DH Programming Pedagogy in the Age of AI (DHSI 2026)

Description

In this team-taught workshop, we invite scholars to join us in exploring the relationship between generative AI and the future of programming pedagogy in the digital humanities and a frontline of what the MLA-CCCC Joint Task Force on Writing and AI called “critical AI literacy.” Generative AI offers opportunities to make programming more accessible to diverse learners, and we explore how to use these emerging technologies to build inclusive pathways into programming through natural language interfaces and “literate programming.” This course will emphasize two critical programming languages, JavaScript and Python, that are commonly taught in humanities courses due to their applicability for interactive experiences, public humanities, and textual analysis. This workshop will build participant’s comfort with both generating and debugging code with AI tools, as well as deploying generative AI outside of mainstream commercial projects. Participants will be invited to approach GitHub, Copilot, Hugging Face, TensorFlow, and Jupyter Notebooks through a beginner’s mind, working through, critiquing, and developing assignments and pedagogical applications or their own classrooms. Participants with and without programming experience are welcome.

Instructor(s)

Anastasia Salter is a Professor of English at the University of Central Florida, and the Director of Graduate Programs and the PhD in Texts & Technology for the College of Arts and Humanities. Dr. Salter is the author of Critical Making in the Age of AI (Amherst College, with Emily Johnson, 2025), Playful Pedagogy in the Pandemic: Pivoting to Games-Based Learning (Routledge, with Emily Johnson, 2022), Twining: Critical and Creative Approaches to Hypertext Narratives (Amherst College, with Stuart Moulthrop, 2021), A Portrait of the Auteur as Fanboy (University of Mississippi Press, with Mel Stanfill, 2020), Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider (Bloomsbury, with Aaron Reed and John Murray, 2020), Toxic Geek Masculinity in Media (Palgrave Macmillan, with Bridget Blodgett, 2017), Jane Jensen: Gabriel Knight, Adventure Games, Hidden Objects (Bloomsbury, 2017), What is Your Quest? From Adventure Games to Interactive Books (University of Iowa Press, 2014), and Flash: Building the Interactive Web (MIT Press, with John Murray, 2014). Dr. Salter’s work has appeared in Feminist Media Studies, The Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, The Journal of Popular Culture, Electronic Book Review, Porn Studies, Transformative Works and Cultures, and several other venues. Dr. Salter is currently vice president of the board of directors of the Electronic Literature Organization.

John T. Murray is an Associate Professor of Games and Interactive Media at the University of Central Florida. He is Co-PI on a multi-institutional NSF grant entitled “Virtual Experience Research Accelerator,” for which he is overseeing the software development. The project’s goals are to increase the diversity of participants for virtual reality by creating a public platform for anyone to participate using their own headsets. He was co-author of Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider (with Aaron Reed and Anastasia Salter, Bloomsbury 2020) and Flash: Building the Interactive Web (with Anastasia Salter, MIT Press 2014). His research focuses on interactive narratives and reality media platforms, which includes augmented, virtual, and mixed reality. He was Program Co-Chair for the International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling in 2023 and 2024 as well as the Electronic Literature Organization’s annual conference in 2024. Currently he is collaborating with Mark Marino and Maria Cecilia Reyes on “Shields Down,” a VR interactive narrative that incorporates players’ emotional performances into the narrative path. He is currently exploring new programming paradigms through generative AI assistance in immersive authoring in VR.