Background Information and Research on Digital Humanities (DH)

     To define and explain what digital repositories are and what the digital humanities encompasses, one should perhaps begin with a definition of digital libraries which “are organizations that provide the resources, including the specialized staff, to select, structure, offer intellectual access to, interpret, distribute, preserve the integrity of, and ensure the persistence over time of collection of digital works so that they are readily and economically available for use by a defined community or set of communities” (qtd in Rydberg-Cox 14). Perhaps a more practical and simpler explanation of the digital humanities in general is offered by Battershill and Ross who posit that the digital humanities “…range from the broadest and simplest of definitions—humanistic research of any kind that uses digital methods or tools—to more specific disciplinary construction that see participation in the field as something that requires a standard set of technical skills” (3). Yet another way of understanding the full scope of digital humanities is via the following expansive definition:

Digital Humanities (DH) is a buzzword that can be difficult to define. DH is “a multidisciplinary field, undertaking research at the intersection of digital technologies and humanities” (Warwick, C., 2016). DH aims to establish applications and models. It is not only a new type of research method that uses information technologies as tools to build new applications and models for studying the humanities but also contributes to the development of computer science. Meanwhile, it also studies how information technologies exert influence on cultural heritages, human memory structures, libraries, archives, and digital culture. (Cuijuan et al. 15)

This wide-ranging definition signals the enormous potential of the digital humanities as digital humanities can refer to many tools in existence to assist with learning and transmission of information in a technologically accessible way. Paul Lauter writes in “Transforming a Literary Canon” of the importance of digital access to a wide range of materials in order to widen and deepen understanding of texts and their contexts: “The Internet has transformed publishing in ways we do not fully understand… But we are only beginning to understand how forms of electronic communication can not only enhance mobilizations but also deepen understandings of culture and history” (31-32). Students and teachers can now use the internet to facilitate wide-ranging research and add to the classroom experience.

While the definitions of the digital humanities vary, the development of digital technologies and their use in academia has changed the way scholars, students, and teachers research, present, and instruct college-level literature and has also increased the reach of Humanities scholarship in general. According to Rydberg-Cox,

While the cultural practices surrounding print have contributed to the creation of research libraries that serve patrons in specific geographic locations, digital libraries that are available on the Internet can reach audiences far beyond these university libraries, extending into schools, public libraries, workplaces and private homes. Broad access without limitations imposed by geography or the need to be affiliated with an academic institution allows scholarship in the humanities to play a new and different role in the lives of students, professional scholars and the general public alike” (1).

While the ultimate definition of digital humanities has not yet been agreed upon, the utility of the digital humanities in the college English and Literature classroom is supported by the current literature.

In recent decades, significant writings by persons of color and by women have been rediscovered. It is important to add these various voices to have a better and more realistic sense of the writing which occurred in specific literary periods. As approximately half of the population, it is of value to expand the literary canon to better represent both female and male writers of English language literature. Such a holistic approach to literature will provide a more substantive glimpse into what authors of this period were saying and what modern readers should understand about the hopes, concerns, and views of bygone eras.

With our capstone project, we endeavor to explore the way the Digital Humanities might be leveraged to expand the literary canon to include underrepresented female authors and also to highlight ways in which the Digital Humanities could be used for research on, and instruction of, textual studies and textual analysis in the first and second-year college literature classroom.  We will investigate the knowledge, attitudes, and opinions on the use of the Digital Humanities in expanding the literary canon. In our instructional context and for this capstone project, we would endeavor to achieve this goal by gauging the attitudes of fellow English and Literature instructors, as well as through the first-hand experience of curating original, primary source scholarship on, and the teaching of said scholarship of non-canonical female writers from the 19th century.  By surveying Literature instructors at Lanier Technical College in North Georgia, and Allan Hancock College in Southern California, we will establish part of a foundation for a grounded theory of using the digital humanities in the 2-year college literature classroom to teach non-canonical authors and how that may or may not help expand the literary canon–in our own professional context at least.

For the other part of or capstone, we also intend to curate and create an original Digital Humanities archive that provides extensive information about two rediscovered 19th-century female authors, on whom we have performed primary research and original scholarship, to demonstrate the way in which Digital Humanities might be used to help fill the gaps in the representation of female authors within the literary canon, and to demonstrate how the digital Humanities might support 2-year college instructors in achieving their classroom goals regarding teaching research and textual analysis. By highlighting the process of primary source research utilizing various digital humanities tools and technologies, we hope to illustrate the ways in which our first-hand experience using these tools of the digital humanities have impacted our research skills and have increased our knowledge and appreciation of non-canonical authors. 

