Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom

Discussing ChatGPT’s implications for industry and higher education: The case for transdisciplinarity and digital humanities

“…With AI increasingly performing analytics (Huang et al, 2019), familiarity with humanities helps students develop flexible thinking by drawing "attention to alterity, difference, relationship, morality, and purpose… and [fulfilling] the passion for connectedness and meaning" (Bullough Jr, 2006: 6). Consequently, approaches such as crossdisciplinary digital humanities (DH) pedagogy can help bridge the divide between STEM and humanities fields, enriching teaching while preparing students for transdisciplinary thinking in practical application (Battershill and Ross, 2022;Luhmann and Burghardt, 2022). DH can be seen as both "a discipline in its own right" and as a bridge that connects the humanities with STEM disciplines such as information science, computational linguistics and applied as well as theoretical computer science (Luhmann and Burghardt, 2022: 20).…”

“…(1) DH and the use of generative AI The application of humanistic methods of thinking to generative AI can take different forms (Battershill and Ross, 2022;Haensch et al, 2023;Kasneci et al, 2023), starting with fundamental training on the functioning of generative AI and the underlying algorithms to help students generate prompts that lead to the desired outcomes. Further, students need to learn to engage with AI agents appropriately.…”

“…Contrary to the trending view that humanities studies are no longer able to prepare students for 'in-demand' careers (Tietz, 2023) and outlandish suggestions that students no longer need to learn to write (El Atillah, 2023), we argue that a transdisciplinary education is key for the workforce of the future and can serve to broaden students' perspectives on both the possibilities and the fundamental limitations that sophisticated technologies entail. We make the case for the need to foster more transdisciplinary digital literacy in universities based on curricula that provide a breadth of knowledge and flexibility of mind (Gordon and Howell, 1959;McLaren, 2019;Worthen, 2022), that bridge humanities with STEM disciplines and that, ultimately, promote responsible use of generative AI and encourage critical reflection on its socio-cultural embeddedness (Battershill and Ross, 2022;Luhmann and Burghardt, 2022). Universities can thus contribute to forming future leaders that are acquainted with a responsible approach toward handling AI in both, their professional and private life, and can lead technological innovation in a direction that ultimately benefits society at large (Acemoglu, forthcoming, 2023).…”

Open Education and Second Language Learning and Teaching

“…A FL pedagogy of openness could also benefi t from the DH practice of openly sharing online innovative assignments, tools and resources, such as those collected in the web companion -published under a Creative Commons license and using Scalar, an open source web-publishing toolto a recent book on DH pedagogy (Battershill & Ross, 2017a. Pointing to 'Open-Access Introductions to the Digital Humanities, ' Battershill and Ross (2017c) explain, 'Many digital humanists are passionate about providing and disseminating open access works'. Clearly, Battershill and Ross are no diff erent.…”

“…Projects like Annotation Studio, eComma and Palladio, received NEH funding in part because they promise to create an infrastructure that would enable knowledge production within the DH community and beyond. In a similar manner, the Alliance for Visual Culture at the University of Southern California fi rst supported the creation of individual works of multimedia scholarship through a series of NEH-funded workshops (Ethington & McPherson, 2011;Goldberg & McPherson, 2009;Willis & McPherson, 2008) before moving to NEH-funded infrastructure creation in the form of Scalar, 'a free, open source authoring and publishing platform that's designed to make it easy for authors to write long-form, born-digital scholarship online' ('About Scalar Overview,' n.d.;Ethington et al, 2015) as Battershill and Ross (2017b) did in their open-access web companion. The use of community peer review for NEH grants indicates community support for the marked change in strategy from supporting the creation of individual scholarly works alone to the creation of infrastructure in the form of open source tools that can support such knowledge creation.…”