Introduction to Linked Open Data and the Semantic Web (DHSI 2026)
2026-06-08 00:00 - 2026-06-12 23:59 (America/Halifax) | Université de Montréal, 3150 Rue Jean Brillant, Montreal, Québec, H3T 1N7, Canada
Description

This workshop provides an introduction to the web of data for humanities researchers and cultural data stewards. Linked open data is highly structured interoperable data hosted on the web that is structured with semantic relationships so that machines can become partners in discovering, disseminating, sharing, and analyzing data. Done right, LOD contributes to a semantic web of resources that can be accessed and used across multiple online locations, aggregating knowledge and facilitating its reuse: it is FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) data in the most profound sense. The workshop will cover reasons for publishing cultural and research collections as LOD by looking at a range of existing uses in humanities research and GLAM (gallery, library, archive, and museum) contexts.

Participants will gain hands-on experience with several linked open data projects and tools; learn about the resource description framework (RDF), ontologies, and vocabularies used to create linked open data; learn how LOD can be leveraged in queries, visualizations, and web applications; gain an understanding of how LOD is created; and be introduced to a number of practical, ethical, and theoretical considerations that should inform the creation and reuse of diverse, nuanced, responsible, and usable linked open data for cultural research and dissemination. By the end of this workshop, participants should have grasped the major concepts of linked open data and the components of its technology stack; understand the basics of linked data creation, publication, and use; and be positioned to start to develop a linked data project of their own.

Intended audience: Advanced students, subject matter experts and researchers, librarians and data curators from GLAM contexts, research software engineers, and the LOD-curious!

Instructor(s)

Susan Brown (she/her) is a Professor of English and Canada Research Chair in Collaborative Digital Scholarship at the University of Guelph. Her work explores intersectional feminism, literary history, semantic technologies, and scholarly research infrastructure. She is a founding director of Orlando Project on women writers in British literary history, and directs two infrastructure projects: CWRC (“quirk”), the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory virtual research environment, and LINCS, the Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship.

Kim Martin (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in History at the University of Guelph and the Associate Director of THINC Lab. Her research focuses on serendipitous experiences of humanities researchers in digital environments, Early Modern London, and makerspaces. Kim is the Research Team Lead for Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship (LINCS), and is excited to share the tools and knowledge from this project with the DHSI community.

Alliyya Mo (she/her) is Data Interface Developer with the Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship (LINCS) whose involvement includes data transformation, vocabulary hosting, and interface work including management of the project website and Fuseki triplestore. She completed her Bachelor of Computing at the University of Guelph.

Click here for an example of previous syllabus and course material (2025)

[Foundations] Intersectional Feminist Digital Humanities: Theoretical, Social, and Material Engagements (DHSI 2026)
2026-06-08 00:00 - 2026-06-12 23:59
Description

Although there is a deep history of feminist engagement with technology, this history is often hidden, and feminist thinkers are frequently siloed. In order to address this, the seminar will offer a set of background readings to help make visible the history of feminist engagement with technology, as well as facilitate small-scale exploratory collaboration during the seminar. Our reading selections bring a variety of feminist technology critiques in Media Studies, Human-Computer Interaction, Science and Technology Studies, and related fields into conversation with work in Digital Humanities. Each session is organized by a keyword – a term that is central to feminist theoretical and practical engagements with technology – and will begin with a discussion of that term in light of our readings. The remainder of each session will be spent learning about and tinkering with Processing, a programming tool that will allow participants to engage in their own critical making processes including data visualization, physical computing, creative coding, and interface design. Pushing against instrumentalist assumptions regarding the value and efficacy of certain digital tools, we will be asking participants to think hard about the affordances and constraints of digital technologies. While we will be engaging with a wide range of tools/systems in our readings and discussions, we anticipate that the more hands-on engagement with Processing will help participants think about operations of interface, input, output, and mediation. In addition to the expanded theoretical framework, participants can expect to come away with a new set of pedagogical models that they can adapt and use for teaching at their own institutions.

Instructor(s)

Elizabeth Losh is the Duane A. and Virginia S. Dittman Professor of American Studies and English with a specialization in New Media Ecologies at William & Mary, where she also directs the Equality Lab. Previously she directed the Culture, Art, and Technology Program at the University of California, San Diego. She is the is the author of Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of Government Media-Making in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes (MIT Press, 2009), The War on Learning: Gaining Ground in the Digital University (MIT Press, 2014), Hashtag (Bloomsbury, 2019), and Selfie Democracy: The New Digital Politics of Disruption and Insurrection (MIT Press, 2022). She is the co-author with Jonathan Alexander of Understanding Rhetoric: A Graphic Guide to Writing (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2013; second edition, 2017; third edition, 2020). She also edited the collection MOOCs and Their Afterlives: Experiments in Scale and Access in Higher Education (University of Chicago, 2017) and co-edited Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and Digital Humanities (Minnesota, 2018) with Jacqueline Wernimont. She co-chaired the Modern Language Association – Conference on College Composition and Communication Joint Task Force on Writing and AI and is currently co-chairing the MLA Task Force on Generative AI Initiatives.

DH Programming Pedagogy in the Age of AI (DHSI 2026)
2026-06-08 00:00 - 2026-06-12 23:59
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.

Constructing Liberatory and Feminist Frameworks in DH Experiential Learning Spaces (DHSI 2026)
2026-06-08 00:00 - 2026-06-12 23:59
Description

This course will guide attendees in developing and enhancing experiential and educational digital humanities programming using liberatory and feminist pedagogical frameworks. Participants will examine strategies for building DH programming that meet the diverse educational and research needs of students, faculty, institutions, and community partners. Participants will engage in critical studies that explain how experiential and educational digital humanities programming can be used to build welcoming and interdisciplinary communities for students that enhance career readiness, collaboration, and skill-building for students while contributing to the research of faculty and community partners. Throughout the course, participants will actively ideate, collaborate, and network while constructing their own project plans for building student-centered curriculum modules, digital humanities labs, and experiential student programs that align with liberatory and feminist pedagogies.

Instructor(s)

Jacquelyne Thoni Howard is a Senior Professor of Practice and Associate Director of Student Engagement at the Connolly Alexander Institute for Data Science at Tulane University. She is a co-editor of the book, Feminist Pedagogy for Teaching Online (AU Press, 2025) and a founding co-editor of the award-winning guide Feminist Pedagogy for Teaching Online (2020). She is also the technical director of numerous digital humanities projects. Her research, teaching, and mentoring work centers on the social and cultural issues relating to the history of data, science and technology studies, data literacy, and convening digital humanities labs.

[Foundations] DH Leadership (DHSI 2026)
2026-06-08 00:00 - 2026-06-12 23:59
Description

This offering is intended for those in, or those considering, leadership roles in DH including leads for collaborative or team projects, academic programs, and administrative roles requiring a broad, deep understanding of DH in terms of resource allocation, professional advancement, integration with institutional mission, and strategic planning. Based on the model of the earlier ‘Chairs and Deans’ course, this offering establishes a cohort that [1] meets as a group for a number of dedicated presentation and discussion sessions throughout DHSI to survey and discuss pragmatic DH basics and leadership issues related to supporting DH and those who practice it, [2] allows those enrolled to audit any and all of the DHSI courses (as non-participatory observers, able to go from class to class), and [3] individually engages in consultation and targeted discussion with the instructors, speakers and consultants contributing to the course, and others in the group outside of course time during the institute.