  By including the creation of an original digital archival source with which students can experience and explore the process of original, primary source research and have the opportunity to expand their textual analysis skills by engaging in literature that have not been studied, we provide our students with the opportunity to develop new skills in both research and literary analysis while they are exposed to authors who fall outside the current literary canon.

Research Question: How are two-year college English/literature instructors utilizing digital humanities to teach, research, and analyze non-canonical authors?

The English literary canon is often seen as sacrosanct; attempts to alter it through the expansion and inclusion of additional authors is often a slow-going process that is met with resistance. Many of the traditional authors whose works are taught as being highly representative of the English literary canon of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries are male writers from white, Christian, cisgender, heteronormative backgrounds. While many of these writers are indeed worthy of study and celebration, the exclusivity with which they have been studied has come at the cost of a lack of exposure to the equally valuable writings by their contemporaries who were not of the dominant social group.

In recent decades, significant writings by persons of color and by women have been rediscovered. It is important to add these various voices to have a better and more realistic sense of the writing which occurred in specific literary periods. As approximately half of the population, it is of value to expand the literary canon to better represent both female and male writers of English language literature. It is also crucial to include the voices, experiences, and written work of “common” people from various time periods in the literary canon in order to have a broad representation of literary and historical life from which more realistic and expansive lessons from our society can be learned.  Such a holistic approach to literature will provide a more substantive glimpse into what authors of this period were saying and what modern readers should understand about the hopes, concerns, and views of bygone eras.

         A related topic ripe for exploration is the idea of metacognition, specifically student and teacher metacognition as relates to an awareness of one’s learning, studying, and teaching styles. Specifically, the digital humanities can help students to map their research process and show their information-seeking behavioral patterns. Furthermore, this deepened understanding may provide models for how to use the internet and digital humanities to more effectively research topics. As Tanner observes in “Promoting Student Metacognition,” metacognition is not a new idea, though the term itself is. Tanner shares how John Flavell, a developmental psychologist prominent in the 1970s, defined metacognition as referring “to one's knowledge concerning one's own cognitive processes or anything related to them, e.g., the learning-relevant properties of information or data” (“Promoting Student Metacognition”). Metacognition can also be defined in an educational context as follows: “This awareness – knowing what you know and what you don’t know – is called metacognition. To have awareness and control over your own thinking enables you to plan metacognitively, monitor progress metacognitively, and evaluate metacognitively” (Fogarty & Pete 1-2). Using metacognition, teachers can help students to become more involved in analyzing their own learning and research processes in order to consider the “how” and “why” and make learning more personally relevant. As Tanner notes, metacognition is not only a valuable skill to teach students, but it is valuable to teach to teachers and researchers: “Delineation of distinct aspects of metacognition, development of tools for measuring these aspects, and strategies for teaching them to students are all active areas of inquiry among researchers across several social science disciplines” (“Promoting Student Metacognition”). Digital humanities can provide that map or blank canvas upon which all members of the classroom can illustrate, share, and recreate visually the processes they followed in their own research. Digital archives and digitized humanities resources/sites such as Omeka, Google Sites, and digital information mapping tools are just a few of the accessible digital tool which students and teachers can use to enhance their learning.

         Utilizing non-canonical authors as the foundation for digital study, research, and teaching provides literature and writing instructors and students with a unique opportunity to engage in instructional research, analysis, literary discourse on an equal footing, all while expanding the idea of who has meaningfully contributed to the literary and historical record. According to Binfield,

The newness of some of the authors provided one of the greatest benefits of teaching a newly expanded canon and of teaching works outside the canon, new or old. My students’ unfamiliarity with the texts leveled the experiences of those who had studied the Big Six in college preparatory or advanced placement classes at high school with those who had not. Whatever the differences among students familiarity with canonical poets, their responses were the same for noncanonical poets: “Who?” At the same time, some students were pleased that the new authors had more evidently material and personal concerns similar to their own. Those concerns distinguished the new poets from the canonical men, whose poetry my students often found overly intellectualized, removed from life circumstances. The expanded canon demonstrated to them that art can engage in the immediacies of personal and domestic life. For other students, however, the simple novelty of poets with whom they were unfamiliar was cause for greater interest. These students were struck as well by the new authors’ personal and materials concerns, regardless of gender (350).

The “newness” of noncanonical, working-class, and or previously unknown authors allows for greater engagement with the text specifically due to the unfamiliarity the students have with those texts.

         Digital archives and online libraries of documents are sources that are theoretically accessible by individuals no matter where the individual is physically located. A digital library serves its patrons as follows:

Digital libraries are constructed to scan, catalog, and organize library collection resources. The emphasis is on the digitized forms of resources, and the aims are to support document management with computers while providing reference service for readers at the same time (Cuijuan et al. 15).

