Lesson Plan
Digital Humanities for Art Historians
I fell in love with Digital Humanities (DH) work as a DH concentrator at Pratt Institute during my graduate career. Art History has been a field slower to incorporate DH methods at large scale. This workshop was developed for Maryland Institute College of Art students in Art History courses as a means to pique the intellectual curiosity of the intersection of technology and art.
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Workshop Description
In this session, we’ll discuss the increasing use of digital technologies in research, publication and scholarship, and teaching. We’ll look at tools that might be useful for art historians, examples of digital scholarship in art history and discuss how digital engagement might affect methodologies and theoretical inquiries.
Details
Designed to be roughly 1.5 hours.
Slideshow with introduction to digital humanities tools and methods, followed by an active learning activity.
Intended audience: Graduate and undergraduate students; general public.
Should be customized to course or group after meeting with the professor or organizer.
Proposed Session Schedule
Short discussion — 10 minutes
Does anyone know what digital humanities is? Can anyone guess what might be barriers to digital humanities work for art historians?
Slideshow presentation — 25 minutes
Introduction to Digital Humanities
Group activity — 40 minutes (20 minutes to complete worksheet, 20 minutes to report back)
Previously, I’ve used Miriam Posner’s Digital Humanities 101 course at UCLA. It included an evaluation of websites created for the course. Those are no longer available, so I would suggest finding digital humanities projects available online.
Final thoughts — 15 minutes
Wrap up with final thoughts: ask attendees how they might apply these methods to their own work.
Activity Worksheet
As mentioned earlier, the resource I used for this activity is no longer available. Before offering the workshop, find and develop a worksheet similar to the one provided here for break out groups to investigate. Have each break out group complete the worksheet (20 minutes) and have each group report back to the larger group for roughly 20 minutes.