This is a seminar style / audit-oriented course. Consider this offering in complement with, and / or to be built on by: DH for Chairs and Deans; Introduction to Project Planning and Management for DH: Issues and Approaches; Agile Project Management; Models for DH at Liberal Arts Colleges (& 4 Yr Institutions); Critical Pedagogy and Digital Praxis in the Humanities; Online Collaborative Scholarship: Principles and Practices (A CWRCShop); DH for Librarians; Professionalizing the Early Career Digital Humanist: Strategies and Skills; Social Knowledge Creation / Construction; Intersectional Feminist Digital Humanities: Theoretical, Social, and Material Engagements; and more!

Instructor(s)

Katherine D. Harris, Director of Public Programming, Outreach & Advocacy and Professor of Literature & Digital Humanities at San Jose State University, is a scholar of literature, technology, and pedagogy whose work spans 19th-century British literary annuals, digital editions, and the award-winning Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities. A leader in cross-disciplinary initiatives, she developed the H&A in Action program, chaired the California Open Educational Resources Council, and launched the DH@CSU consortium. She is currently helping establish SJSU’s Advanced Institute for Ethical Technologies, focusing on AI, while also advancing public humanities through projects like Public Art as Resistance. Her recent writing in the Debates in Digital Humanities series explores the challenges of teaching DH at teaching-intensive institutions and sustaining DH centers. You can find her as @triproftri on BlueSky or visit her WordPress site, https://triproftri.wordpress.com.

Glen Layne-Worthey is the Associate Director for Research Support Services in the HathiTrust Research Center, based in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign School of Information Sciences. Glen was Digital Humanities Librarian in the Stanford University Libraries from 1997 through 2019, and was the founding head of the Libraries’ Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research (CIDR), and a founding member of the Stanford Literary Lab. Long active in the international Digital Humanities community, he hosted the international DH2011 conference at Stanford, and was co-chair of the Program Committee for DH2018 in Mexico City. He recently served as Executive Board Chair in the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO), and as co-convener of its “DH in Libraries” Special Interest Group. He is co-editor (with Isabel Galina) of The Routledge Companion to Libraries, Archives, and the Digital Humanities and (with Lise Jaillant and others) of Navigating Artificial Intelligence for Cultural Heritage Organisations, both published in 2025.

Ray Siemens is Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Victoria, in English with cross appointment in Computer Science, earlier Canada Research Chair in Humanities Computing. He directs the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab, the INKE Partnership, and until very recently the Digital Humanities Summer Institute. He was an early president of both the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities and the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. For further details, see https://web.uvic.ca/~siemens/.

Building Artificial Intelligence Agents for Digital Humanities (DHSI 2026)
2026-06-08 00:00 - 2026-06-12 23:59
Description

This hands-on, project-based course introduces scholars, educators, and practitioners in the humanities to the creation and use of generative AI agents. Participants will learn how to design, customize, and interact with agents capable of interpreting and generating text, structured data, images, and sound. The course incorporates computational methods into humanistic inquiries in practical and creative ways. We will experiment with Large Language Models, Large Vision Models, Large Audio-Language Models, and Multimodal AI. Designed for digital humanists of all technical backgrounds, the course empowers participants to harness these tools ethically and imaginatively, transforming how they explore meaning, structure knowledge, and tell stories across data formats. Datasets and tools will be provided, though participants are encouraged to bring their own data and experiment with it. The course culminates in a collaborative Project Studio, where participants will showcase the generative agents and prototypes developed throughout the week.

Instructor(s)

Yadira Lizama-Mué is a Postdoctoral Researcher and Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities in the Department of Languages and Cultures at Western University. She has a degree in Computer Science Engineering from the Universidad de las Ciencias Informáticas in Havana and a Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies from Western University. Her work applies AI-driven methods to peace research, cultural analysis, and digital humanities, core areas reflected in this course. At Western University, she teaches hands-on Digital Humanities courses that introduce students to programming as a tool for understanding and interacting with information in the form of text, structured data, images, sound, maps, and networks. Her research and teaching consistently bridge technical and humanistic domains, empowering learners to explore and create with AI critically and imaginatively.

Queer(ing) DH (DHSI 2026)
2026-06-08 00:00 - 2026-06-12 23:59
Description

Queerness and the digital humanities share a common ethos: a desire to make meaning in new ways. Indeed, the intersection of DH and queerness is a site of rich potential that can inspire (and challenge) us to think differently about DH, its methods, its purpose, and its politics. This is true whether we are building a DH project or writing DH critique.

Instructor(s)

Edmond Y. Chang is an Associate Professor of English at Ohio University. His areas of research include technoculture, race/gender/sexuality, video games, RPGs, and LARP, feminist media studies, cultural studies, popular culture, and 20/21C American literature. He earned his Ph.D. in English at the University of Washington. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on queer American literature, speculative literature of color, virtual worlds, games, and writing. Recent publications include “Looking for Asianfuturism” in Techno-Orientalism 2.0, “Gaming While Asian,” in Made in Asia/America, “Why are the Digital Humanities So Straight?” in Alternative Historiographies of the Digital Humanities, and “Queergaming” in Queer Game Studies. He is the creator of Tellings, a high fantasy tabletop RPG, and Archaea, a live-action role-playing game. He is also an Assistant Editor for Analog Game Studies and a Contributing Editor for Gamers with Glasses.

Jason Boyd is an Associate Professor of English at Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, Canada, where he is also the Director of the Centre for Digital Humanities. He is also affiliated with the Master of Digital Media and the graduate program in Communication and Culture (a joint program with York University). His areas of research include digital text editing/analysis (particularly in relation to biographical texts [the Texting Wilde Project]), narrative games/playable stories (https://storiesinplay.com/), and queer DH. He is co-author (with Bo Ruberg and James Howe) of “Towards a Queer Digital Humanities” (2019), and has recently co-authored (with Bo Ruberg) “Queer Digital Humanities” for the Bloomsbury Handbook of Digital Humanities. Recent work includes “‘The Playing’s the Thing’: Diversifying Digital Shakespeare Through Ludic Adaptation,” and the online exhibit/archive Wilde ’82: A Conference of Some Importance.

Click here for an example of previous syllabus and course material (2025)

Practical JavaScript for Interactive Scholarship (DHSI 2026)
2026-06-08 00:00 - 2026-06-12 23:59
Description

This is a basic introduction to JavaScript, which is the programming language of the web. The class is designed for anyone interested in developing a 2025 site, or creating an interactive data visualization. By the end of this course, you will be able to read JavaScript you find online and adapt it to your needs. You will also have an opportunity to work with common JavaScript libraries/tools and enhance your own research practices.

