"How Not to Teach Digital Humanities" will draw on Cordell's experiences teaching digital-humanities-inflected courses at both a liberal arts college and a research university to reflect on the reasons undergraduates often do not share their instructors' fascination with defining or theorizing digital humanities qua digital humanities. Rather than dwelling on such debates, Cordell will contend that DH instructors should embrace undergraduate disinterest in DH as an aid to curricular incursion. The workshop will help participants develop strategies for effectively introducing digital methods as routine aspects of scholarly practice.

Ryan Cordell is Assistant Professor of English at Northeastern University and Core Founding Faculty Member in the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. His scholarship focuses on convergences among literary, periodical, and religious culture in antebellum American mass media. Prof. Cordell is collaborating with colleagues in English, History, and Computer Science on an NEH-funded project using robust data mining tools to discover borrowed texts across large-scale archives of antebellum texts. These “viral texts” help us to trace lines of influence among antebellum writers and editors, and to construct a model of viral textuality in the period. Cordell is Co-Editor-in-Chief of centerNet’s forthcoming new journal, DHCommons, and he also writes about technology in higher education for the group blog ProfHacker at the Chronicle of Higher Education.