When considering the methods and topics of instruction that are inherent in college composition and literature courses, research, writing, and the analysis of textual discourse must be front of mind. The ability to research and analyze digital discourse, as opposed to a more traditional idea of textual discourse,  becomes even more a necessity the further we plunge into the 21st century. According to Eyman, “The final element to consider is the notion of digital text–how we choose to define and delimit “text” may circumscribe or open up the objects of study available to digital rhetoric methods. As a student whose early scholarly training was focused solely on literary studies, I initially understood “text” to be a fairly limited term that referenced printed text (and in particular literary works); it was not until I began working with cultural studies approaches and postmodern theory that I learned that (20-21) “any object, collection of objects, or contexts can be “read” by tracing and retracing the slipping, contradictory network of connections, disconnections, presences, absences, and assemblages that occupy problematic spaces” (qtd. in Eyman 21).

There are additional educational benefits that arise from the use of digital technologies that introduce “people to newly digitised information and experiences. Education benefits should aim to include all members of society, not just university students or schoolchildren; there is gh7unger for learning and for resource discovery at all levels and Digital Humanities resources are frequently used beyond academia” (Tanner et al. 17).  This theoretical precept that the Digital Humanities can expand ideas, knowledge, and rhetoric both in and out of the classroom translates to the idea that the Digital Humanities could potentially expand what we consider relevant scholarship where the literary canon is concerned. According to Eyman, “The notion of the rhetorical situation serves as a lens that frames a particular rhetorical activity within a set frame, thus allowing analysis to take place within a context that is created through the interaction of rhetoric, text, audience, and rhetorical purpose” (74).

Performing original research and creating digital tools to house and share said research applies the pedagogical theory of modeling as defined by Campbel et al.: “Modeling instruction, defined for the purposes of this research is instruction that is centered around models, so that students explore, create, test, evaluate, and revise models in singular or iterative cycles in sense making processes…” (160). There are varying types and/or phases of modeling as relayed further by the author, and that can apply to the study and creation of digital humanities platforms, “Exploratory modeling, where students investigate the property of a pre-existing model by engaging with the model (e.g., changing parameters) and observing the effects. Expressive modeling, where students express their ideas to describe or explain scientific phenomena by creating new models or using existing models'' (Campbell et al. 162). When instructors utilize modeling in the literature and writing classrooms, students are able to observe original research and analysis and follow up by performing the same on their own.

         Digital humanities can be understood as supporting and supplemental tools for teaching about and better understanding topics in the field of humanities. There are many practical digital strategies that can be applied using the digital archives and websites. Those who participate in digital history research often use what is called “...spatial history…Geographers often call it historical GIS, and it is also known as spatial humanities. Within this research practice, digital historical data is studied both collaboratively and across disciplinary lines using various types of new technology and visualizations” (Nygren et al. 64). Digital Humanities research and study  can also be applied to a fine-art context in both the creation and presentation of works that can be used for research and analytical educational purposes. According to Hilyard, “In the fine-art context the ongoing advances in digital technology provide the artist with a wealth of opportunities to create metaphors which deal with the questions of subjectivity, contingency, mediation via culture and relativism in the context of our lived experience of the world” (88).  The availability of primary and secondary sources online and in digital format have also become crucial research sources for academic scholars and students alike. For example, “Old Bailey Online makes available fully searchable, digitised collection of all surviving editions of the Old Bailey Proceedings [historical English court proceedings] from 1674 to 1913…it gives access to over 197,000 trials and biographical details of approximately 2,500 men and women executed at Tyburn, free of charge for non–commercial use” (Deegan 181).

Utilizing digital sources for educational purposes also indicates “...appreciable growth in their [students’] growth in their abilities to conduct primary research and to reflect on the particular aptitudes archival research requires” (McNeill 23). The benefits and innovations made possible via digital research are many and far reaching and

accrue when we invest in deepening our understanding of the world and build upon the intellectual legacy of previous generations. Digitised resources continue to transform the process. The researcher can now ask questions that were previously not feasible. They can engage in new processes of discovery and focus their intellect more on analysis than data collation (Tanner et al. 17).

Online or digital research also naturally lends itself to the creation of trusted communities of learning. According to Anderson, et al., “Creating an online community will facilitate a community of practice involving students from widely different cultural and social milieus. Archivists worldwide speak a similar language and undergo a similar discipline in the learning and plying of their profession, so an online laboratory can accommodate a broad and diverse community of users” (359).