Instructor(s)

Stephen Zweibel is Digital Scholarship Librarian at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he supports students and faculty in developing digital projects and working with data, individually and through workshops and classes on research skills and tools. Steve earned his MS in Library and Information Science from Long Island University in 2010, and his MA in the DH track of the GC’s Liberal Studies (MALS) program in 2016. He built DH Box, which won a National Endowment for the Humanities Start-Up grant in 2015, and is co-director of DHRIFT, which recently won an NEH Level III Advancement Grant (since canceled!). Stephen sees democratizing computational literacy as a core focus of his service and scholarship.

Zachary Lloyd, Developer, holds an MA in philosophy from The New School. He is currently a PhD student in comparative literature and a Digital Fellow at CUNY Graduate Center. He is also an adjunct lecturer at Brooklyn College and NYU. He hopes to continue building his skills in web development to provide students in the humanities with open-source tools for learning digital skills relevant to their research aims. Through his advocacy for digital literacy, he aspires to help forge scholarly relationships and strengthen interdisciplinary ties among academic communities.

Click here for an example of previous syllabus and course material (2025)

Introduction to Project Planning and Management for DH: Issues and Approaches (DHSI 2026)
2026-06-08 00:00 - 2026-06-12 23:59
Description

This course will cover the basics of project management from project definition to project review upon completion. Topics such as budget setting and controls, risk management, critical path scheduling, software tools, and related Internet resources will also be discussed. Material will be covered through lectures, discussions, case studies, and presentations. By the end of the course, participants will be able to implement the course concepts and tools in their projects.

This course has lecture, seminar, and hands-on components.

Instructor(s)

Lynne Siemens is an Associate Professor in the School of Public Administration, University of Victoria. Her research areas include project management in the academy and academic collaboration. She has taught the Project Management workshop at DHSI since 2006.

Click here for an example of previous syllabus and course material (2025)

Wiki for Academics: Critical Engagement, Teaching, and Knowledge Dissemination (DHSI 2026)
2026-06-15 00:00 - 2026-06-19 23:59
Description

This course introduces academics to the Wikimedia ecosystem and its applications in teaching and research. The course will address questions of authority and content attribution, the reliability of sources, knowledge equity, and the political dimensions of open knowledge. Participants will learn how Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, and other Wiki projects function, and how they can be leveraged as tools to foster critical thinking, teach about misinformation, engage students in collaborative editing, and make scholarly knowledge more discoverable and accessible according to FAIR principles. Through a mix of hands-on editing, critical discussion, and guided planning, participants will leave with:

a draft course plan for integrating Wiki tools into their teaching; and a draft research plan for using Wiki projects in their scholarship and knowledge mobilization.

This course emphasizes both theoretical and practical approaches, equipping scholars to critically analyze Wiki platforms while also contributing meaningfully to them. This course also integrates critical theory and practice in understanding and using the Wiki ecosystem.

Instructor(s)

Pascale Dangoisse: Program Officer for Wikimedia Canada, I conduct work towards a better representation and integration of historically marginalized people into the Wiki ecosystem. My doctoral research (University of Ottawa) focused on understanding the persistence of systemic discrimination in liberal and progressive political environments. I was also a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Ottawa’s Digital Humanities Lab, where I worked on the Lesbian and Gay Liberation Canada project (with Prof. Crompton). I continue to teach about the various systemic barriers that people face on a daily basis through Wiki tools and projects.

Python Programming for Multilingual Texts (DHSI 2026)
2026-06-15 00:00 - 2026-06-19 23:59
Description

This course introduces digital history through multilingual text analysis using the Python coding language. It is designed for both beginners and those with some experience, teaching and revisiting Python basics through Jupyter Notebooks. Participants will complete a full digital history project, from sourcing primary materials to analysis and visualization. The course’s corpus will be Lady Montagu’s The Turkish Embassy Letters, detailing her travels to Constantinople (1716-18), which are significant for the history of medicine, and for examining travel and mobility, cultural exchanges between Europe and the Ottoman Empire. They also offer an ideal bilingual corpus for historical analysis as they were first published in English in 1763, then translated into French in 1764, and finally published in a parallel English-French edition in 1816. Participants learn to clean, analyze, and visualize multilingual data in Python while exploring how text technologies and analytical techniques differ across source languages, emphasizing the challenges and opportunities of working with non-English texts in the digital humanities. By the end of the course, participants will have the tools to design their own digital history project and will have gained hands-on experience in multilingual digital humanities. No prior experience with digital tools is required, though an interest in historical source analysis is encouraged.

Instructor(s)

Merve Tekgürler is a MS candidate in symbolic systems and a PhD candidate in history at Stanford University. Merve’s research spans multilingual digital humanities, artificial intelligence, and machine translation, focusing on the development of Natural Language Processing tools for Ottoman Turkish. They previously taught “Python Programming for Digital Humanities” at University of California, Berkeley.

Chloé Brault completed her PhD in comparative literature at Stanford in 2025. She works computationally with French-language texts from 1960s Quebec.

Responsible Computing and the Climate Crisis: Tools, Principles, and Actions (DHSI 2026)
2026-06-15 00:00 - 2026-06-19 23:59
Description

This course surveys several important tools and approaches to understand how digital research impacts the climate, and what we can do to think through and make responsible decisions as DH researchers. The course will broadly follow the organisation of the Digital Humanities Climate Coalition’s Toolkit (https://sas-dhrh.github.io/dhcc-toolkit/), a collaborative project which I have coordinated since its release in 2022 and on which I have subsequently taught several workshops. The toolkit provides advice on minimal computing, maximal computing, institutional change, working practices, grant writing, and teaching.

The intended audience for the course is broad: it can accommodate graduate students, academics, librarians and archivists, and academic administrators. Given that digital tools (hardware and software) are now ubiquitous and have environmental consequences, we all have to think carefully about the tools we choose and the ways we consider responsible practices within our professional contexts.

This course will offer a blend of hands-on computational work with theoretical reflections and pragmatic suggestions for change, while also showing how responsible environmental decisions connect to social justice issues. It will rely on accessible hardware and software (e.g., laptops and particularly open-source tools).

Instructor(s)

Christopher Ohge is Senior Lecturer in Digital Approaches to Literature at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, where he teaches in the MA programme in the History of the Book. He has been the lead coordinator of the toolkit that the Digital Humanities Climate Coalition released in 2022 and has participated in several events and workshops to highlight the environmental impacts of digital technologies. He is also the author of the book Publishing Scholarly Editions: Archives, Computing, and Experience (2021) and other writings on nineteenth-century literature, textual editing, and digital humanities.

Publier avec des limites (DHSI 2026)
2026-06-15 00:00 - 2026-06-19 23:59
Description

Comment publier dans un contexte de limites ?

Les humanités numériques sont une approche pluridisciplinaire pour la recherche scientifique, mais constituent aussi une démarche critique par rapport au numérique. L’émergence des grands modèles de langage et leurs intelligences artificielles génératives posent des questions sociales cruciales quand aux modèles épistémologiques et à l’impact écologique qui sous-tendent les technologies de nos sociétés. Ce cours propose d’interroger et de mettre en pratique cette démarche critique propre aux DH dans le champ de la publication, et plus spécifiquement de la publication scientifique.

