In 2017 the Digital Integrative Liberal Arts Center (DILAC) contributed to sending five Brittain Fellows in the Writing and Communication Program (WCP) to attend the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI), hosted by the University of Victoria in British Columbia. In conjunction with WCP and the School of Literature, Media and Communication (LMC), this initiative served to advance the Ivan Allen College-wide mandate to promote the digital humanities and digital pedagogy at Georgia Tech.
The courses offered at DHSI explore a variety of topics including text encoding, digital storytelling, understanding topic modeling, digital humanities pedagogy, and many more. Training WCP faculty in these topics furthered WCP/LMC/IAC programmatic curricular and individual research goals. Thanks to the support of Dr. Rebecca Burnett, Dr. Richard Utz, and Dean Jacqueline Jones Royster, attendees received a world-class education in digital humanities methods that have been invaluable to bringing digital technologies and best practices to the classroom.
After vetting statements of interest, WCP representatives selected five faculty who demonstrated the greatest enthusiasm about the Institute’s capacity to support their teaching: Dr. Ian Afflerbach, Dr. Andrew Eichel, Dr. Matthew Dischinger, Dr. Kate Holterhoff, and Dr. Sarah Lozier‐Laiola. As WCP teaches approximately 5,000 undergraduate students a year—up to 150 students a year for each participant— by sharing ideas for integrating the digital humanities into the classroom with other WCP faculty (Brittain Fellows and lecturers) through involvement in orientation, DevLab workshops throughout the year, revisions to the WCP handbook statement of commitment, additional content for the WCP website, and TECHStyle blog articles, this DHSI initiative has reached a lot of students. The skills acquired at DHSI have not only enriched the participants’ pedagogy, it also advanced the position of digital humanities in the Georgia Tech community.