         Digital humanities platforms allow for an ease of access for studying non-canonical literature, especially at colleges and universities that do not focus highly on research. Binfield relays trends that surround the study of non-canonical poets, research, and teaching: “The first trend is the exclusion of working-class women poets (and men, too) from what is clearly a new expanding Romantic canon. The second is the increasing gap between scholarship on women Romantic poets and the teaching of them in institutions whose primary mission is not research” (348). 

There are also pitfalls associated with online or digital research surrounding how to organize and approach the instruction of practical research methods. McNeill posits, “...primary readings from the archive themselves were a challenge, in part because [of the desire] to demonstrate the breadth of materials and, by extension, allow more interest-based inquiry, I’d overwhelmed the students with too many options each week…Further, they were struggling with the pragmatics of archives: what to read, where to start, when to start…” (26). While the digital humanities can make research more accessible, itis important to plan for failures in order to ensure the ultimate success of any digital humanities research.

         One arena of digital humanities which is overdue for exploration is genealogical research. As Bishop notes, “The popularity of genealogy has increased dramatically in the last decade, thanks in large measure to the internet, which has expedited access to a wide and still expanding range of information” (“In the Grand Scheme of Things”). Bishop notes how, despite the availability of genealogical records as vital artifacts of settlements, there is a gap in the knowledge as concerns the history of genealogical research and why individuals undertake genealogical research. Bishop notes that

Taylor and Crandall offer three reasons to explain why a comprehensive history of genealogy has not been written, despite its booming popularity: genealogical research has been deemed too personal, the methodology is too straightforward, and the field lacks professional oversight. (“In the Grand Scheme of Things”)

While genealogy has long been thought of as the wheelhouse of a small number of hobbyists, more fields are recognizing the value of genealogy in enhancing understanding of seemingly unrelated topics including unsolved crimes and literary research. In 2018, detectives in Northern California turned to genetic genealogists to help solve a more-than-four decades old mystery surrounding the identity of the Golden State Killer. As Ertürk et al explains, “Since the April 2018 arrest in the Golden State Killer case, forensic genetic genealogy (abbreviated hereafter by FGG and also called investigative genetic genealogy) has emerged as an important tool to solve cold criminal cases and to identify unidentified human remains” (“Analysis of the Genealogy Process”). Genetic genealogy, using digital humanities such as digitized vital records, can assist in ventures of the legal, personal, and academic variety. While professional genealogists share their skill sets to locate missing connections and suspects in cold cases, certified genealogists are not the only individuals with access to digital and print genealogical records.

Genealogical websites such as Ancestry.com (also known an AncestryLibrary), Findmypast.com, Heritagequest.com, and Myheritage.com as well as free and open digital archives like The National Archives offer free or low-cost access to millions of digital records to anyone with access to a computer/tablet/phone and an internet connection. Many public libraries provide community members with free access to major genealogical research sites such as Ancestry, and anyone with an interest connection can browse through digital holdings hosted on the websites of libraries, archives, and museums. Some larger universities also offer institutional subscriptions to services like AncestryLibrary, including the University of California Los Angeles and Murray State University (“Genealogy (UCLA Library Research Guides)”). AncestryLibrary allows visitors to search for particular individuals and it also allows users to browse collections of digitized records. Through Murray State University, students and staff can browse through 10,943 record collections, including such specific collections as “UK, Coal Mining Accidents and Deaths Index, 1878-1951,” “Nottinghamshire, England, Church of England Marriages and Banns, 1754-1937,” “Lancashire, England, Index of Wills and Probates Proved at Richmond and Chester, 1600-1858” and “UK, Portraits and Photographs, 1547-2018” (“Card Catalog”). Researchers can further filter their catalog searches by category (such as “Birth, Marriage & Death,” “Family Trees” and “Court, Land, Wills & Financial”), by location (by continents as well as specific countries like Mexico and the United States and specific continents such as Australia, North America, and Asia), and they can filter by dates (from the 1600s to the 1990s) (“Card Catalog”).

Genealogy-focused resources such as those mentioned in the previous paragraph can enhance research projects focused on illuminating a specific individual or time period, including a specific author. AncestryLibrary provides access to vital records such as federal census records, voter registration cards, marriages, births, deaths, wills, and more.

