For a few years now, I’ve been invested in trying to make digital literacy one of the goals of a humanities education. DH approaches not only give students more familiarity with basic web tools, but students use those web tools to hone close-reading and textual analysis skills. I found that integrating GIS (Google Maps) into literary analysis has been a wonderful way of achieving these goals.

A map from a project on Joyce’s Portrait.

I want to propose a session that looks at various examples of DH mapping projects in the humanities classroom. This might not only include those in the literary field (my own), but also other humanities fields. We might ask the following questions:

What goals do we hope to achieve by integrating digital components into humanities assignments? How can we better integrate these DH concepts into the course outside of just assignments? How might we use mapping projects to organize a semester-long project? What other kinds of assignments might be bolstered by GIS-based projects?