part of our 2018-2021 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for “Building Leadership and Capacity for Digital Liberal Arts across AMICAL”, for which we had requested an extension through 2023.

• DLA Consultation Program: Najla Jarkas, Mellon Fellow from 2021 to 2023, offered guidance on questions or challenges that AMICAL members had related to the digital humanities, or to digital pedagogy or scholarship generally, in liberal arts environments. This included extensive support for course-integrated digital projects.
• DLA Cohort programs (2022–2023)
  • Digital Collaborations: This program fostered and supported collaborations across AMICAL institutions on digital projects or assignments that are integrated into coursework.
  • Digital Oral History: This program offered training in digital oral history methods, and support to digital projects involving oral history (or oral narrative more generally) integrated in courses.
• Events: We organized events on digital tools and methods with presentations by invited guests and interactive discussions with AMICAL colleagues.
• Small Grants: Funding for projects and initiatives that relate to locally grounded and collaborative forms of digital liberal arts.

Here are some digital projects AMICAL supported during this period (as of Nov 2021):

• Analyzing Kyrgyz Narratives (AKYN) is a collaborative course-integrated digital project that recorded, transcribed, and analyzed six metrical oral Kyrgyz verse narratives by two different Kyrgyz performers of the epic Manas.
• A digital history of Hausa narratives in a multilingual translation project across borders (collaboration between teams at Franklin University & American University of Nigeria).
• Collaborating on a Digital Cultures course to redesign syllabus, create rubrics, present lectures, and offer feedback on final digital projects to students (consultation between the Mellon Fellow and faculty at the American University of Central Asia).
• Italian-American digital oral histories (faculty-technologist-librarian collaboration at John Cabot University)
• Course module combining library special collections with curating online exhibits (library-faculty collaboration at Al Akhawayn University)
• Incorporate digital methods in an Academic Travel course (library-technologist-faculty collaboration at Franklin University)
• Use of digital methods and tools in liberal education courses (faculty-library collaboration at American College of Greece).
• 3D modeling projects involving local cultural heritage (faculty-library collaborations at American University of Central Asia).