À travers une dizaine de séances réparties sur une semaine, ce cours permet d’appréhender les mécanismes de production et de diffusion de la publication scientifique, en prenant en considération des limites techniques et énergétiques. Que ce soit dans une perspective d’autonomisation (prépublication, carnet de recherche, diffusion autonome, fanzine de recherche) ou dans un cadre institutionnel plus classique (dépôts institutionnels, multi-diffusion numérique, impression à la demande), ce cours aborde toutes les questions liées à la publication scientifique dans un contexte de transition écologique, en souhaitant explorer différentes voies : expérimentales, alternatives, marginales ou radicales. Structuration de contenus, partage et versionnement de documents, production de formats de sortie standards (XML), fabrication de sites web, création de brochures et de fanzines, utilisation de l’impression à la demande, etc., autant de techniques qui seront présentées et manipulées.

Trois objectifs complémentaires sont au cœur de cette proposition : 1. l’acquisition de compétences en publication (imprimée et numérique), directement applicables à l’issue du cours ; 2. la compréhension et l’application des principes de low-tech, de minimal computing, et de permacomputing, avec des ressources concrètes ; 3. le développement de chaînes de publication via l’assemblage de logiciels, de programmes ou de services.

Cette formation s’adresse à toutes personnes de la communauté DH qui interrogent ses pratiques de publication scientifique, aucun bagage technique n’est demandé, des connaissances en libre accès/open access sont nécessaires, quelques connaissances en balisage/HTML/XML sont un plus.

Enseignant.e(s)

Antoine Fauchié est maître de conférences (assistant professor) à l’Université Grenoble Alpes, en France, où il co-coordonne le Master Métiers du livre et de l’édition. Ses recherches s’inscrivent en sciences de l’information et en études de l’édition, et portent sur les processus techniques d’édition dans différents domaines éditoriaux, dont l’édition scientifique, ainsi que sur les démarches de critique des technologies en lien avec les mouvements dits de low-tech ou de permacomputing (observation, analyse et expérimentation). Sa thèse, soutenue en janvier 2024 et intitulée “Fabriquer des éditions, éditer des fabriques : reconfiguration des processus techniques éditoriaux et nouveaux modèles épistémologiques”, est une exploration de chaînes d’édition non conventionnelles via des études de cas et la réalisation de prototypes et de modélisations éditoriales (https://these.quaternum.net).

Processing Your XML/TEI with the XML Family of Languages (DHSI 2026)
2026-06-15 00:00 - 2026-06-19 23:59
Description

This class teaches you how to navigate and process XML using tools designed for the purpose–XSLT, XQuery, and Schematron. We cover these together as members of the same XML family, sharing a common syntax in XPath. New and experienced coders of XML will benefit alike from this course, whether just beginning a project or seeking to update and refresh skills. Our goals are 1) to share strategies for systematically building archives and databases, and 2) to increase participants’ confidence and fluency in extracting information coded in XML in those archives and databases. XPath is the center of the course, but we will show you how it applies in multiple XML processing contexts so that you learn how these work similarly and how these are used, respectively, to validate documents and to transform them for publication and other reuse. We’ll apply XPath to check for accuracy of text encoding–to write schema rules to manage your coding (or your project team’s coding).

You’ll practice and gain fluency in writing XPath expressions and patterns, including sequence expressions, regular expressions, datatypes, predicates, operators, and functions (from the core library and user-defined). We’ll write XPath to calculate how frequently you’ve marked a certain phenomenon, or locate which names of people are mentioned together in the same chapter, paragraph, sentence, stanza, or annotation. You’ll learn how XPath can help you to build exciting visualizations from XML code (such as to make a chart like a timeline or a network graph). Whether you are an XML beginner or a more experienced coder, you’ll find that strengthened skills in XPath and the XML family will help you with systematic encoding, document processing, and project management.

Prerequisites: Some experience with XML markup. No prior experience with programming is required.

Instructor(s)

Elisa Beshero-Bondar is Program Chair of Digital Media, Arts, and Technology and Professor of Digital Humanities at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College. She teaches undergraduate students to code and build digital projects with the XML family of languages. Elisa led the technical development of the Frankenstein Variorum project combining Python, XSLT, and TEI to compare 5 distinct digital versions of the novel Frankenstein. She is also founder and director of the Digital Mitford Project which has hosted coding workshops for graduate students, faculty, scholarly editors, and librarians interested in learning coding and digital project management methods used in the project. She was elected to the TEI Technical Council in 2015, which she now chairs, and where she works with ten other members from around the world in revising the TEI Guidelines and schema and supporting the TEI community.

David J. Birnbaum is Professor Emeritus from the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh. He has been involved in the study of electronic text technology since the mid-1980s, has delivered presentations at a variety of electronic text technology conferences, and has served on the board of the Association for Computers and the Humanities, the editorial board of Markup languages: Theory and practice, and the Text Encoding Initiative Council. Much of his electronic text work intersects with his research in medieval Slavic manuscript studies, but he also often writes about issues in the philosophy of markup.

Click here for an example of previous syllabus and course material (2025)

[Foundations] Intro to Spatial Humanities with GIS (DHSI 2026)
2026-06-15 00:00 - 2026-06-19 23:59
Description

This course is an introduction to the spatial humanities both in practice and theory for those with minimal or no experience. The course will consist of readings, lectures, and hands-on practice with basic GIS and other softwares. An emphasis will be placed on spatial humanities as a way of thinking. By the end of the course, students will have a basic toolset to apply the techniques and theory of spatial humanities to both their research and teaching. This course will combine lecture, seminar, and hands-on activities with emphasis on the latter.

Instructor(s)

Amanda Madden is an Assistant Professor of History at George Mason University and affiliate faculty at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. She teaches digital humanities and history courses at the undergraduate and graduate level. Her current spatial history projects include Mapping Violence in Early Modern Italy. She is the author of Civil Blood: Vendetta Violence and the Civic Elites in Early Modern Italy.

Click here for an example of previous syllabus and course material (2025)

Multimodal Rhetoric, Digital Writing (DHSI 2026)
2026-06-15 00:00 - 2026-06-19 23:59
Description

A longstanding relationship exists between the digital humanities and writing studies as evidenced by journals like Kairos and Computers and Composition Online; however, in practice, the multi-faceted and mutually influential relationship between digital technology, rhetorical theory, and interdisciplinary writing practices is often underestimated. By centrally orienting this relationship, our course will explore multimodal writing practices, theories, and pedagogy. We consider how rhetorical aims, digital platforms, and disciplinary conventions might work together to generate complex, unconventional ways of writing and opportunities for teaching. Participants will engage in multimodal composing across digital and analog environments, including open-access platforms like Twine and Audacity. We will also re-purpose everyday materials and software to reconsider rhetorical principles, such as invention and arrangement. Adopting an interdisciplinary writing studies lens, we will investigate questions like:

How do we persuade and engage differently in digital and multimodal spaces?

How do we understand what it means to be an author and a reader in different formats or media?

