Last month we published a new article as part of a special issue of the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy on “Minimalist DH Pedagogy” edited by Patricia Belen, Stefano Morello, Gregory J. Palermo, Danica Savonick, and Brandon Walsh. The full special issue can be found here, open access: JITP 27. Our article, “A Dostoevsky Laboratory: Creating a TEI Training Workshop for Undergraduate Students Using Minimal Computing,” discusses the undergraduate TEI training workshop we designed and taught in May 2022.

Here’s the article abstract:

This article discusses a TEI training workshop created by the “Digital Dostoevsky” project team as an example of minimalist DH pedagogy. In designing the workshop, the team turned to the minimalist DH computing heuristic proposed by Roopika Risam and Alex Gil: “What do we need? What do we have? What must we prioritize? And what are we willing to give up?” This heuristic helped the team prioritize not just material and practical considerations, but also ethical and humanistic decision-making. A focus on method (the TEI), training, and communication in the workshop’s design over direct oversight resulted in student autonomy and long-term engagement in the “Digital Dostoevsky” project. The workshop’s communication structure relied on proprietary software including Google Docs, Slack, and Zoom, despite their known privacy issues, and created a true sense of community, a collective feeling of scholarly impetus, among the students and project team members. These digital spaces became, in fact, even more creative than the traditional literary classroom: a collective laboratory where students and professors discussed and debated the nuances of Dostoevsky’s stylistic quirks and tics in the original Russian texts, unmediated by translation. The TEI training workshop had transformative, long-term effects on the individual students as well as the “Digital Dostoevsky” project and team. As an example of minimalist DH pedagogy this case study demonstrates the way minimal computing methods can empower students in their learning and professional development as well as strengthen a DH project, creating spaces for inclusivity and experimentation that have far-reaching impact.

You might also be interested in some of the work by our students from the workshop. Their blogposts can be found here:

• Speech within Speech, or the Literary “Inception” in Dostoevsky’s “The Adolescent”
• Tagging Speech in Notes from Underground: a Journey Through Layers of Reality

Check out our article to learn more!