Creating a Digital Humanities Curriculum at Xavier University

With funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, faculty at Xavier University developed a digital humanities minor that allows students to learn technical and data science skills while exploring issues of digital justice and access. The curriculum is meant to appeal to students by providing them with opportunities to meaningfully engage with current events while learning new skills. The minor includes coursework on Excel, data manipulation and analysis, and multimedia storytelling, and has included topics such as technology and the sacred, end-of-life ethics, and democracy.

NEH funding ensured that creating the program was a collaborative effort, bringing faculty from the sciences and the humanities together. It provided support for travel and consultation, enabling faculty members to work with and learn from Stanford University’s Center for Biomedical Ethics, Yale University Library Digital Humanities Laboratory, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Digital Innovation Lab, and the University of Nebraska, Lincoln’s Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. A one-week planning seminar, hosted in August 2018, provided time for scholars from different fields to be in dialogue with one another, introduced humanities scholars to data science, and gave Xavier faculty the chance to speak with other, prominent practitioners through Skype. Featured speakers included Ronald Marlow, Vice President for Workforce Development at the National Urban League, who spoke on cities and the digital revolution and Jason Cohen of Berea College, who spoke on presenting and preserving history through digital approaches. Faculty from Brigham Young University and Creighton University spoke on running a digital humanities undergraduate minor.

Students, the ultimate beneficiaries of this program, were involved in the project from the very beginning. NEH funding supported four student participants in the project, offering them the opportunity to participate in the seminar and work on semester-long digital humanities projects. Ultimately, this student-led planning committee created an outreach strategy to foster awareness of the program throughout the student body.