How can we adopt co-creation and collaboration as frameworks for inclusive writing practices in digital spaces?

This course will help faculty, graduate students, librarians, and instructional technologists design assignments and activities for humanities and interdisciplinary courses that include writing. Participants will collaborate on making activities, crafting and scaffolding assignments, identifying methods for assessment, and discussing the relationship between digital making tools, rhetorical practices, and writing pedagogy. At the end of the week, participants will have a strong understanding of ways to incorporate digital writing approaches and tools into their teaching and scholarly communication.

This course includes hands-on experiences, seminar discussion, and lecture and has no prerequisites.

Instructor(s)

Denna Iammarino teaches literature and writing at Case Western Reserve University. Her research combines early modern literature, multimodality, digital rhetoric, and writing studies to consider how the intersections of material culture and rhetoric can shape textual meaning and readerly engagement. More specifically, her work merges 16th-century literature and book history with contemporary issues of digital pedagogy and publishing to consider how changes in communication technology (like the invention of the printing press or the digital turn) impacts what it means to be an author, a text, and a reader. In addition to articles and reviews in several journals and edited collections, she is also co-editor of and a contributor to the critical collection entitled John Derricke’s The Image of Ireland, with a Discoverie of Woodkarne: Essays on Text and Contexts (Manchester UP, 2021) as well as a co-creator of a digital edition of the same work.

Kristine Kelly teaches in the Writing Program at Case Western Reserve University. Her classes, which include “Digital Literature,” “Interactive Storytelling,” and “Writing across Media” encourage students to develop as thinkers, writers, and makers in diverse rhetorical contexts. Kristine’s research and scholarship focus on digital literary studies and post-colonial and contemporary Anglophone literature and cultures, especially related to travel and mobility. Her work, published in forums like ARIEL, Paradoxa (Small Screen Fictions issue), and the recent collection The Ruptured Commons, explores how individuals forge paths, grounded and digital, in global, networked spaces.

Click here for an example of previous syllabus and course material (2025)

Digital Pedagogy and the Book: Tools, Methods, and Projects (DHSI 2026)
2026-06-15 00:00 - 2026-06-19 23:59
Description

This course will help faculty, staff, and instructional technologists conceptualize, design, and explore approaches to teaching digital book history and digital publishing. The course will provide readings on the history of the book and the book after the digital turn, and together we will discuss ways to immerse students in archival, editorial, and analytical practices regardless of their access to material books in special collections. Throughout the week, we will explore digital tools and platforms and consider how to best adapt them for a variety of educational contexts. We will collaborate on designing and scaffolding assignments, consider methods for assessment, and collectively build a repository of resources, links, and prompts. At the end of the week, participants will leave with a fully designed assignment or workshop plan and a better understanding of how to incorporate digital tools within their book history/digital publishing lessons and courses.

Instructor(s)

Andie Silva (she/her) is Professor of English and Digital Humanities at the City University of New York (York College and CUNY Graduate Center). Her research interests lie at the intersection of book history and print culture, popular culture, and digital humanities. In addition to articles and reviews in several journals, Silva is also author of The Brand of Print: Marketing Paratexts in the Early English Book Trade (Brill 2019) and co-editor, with Scott Schofield, of Digital Pedagogy in Early Modern Studies: Method and Praxis (Iter Press 2024) and Using Commonplace Books to Enrich Medieval and Renaissance Courses, with Sarah E. Parker (Arc Humanities Press 2023).

[Foundations] DH Sample Platter (DHSI 2026)
2026-06-15 00:00 - 2026-06-19 23:59
Description

Have you ever looked at the wide variety of courses offered at DHSI and wondered what all those technical terms mean? Or had problems deciding on which technologies might be best suited for your work or most interesting to pursue further? This course is meant to provide a broad overview of technologies that are often used (and talked about) in the Digital Humanities. While it cannot (and is not meant to) serve as a replacement for any of the technology-focused workshops at DHSI, this course can provide a foundation to help you make informed decisions on where to direct further studies as well as get you over the initial hurdle. Each technology will be approached through a mixture of lectures and exercises.

We will survey the following technologies and methods:

Shell: A Shell allows you to control your computer using text commands and to automate repeated workflows

Image and video editing: Learn some basic image and video editing techniques

Audio recording and editing: Learn how to record audio and edit these recordings

XML and text encoding: Text encoding forms the basis of many DH projects. Learn about XML and how to use it to encode texts

Text analysis: Learn some basic text analysis techniques using Voyant and Python

3D Modelling: A brief introduction to creating 3D models

Content Management Systems: How to use Content Management systems such as Omeka to create DH projects.

This course will have lectures, demoes, and hands-on components. It is a good foundation for all tool- and technology-oriented DHSI offerings.

Instructor(s)

Markus Wust is Head of User Services at the University of Tübingen Library where he teaches workshops and courses in Data and Information Literacy. He holds Master’s degrees in German Literature (University of Georgia, USA) as well as Library and Information Studies and Humanities Computing (University of Alberta, Canada).

Click here for an example of previous syllabus and course material (2025)

Creating Digital Collections with Minimal Infrastructure: Hands On With CollectionBuilder for Teaching and Exhibits (DHSI 2026)
2026-06-15 00:00 - 2026-06-19 23:59
Description

This course introduces fundamental web and DH skills using CollectionBuilder, an open source framework for building digital collection and exhibit websites driven by metadata and hosted on a lightweight infrastructure. The high cost and IT requirements of digital collection platforms are often a barrier to creating new collections for sharing or teaching humanities research. CollectionBuilder is optimized for non-developers and simple hosting solutions, allowing researchers to take greater ownership over their digital projects and lowering barriers to customization. Scholars in this course will learn CollectionBuilder by engaging in a scaffolded approach with hands-on experience in digital library foundations such as accessibility, metadata creation, and web development. Building on these skills, students will learn the basics of working with plain text files, CSV data, Markdown, Jekyll, Git, GitHub, and GitHub Pages in order to create and customize their very own digital collection. By the end of this course, students will have gained the knowledge and independence necessary to implement CollectionBuilder in contexts that include creating and disseminating research collections and custom digital exhibits, or teaching digital libraries in the classroom. They will also have built their own digital exhibit, such as those built by our previous DHSI classes in 2023, 2024, and 2025.

No programming experience is necessary, although you should have a strong interest to learn! Participants are asked to bring their own computers. All software used in the course is free, open source, and cross platform and will be installed during class time.

Instructor(s)

Olivia Wikle is the Head of Digital Scholarship and Initiatives at Iowa State University, where she collaborates on projects involving digital scholarship, digital collections, and the institutional repository. She is a co-developer of the CollectionBuilder (https://collectionbuilder.github.io/) static web framework, and her research interests include sustainability in digital libraries and digital literacy instruction.

Evan Peter Williamson is the Digital Infrastructure Librarian and Head of Digital Scholarship and Open Strategies at the University of Idaho Library, working with the Center for Digital Inquiry and Learning to bring cool projects, enlightening workshops, and innovative services to life. Despite a background in Art History, Classical Studies, and Archives, he always manages to get involved in all things digital. His recent focus has been on data driven, minimal infrastructure web development, currently embodied in the CollectionBuilder project.

