American Studies

I made the mistake of reviewing Jennifer Travis and Jessica DeSpain's edited collection Teaching with Digital Humanities (2018) over Winter Break—after my book orders and syllabi were finalized. This is high praise for its fifteen vibrant essays, which adroitly erode the barriers of entry for incorporating DH pedagogy into classrooms. Organized by five keywords or "tags" (the verbs Make, Read, Recover, Archive, and Act), the essays range considerably in scope, from the big data trends in Blair Best et al.'s analysis of dramatic scripts to the granular textual annotations in Wyn Kelley's Melville course. They are accessible and useful even to readers unfamiliar with the technical aspects of DH. Beyond providing step-by-step explanations of their digital projects' conceptualizations, implementations, and evaluations, the authors consistently and candidly recount their failures. Their thoughtful meditations on redressing missteps and better meeting unanticipated challenges embolden readers who might otherwise feel intimidated by the prospect of developing or employing DH methods in their own courses.

Ashley Reed's essay on digitizing and collaboratively annotating Prudence Person's Scrapbook, for example, courageously frames Phase One of that classroom project as a "negative lesson on how not to launch a digital project" (25). The problem, she explains, was twofold: on the one hand, "students simply didn't have the historical-cultural knowledge that would allow them to correctly situate these texts in their nineteenth-century milieu" (31); on the other hand, she enumerates the "somewhat ludicrous" list of specialized (digital and analog) skills the project demanded of introductory-level non-English majors. Reed helpfully pinpoints a challenge pervasive in the volume: how do instructors balance finite class time between providing literary-historical context, training students with new digital tools (some with steep learning curves), and actually building digital projects?

The essays' collective and compelling response is that these competing demands are not mutually exclusive, but rather mutually informative. Contributors consistently argue that digital methods actually share much in common with the technologies, aesthetics, and politics of nineteenth-century literary culture: Ryan Cordell, Benjamin Doyle, and Elizabeth Hopwood use an early republican invention—the kaleidoscope—as a heuristic [End Page 116] for cultivating collaborative classrooms; August Rohrbach et al. show how Emerson's transcendental philosophy on knowledge production directly shaped her class's Digital Emerson: A Collective Archive; Cynthia Hallen frames Emily Dickinson's informal circulation of verses "in social media forums" as the reason poet presented "a perfect candidate for big-data literary studies in a universe of digital discourse" (73); and Catherine Waitinas notes that manuscripts in The Whitman Archive allowed her students "to see literature not only or even at all as the product of a burst of inspiration but, instead, as the result of recurring acts of creation and re-creation" while also "marry[ing] new and old technologies, analyzing big data alongside old-school penmanship" (154).

Similarly, the collection's final sections ("Recover" and "Act") persuasively position digital archives and pedagogy as essential to rethinking and remaking the traditionally white, male canon. Duncan Faherty and Ed White struggled to publish an anthology of overlooked early republican literature before developing the online Just Teach One project as a "sustainable recovery project untethered to precarious institutional support or subject to the currently narrow parameters of the academic publishing industry" (108), while Eric Gardner, Nicole Aljoe, and Molly O'Hagan Hardy discuss further expanding its purview to add African American texts in an effort to recover "pieces of American literature and history that have been stolen, dismissed, and abused by a culture that couldn't and wouldn't admit to deep African American engagement with texts" (119). The volume's most powerful contribution, to my mind, is Celeste Tường Vy Sharpe and Timothy Powell's essay on assembling a digital timeline of Haudenosaunee history that more sensitively renders that culture's nonlinear storytelling and cosmology. Simultaneously an urgent critique of "embedded...