What Counts? Digital Humanities Pedagogy Seminars as Teaching

Digital Humanities pedagogy seminars (DHPSs) are a common occurrence on small liberal arts campuses that are seen as acts of service within the logic of the Teaching-Research-Service model of tenure and promotion in the U.S. academy. Yet, the goal of these events is to teach faculty colleagues DH methods, inflected by DH pedagogy values, which they can then use in their undergraduate courses. As tenured and tenure-track DH specialists at small liberal arts colleges, we argue that a DHPS is pedagogical labor and should be evaluated as teaching in order to enact values-based DH more broadly. The paper provides qualitative data based on experiences at our institutions as well as quantitative data about 226 DHPSs offered in North America from July 2015 to July 2019. We focus on the impact of DHPS duration and the home institutions and roles of instructors on collaboration, experimentation, and intersectional feminism as practiced in the field.