Devin Becker is the Co-Director of the Center for Digital Inquiry and Learning (CDIL) and the Associate Dean of Research and Instruction at the University of Idaho Library. His recent CollectionBuilder-based digital scholarship projects include Storying Extinction, Keeping Watch, and Tender Spaces. His first book of poetry, Shame | Shame, won the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize and was published by BOA Editions Ltd.

Click here for an example of previous syllabus and course material (2025)

[Foundations] Race and Social Justice: Methods and Applications (DHSI 2026)
2026-06-15 00:00 - 2026-06-19 23:59
Description

Over the past five years we have seen a proliferation of academic job advertisements, publications, and discussions demonstrating ways in which race and social justice can be engaged in digital humanities scholarship. Interest by students and local communities in technological advancements through Web 2.0, social media, and mobile phones are permitting new forms of research and practice. #transformDH, #DHpoco, #femDH, and #BlackLivesMatter have helped to challenge the all-white discourse, often dominated by scholars in the disciplines of English and history, that is too often found in digital humanities. What happens to students in digital humanities methods classes who bring non-traditional bodies into this world? There have been discussions how to insure that syllabi and materials for digital humanities classes are inclusive – specifically, how an introductory DH methods class keeps race, social justice, and inclusivity as cornerstones in their pedagogy. The traditional divides witnessed in the tech world will only be replicated in the world of both undergraduate and graduate DH courses without attention to race, social justice, etc. This week-long class will show how, through an interdisciplinary intersectional and CRT framework, both race and social justice can be central to any DH teaching, pedagogy, and practice. The course will pay special attention to queer theory, critical ethnic studies, postcolonial theory, WOC/Black feminism, Indigenous studies, and disability studies as they currently help to reshape digital humanities teaching and methods across our university/college classrooms.

This course combines lecture, seminar, and hands-on activities.

Instructor(s)

Dorothy Kim teaches at Brandeis University. She is the co-editor of Disrupting DH and Alternative Histories of the Digital Humanities. .

Jordan Clapper is an Assistant Professor of Digital Technology and Culture at Washington State University. His research interests include indigenous video games, indigenous literature, queer games, narrative theory, queer theory, and digital humanities.

Markup, Maps, and Multimedia: Building Digital Projects with COVE (DHSI 2026)
2026-06-15 00:00 - 2026-06-19 23:59
Description

This course introduces graduate students, university faculty, and independent scholars in the humanities to some foundational tools and critical frameworks within digital scholarship, with an emphasis on developing publishable projects. Using the open-access, scholar-led platform COVE (Collaborative Organization for Virtual Education), participants will explore how digital tools deepen analysis, expand communication, and support public-facing research—all without prior technical experience.

The course blends technical fluency, theoretical grounding, and collaborative creativity. Participants will gain accessible entry points into the digital humanities, including text encoding, spatial analysis, and introductory coding. Each will design a project—such as an annotated edition, dynamic timeline, map, or multimedia gallery—using COVE Studio and COVE Editions.

Hands-on sessions will introduce TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) for semantic markup and HTML for web publishing. Participants will also work with IIIF-compliant images to build interactive maps, timelines, and curated galleries, learning to upload, reorganize, annotate, and apply art historical metadata—skills especially valuable for scholars of literature, visual culture, and material history.

This multimodal approach highlights how visual, textual, and digital forms intersect to tell complex stories. By the end, participants will have developed a solid foundation in digital humanities methods and a project-in-progress for future inclusion in research, teaching, or public humanities initiatives.

Instructor(s)

Kate Faber Oestreich is Professor of English at Coastal Carolina University. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century British literature, adaptation studies, and the ways multimodal and digital forms reshape reading and teaching practices. She is co-author, with Jennifer Camden, of Transmedia Storytelling: Pemberley Digital’s Adaptations of Jane Austen and Mary Shelley (2018), and her articles appear in Adaptation, Brontë Studies, South Atlantic Review, Victorians Institute Journal, Nineteenth Century Studies, and several edited collections. Her recent work examines how immersive and interactive environments—from YouTube adaptations to collaborative digital editions—extend and transform nineteenth-century texts. She is Pedagogy Consultant for the Collaborative Organization for Virtual Education (COVE), where she has co-led international workshops on COVE Editions and Studio and developed resources for integrating annotation, timelines, and mapping into humanities courses. Her professional service includes roles as Executive Secretary for the North American Victorian Studies Association, Deputy Associate Director (Digital) for the Centre of Nineteenth-Century Studies International, and board member of INCSA, INCS, and NCSA. Through this work and her leadership with COVE, she has helped to develop and sustain the field’s digital and organizational infrastructure, from collaborative teaching platforms to membership and communication systems.

LLMs from Prompts to Pipelines for Text & Media Analysis & Creativity (DHSI 2026)
2026-06-15 00:00 - 2026-06-19 23:59
Description

The course offers an effective hands-on intro and further deployable deliverables in large-language-model (LLM) deployment and adaptation, natural language processing (NLP), text and media analysis, and text and/or media corpus network visualization and analysis.

We will harness the power and amplitude of LLMs and other computing resources in analyzing single/discrete datums as well as big data and corpora, be they text or media or both. The skills, affordances, methods, and concepts will be paced and assembled into pipelines starting from locating, collecting/scraping, and (pre)processing relevant datasets, continuing by deploying/engineering best-fit LLMs and specialized libraries and developing algorithms for multi-feature data analysis, and culminating with fine-grained holistic networked assemblages modeling and scrutinizing the datasets in depth and comparatively across corpora and media.

We will be doing coding in Python and learning how to use (and compare) transformer-based, (sub)word, text, and media modeling open-source LLMs/frameworks such as GPT (3.5., 4.1., 5, and later), Mistral, (Nomic/Meta-)LLaMa, GPT-NeoX, T5, OLMo, (M)BERT, and a host of others in concurrence with a wide-range of relevant libraries and related APIs including Scikit-learn, NLTK, Sentence-Transformers, Hugging-Face-based models, FastText, and Stanza/SpaCy (displaCy), involving embeddings with text classifiers and/or image/video/audio vectorization, e.g.., Deep Learning architectures, CLIP, MediaPipe, TensorFlow & Keras, Pytorch, LibROSA, etc. In the context, we will learn how to zero/few-shot prompt, fine-tune or train our (own) LLMs and incorporate them into our task-specific Python pipelines.

After using BeautifulSoup, Selenium, and pytesseract (Python-tesseract) to automatically collect and (if needed) OCR our data, the subsequent computational analyses will be translated to networks ranging from plain (single-layer) graphs to multiplexes to most general multilayer networks to be visualized and/or analyzed by means of NetworkX or, in the more specific or complex cases, in-house/indie algorithms. The translation to networks will also involve correlations between various forms of vectorization applied to text (and/as inter)media as coexistent in or combined into modeling the data. The LLMs called into and adapted for our scripts and environments will make the difference in critical respects such as dynamic data curation and searching, trans-quantitative and/(f)or qualitative analysis, finesse-level processing and mega-scale coverage.

