Abstract 4C

Sunday, July 9 2:05pm

Narrating a Path: Digital Humanities Tools in the Linguistics Classroom

Kristine Hildebrandt khildeb@siue.ed
SIU Edwardsville, Edwardsville, USA

This presentation embraces the premise in Mehl (2021: 331) that “linguists should care about the digital humanities … because collaborations between … linguistics and DH will be fruitful for all of us.” I will discuss my incorporation of DH tools and practices into my teaching of three undergraduate linguistics courses: Phonetics & Phonology, Language & Ethnicity, and Language Endangerment.

In these courses, in lieu of the traditional “research paper”, students learn about two free web-based tools to create interactive exhibits and digitally edited volumes on topics specific to the foci of the courses. They include Scalar, an open source authoring and publishing platform (https://teachdh.sdsu.edu/tools/scalar/) and Omeka, an open source platform for the display of archives and scholarly collections https://omeka.org/). Both tools make multi-modal writing and data presentation easy, and they are ideal for interactive presentation of ideas.

In Phonetics & Phonology, students were asked to describe the segmental and suprasegmental systems of (instructor-screened) languages of the world pulling together reports and publicly available A-V material. In the other classes, students constructed digital exhibits that leveraged a wide range of traditional and online sources. I will discuss the pedagogical principles underlying these projects and demonstrate how the tools were introduced as I display exemplar projects. I will also cover challenges and recommend ideas for future implementation.

Holton (2014: 44) discusses a central DH idea of “mediating the corpus”, i.e., digging into materials and tinkering. In the same spirit, Woodbury (2014: 24) writes that (digital) tools should “narrate a path” for users, opening up new directions of use, where they can think about novel applications in different contexts. My presentation will demonstrate how undergraduates used these tools to deepen their understanding of “traditional” concepts and methods of the field.