On the fifth day (Friday, June 19th), everybody will have the opportunity to participate in the #GraphPoem event, an intermedia social computing and data-commoning performance drawing on the algorithms, methods, and programming presented or developed in class.

The knowledge and skills acquired—alongside our in-class applications—will be useful in education, research, and analytical-creative work involving LLM-informed coding, NLP, automated text and (mono and multilingual) corpus analysis, network science (or graph theory) applications, inter/trans-disciplinary text (and) media studies, computational literary studies/analysis/criticism, computational linguistics, multimodal and intermedia(lity) studies and creativity, HCI & AI creative writing and experimental/intersemiotic/literary translation, digital editions, digital poetry/e-lit/digital art, social (media/network) analysis, complexity studies in/and social science, and applications in the philosophy of mathematics and computation.

Instructor(s)

Chris Tănăsescu is a poet and academic with backgrounds in English and computer science. The Graph Poem project he started 15 years ago has outputted natural language processing and network science-based poetry classifiers, intermedia performances, and computationally assembled poetry anthologies. His alias MARGENTO refers to a cyber cross-artform ensemble and international coalition of poets-translators, visual artists/musicians, and coders/AI throwing events and launching publications on and off-line in four continents since 2001 and at DHSI (#GraphPoem) since 2019. Chris is currently a DH Research Scientist at the University of Galway while continuing his affiliation as Senior Researcher in Global Literary Studies and Complex Systems at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. Previous or ongoing positions and affiliations include Coordinator of Digital Humanities at the University of Ottawa, Altissia Chair in Digital Cultures and Ethics at Université Catholique de Louvain, and Visiting Scholar at the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab, University of Victoria. His latest publications include Literature and Computation (Routledge 2024) and A Computationally Assembled Anthology of Contemporary Belgian Poetry [MARGENTO, collective ed.] (co-edited with Raluca Tanasescu, featuring John Taylor as main translator, Peter Lang 2025).

Click here for an example of previous syllabus and course material (2025)

Immersive Scholarship 101 (DHSI 2026)
2026-06-15 00:00 - 2026-06-19 23:59
Description

Participants will explore the nature and range of spatial data, immersive interfacing (AR/VR) hardware, and the unique scholarly benefits that this combination affords. Information professionals – including IT, library, and instructional technologists – will survey the associated hardware and software landscape and related (3D printing, scanning, and preservation) tools. In addition to theoretical background and practical methods, participants will be given the opportunity produce and inhabit virtual worlds, populated by their own 3D scans, objects from their chosen discipline, and generative AI (text-to-3D) content. Participants will leave with a working knowledge of the 3D/XR landscape, hands-on content creation – including 3D scanning – experience, and a fully customized virtual world that can be shared with colleagues after DHSI.

Instructor(s)

Matt Cook Digital Scholarship Program Manager at Harvard Library. As a proven expert across the entire 3D data lifecycle; Matt regularly consults on scanning (e.g.photogrammetry), immersive (AR/VR) data analytics, and rapid prototyping (3D printing) processes that span disciplines. Matt studied Philosophy at the undergraduate and graduate levels and has since published R&D in multiple fields, including Architecture, Chemistry, Information Science, and a range of Humanities. Currently he is developing automated workflows that combine the use of handwriting transcription technologies, genAI, and the Metaverse. Please check out mncook.net for more information.

Brian Leach is Technology Support Coordinator with Creative Technologies at Harvard Library. As a member of the management team that supports the Tech Lending program at Cabot Science Library, Brian regularly interacts with patrons (faculty, students and staff) to teach to; One. How to use AR/VR technology (Such as the Meta Quest series of headsets) in classes; Two. To support individual use for research purposes. In addition, Brian maintains the Cabot Library Media Studios used for video/podcast recordings. He also supports other technologies such as the new library 3D printing service. Currently, he is researching new technologies to integrate into the Tech lending program while supporting classes using VR technology. For more information, please email Brian at brian_leach@harvard.edu.

Exploring the Field of Recovery and Its Role within the Classroom (DHSI 2026)
2026-06-15 00:00 - 2026-06-19 23:59
Description

This course aims to introduce educators to the field of recovery and its value as a pedagogical tool. The course will begin by introducing the goals of recovery and what it may look like in practice: from projects incorporating creative expression, gaming, and other multi-disciplinary approaches for interrogating or speculating upon archival silences; to projects working to protect or promote texts, materials, or perspectives that have been ignored, overshadowed, dismissed or forgotten. Following this introduction, course instructors will guide participants through the process of planning a recovery project for their classroom. We will conclude by discussing resources that will support participants in continuing project planning well beyond the end of the workshop. The intended audience for this workshop is educators who are working with students of any age group/level.

Instructor(s)

Katie Blizzard is the Managing Director of eLaboratories and a research editor at the Center for Digital Editing, where she supports the editorial practices of community and partner projects. She holds a BA in Anthropology and History, and a master in public administration. Blizzard contributes to the Association for Documentary Editing (ADE) e-newsletter and served as secretary for the ADE from 2021 to 2023.

Noelle Baker, an independent scholar, is Editor-in-Chief of Scholarly Editing, an open-access, peer reviewed journal archived by the U.S. Library of Congress and distributed by the University of Virginia Press. She is the editor of Stanton in Her Own Time (Iowa, 2016), the co-editor of Margaret Fuller: Collected Writings (Library of America, 2025) and The Almanacks of Mary Moody Emerson: A Scholarly Digital Edition (Women Writers Online, published by the Women Writers Project at Northeastern University, ongoing), and the author of essays on American literature and culture published in journals such as ESQ, The Concord Saunterer: A Journal of Thoreau Studies, Poe Studies, and Resources for American Literary Study. Currently, Baker serves as an NHPRC Commissioner, steering committee member for the Recovery Hub for American Women Writers, and eLabs advisory board member; previous roles include co-chair of the MLA Committee on Scholarly Editions and president of The Association for Documentary Editing.

Engaging Play (DHSI 2026)
2026-06-15 00:00 - 2026-06-19 23:59
Description

This class provides students with hands on experience with games and their uses in the humanities classroom. The focus of our course is to learn how games are structured, how they function and how they can become an integral part of a humanities curriculum. Participants will learn to use Twine and incorporate game narratives into their own classes. Taught by Jeffrey Lawler and Sean Smith, co-directors of the Center for the History of Video Games, Technology and Critical Play, the course covers a variety of topics such as game theory and questions that games, including tabletops and video games, raise within humanities disciplines.

Instructor(s)

Sean Smith is a full-time lecturer of U.S. history at California State University, Long Beach. He is the Co-Director of The Center for History of Video Games & Critical Play (criticalplay.org). He writes about video games, digital history,

Jeffrey Lawler is co-director of the Center for the History of Video Games, Technology and Critical Play at California State University, Long Beach, where he is a full-time lecturer. Current research examines arcades as radicalized leisure spaces in Los Angeles County in the 1970s and 80s. Recent publications include “The Historical Environment as Aged Icon in the Gamed West,” in Comparative American Studies, and the forthcoming chapter “Imagining the Other: Historical Possibilities and Teaching American History with Twine,” to be published in EnTwine: A Critical and Creative Companion to Teaching with Twine.

Click here for an example of previous syllabus and course material (2025)

DH for Librarians (DHSI 2026)
2026-06-15 00:00 - 2026-06-19 23:59
Description

This course will focus on the processes and methods of digital humanities and how they intersect with librarianship practice. We will start by considering big picture questions: how have librarians approached “doing DH” and “supporting DH” in libraries, what has the practice of DH librarianship been, and what could the future of DH in libraries be? From there, we will survey different aspects of DH in librarianship in more detail, including assessment and strategic planning, reference and consultation, instruction, project management, and collaborative partnerships. Along the way, we will explore key resources, methods, and tools, as well as threshold concepts, data literacy, and relationships to other parts of academic libraries.

Instructor(s)

Leigh Bonds is an Associate Professor and the Digital Humanities Librarian at The Ohio State University. For the last nine years, she has led campus digital humanities efforts, consulted with faculty and graduate students on research and curricula, and collaborated on several projects. She served on the programming committee for DLFxDHSI Unconference in 2018, taught sessions at ARL’s Digital Scholarship Institute in 2019 and 2021, and taught “DH for Librarians” in 2024. Leigh’s publications on DH librarianship and pedagogy include “Facilitating Course [Re]Design: A Programmatic Approach to DH Integration,” “Preparing, Facilitating, Assessing: A Reflection on Digital Humanities Consultations,” and “First Things First: Conducting an Environmental Scan.”

John Russell is an Associate Librarian and Associate Director of the Center for Virtual/Material Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. From 2015-2022, he taught “Introduction to Digital Humanities for Librarians” and “Introduction to Text Encoding” for Library Juice Academy. John is co-author of “Beyond Buttonology: Digital Humanities, Digital Pedagogy, and the ACRL Framework” and “Remodeling the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Workshop,” as well as articles on computer vision and art history, digital humanities librarianship, and collection assessment. John is also past editor-in-chief of dh+lib.

Convivial Machine Learning (DHSI 2026)
2026-06-15 00:00 - 2026-06-19 23:59
Description

Ivan Illich wrote of the alphabet and the printing press that they are “almost ideally convivial” because “anybody can learn to use them, and for [their] own purpose. They use cheap materials. People can take them or leave them as they wish. They are not easily controlled by third parties” (Illich, Tools for Conviviality, 1973). Yet, these affordances of the alphabet and the printing press, as described by Illich, came after centuries of the parallel development of technical innovations and social practices which made these technologies convivial.

In this course, we will take a historical and speculative route to interrogate what lessons from manuscript and print culture we can apply to design and think machine learning tools that are open and convivial. We can draw a straight line from the alphabet (the discretization of speech sounds into letters) and the printing press (the first mechanical means of textual (re)production) to machine learning. Through a series of digital and analog experimental projects, we will situate machine learning within a history of radical and innovative writing technologies that can serve as models for designing and thinking more convivial machine learning systems.

Specifically, students will learn how to use open-source language models locally, build their own small-scale language models, and learn how to use open-source and powerful transcription models. They will also learn how to document their process digitally and materially with small, hand-made publications. Through this mix of historical inquiry and hands-on experimentation, students will have developed practical skills in working with open machine learning tools and developed a reflection on how to design interactions and technologies that enhance human autonomy and creativity.

No prerequisites are required for this class.

Instructor(s)

Gabrielle Benabdallah is a Sloan postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington in Seattle, where her research explores the materiality of knowledge production, from print culture to artificial intelligence. With a background in comparative literature and textual studies, she has dedicated the past seven years to working and publishing in the fields of human-computer interaction and interaction design. Currently, she is focused on examining the influence of AI-augmented tools on practices in scientific publishing.

AVAnnotate Open Source Application for Audiovisual Digital Exhibits and Editions (DHSI 2026)
2026-06-15 00:00 - 2026-06-19 23:59
Description

This course introduces participants to AVAnnotate, an open-source digital humanities tool for creating annotated audiovisual exhibits. Through hands-on exercises with sample media, participants will learn how to set up projects, create annotations for accessibility and research, and explore case studies in teaching and scholarship. By the end of the week, participants will have built and presented their own projects, gaining practical skills for integrating audiovisual materials into digital research and pedagogy.

Prerequisites: No technical prerequisites are required. Familiarity with basic digital tools and an interest in working with audiovisual collections will be helpful, but all levels of experience are welcome.

Instructor(s)

Jack DeVry Riordan is a PhD student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on contemporary Cuban cinema, and the ways in which digital humanities tools can be used for the curation and sharing of audiovisual works. Since September 2025, he has been working with AVAnnotate, exploring how digital annotation and archival practices can expand access to and engagement with audiovisual materials. More broadly, his work bridges film studies and digital humanities, with an emphasis on fostering new methods of preserving and disseminating cultural memory.

Automatic Text Recognition of Historical Documents: Building Text Corpora and Datasets (DHSI 2026)
2026-06-15 00:00 - 2026-06-19 23:59
Description

The course will be an introduction to automatic text recognition technologies, focusing on the example of Kraken and eScriptorium but including an overview of other existing solutions. At the end of the course, participants will have a better understanding of machine learning through the example of automatic text recognition, will have first-hand experience using transcription software, producing data and models, as well as publishing and reusing special datasets for training transcription models. They will be able to understand how to organize a transcription campaign individually or as a team while complying with existing standards for annotation. The course is intended for participants with little to or no knowledge about automatic transcription. Students, librarians, and all scholars are welcome.

Instructor(s)

Alix Chagué is a specialist in automatic text recognition applied to historical documents. Her PhD thesis, which she will defend in 2026, especially focuses on questions relating to Open Science and data creation for using and training transcription models. She has contributed to the development of several essential infrastructures for the advancement of automatic transcription, among which the open source application Scriptorium and the ecosystem for the publication of reusable gold data for text recognition HTR-United. Since 2019, she has taught several workshops introducing automatic text recognition and its software solutions to beginners or advanced users.

Agile Project Management for Humanities Research (DHSI 2026)
2026-06-15 00:00 - 2026-06-19 23:59
Description

Agile project management is about negotiating the completion of a project from beginning to end while remaining flexible. Being patient and delaying decisions until you have to make them, gathering as much information as you can in the meantime, and then taking action with the information you have, always keeping alternatives in mind in case your first plan of action doesn’t pan out. It’s about more than just negotiating within the rules. It’s about changing the rules of the game to better ensure a successful project.

Over the course of the week, participants will learn about how different teams could approach managing different aspects of a project. Participants will explore applying these to their own project(s). By the end of the week, participants will have an initial plan of action for managing their own project(s).

Instructor(s)

Over the years, James Smith has had computing interests that include exploring REST, linked open data, and other components of the web-as-platform as a foundation for building sharable, long-lived digital contributions to the humanities. More recently, he has focused on emphasizing the human element in computing.

Click here for an example of previous syllabus and course material (2025)