What does the traditional literary canon of a culture tell its future readers about that culture? The canon is the product and reflection of attitudes and social norms of a culture. The very creation of a canon, however, necessitates the exclusion of all literature that is not selected for inclusion in this ‘representative’ canonical collection. The English literary canon is no different. According to the Encyclopedia of American Studies, the term “Literary canon refers to those texts generally thought of as important or valuable to a culture; by extension, the term canon has come to refer to the works that are accepted as significant within any field of study” (Lauter, “Literary Canon”). Another exploration of the term canon looks at how

the term “canon” refer[s] to a constellation of highly valued, high-cultural texts that have traditionally acted as arbiters of literary value, determining the discipline of literary studies as well as influencing the critical and cultural reception of literature… It has been a matter of sustained debate in the academy whether the persistence of ideas of canonicity in the twentieth century (as evidenced in the burgeoning market for authoritative selections, such as the literary anthology) is a function of cultural conservatism or is simply a validation of enduring aesthetic value. (Mukherjee, “Canons”).

Historically, the English literary canon has heavily focused on works by Caucasian men of European background who were also Christian and from the upper classes. The stories that are familiar as canon often were Eurocentric in their origins. Aston notes how “Paul Lauter (1991), an influential critic of the canon, has denounced many aspects of the canon as potentially elitist, classist, and misrepresentative of various groups of people” (2). It was only in the second half of the twentieth century that it has been a “revolutionary literary period for post-colonial writers” and writers representing marginalized voices in the English canon (Deena 121). It was after

“Political independence of many colonies in the 1960s and 1970s and the achievements of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States in the 1960s paved the way for the release of numerous marginalized voices. These voices drastically revised the dominant historical, theoretical, and literary perspectives. And for the first time in centuries, colonized and marginalized peoples began to decolonize their minds” (Deena 121).

As previously colonized peoples were rejecting the narrative of a Eurocentric literary tradition, other historically marginalized groups were seeking ways to share their voices and the voices of their predecessors. Different readers were asking about the cultural values embedded in the selection of representative authors to designate ‘the canon’ of literature. As Truman notes,

whiteness circulates and clings to the literary canon and literary education as if white experience were universal… Many of the narratives we continue to teach are written by and for white people and taught in ways that continue to centre white experience (Borsheim-Black, 2015; Haddix & Price-Dennis, 2013; Spires, 1999; Stallworth, Gibbons & Fauber, 2006) and in the service of whiteness. (54-55)

This inclusion has historically been at the expense of exclusion of equally talented contemporary authors whose countenance did not fit the narrative of what English literature was publicly presented as and who was seen as ideal to exemplify the English literary tradition. Such identified excluded parties included  women, non-Christian, Persons of Color, and members of the LGBTQ community. As Coryat and Clemens observed of the typical standard texts taught at the high school level,

 Teaching British literature with a traditional curriculum does not offer students exposure to many females at all, either inside or outside of the text. There are female characters within many of the classic texts in the curriculum, but on further  examination, we questioned the general picture of womanhood painted by them. In Beowulf, Grendel's monstrous mother and Welthow, Hrothgar's queen, are the only lead female characters. A strong female role in the Canterbury Tales is the "promiscuous" Wife of Bath… During our study of the Early Modern, we noted that Shakespeare exposes readers to a strong yet sometimes "evil" female character, Lady Macbeth…  When teachers only present students with literature written by men, we validate assumptions that men hold the majority of power in the realms of the "social, political, economic, aesthetic." Hence our drive to ensure that students questioned the omission of women from that canon as part of a larger project of questioning women's denial into such realms that go beyond the page. (41)

What was excluded from the canon represents a vibrant selection of experiences, insights, celebrations, and responses to events. Modern audiences may ask where the voices are which represent different experiences. As Caryat and Clemens muse, “do we have to re-envision the canon to include marginalized voices, specifically in this case the voices of women?” (41). Through expanded use of digital humanities to locate records of female authors and a variety of other marginalized voices, these authors’ voices can be brought to the forefront and shared as an equally valid representation of the literary canon. According to Binfield, “A cannon is necessarily a false picture… because selection requires omission (not everything from a period can be included); however, nothing requires that a period’s canon be less substantially suggestive of the scene of writing. Littel in the new Romantic canon acknowledges that working-class women, working-class men, and black writers produced texts–perhaps not in enormous quantities, but certainly in quantities that are remarkable, given the authors’ material circumstances, frequently including autodidacticism, poverty, and lack of leisure time for writing” (349).

         The use of digital humanities has wide-ranging implications. One sphere in which digital humanities may shape and alter the familiar terrain is in the realm of accepted and recognized literary canonical works. Digital humanities can be called upon to expand representations of writers who have shared their impressions, observations, and reactions to events of the past and present. One group which has been recognized as long being marginalized in terms of its reflected and selected contributions to the English literary canon are African American writers. The meditation below specifically references the impact of the exclusion of African American voices from newspaper archives, though its message is applicable to the English literary canon as a whole. As Senchyne notes,

There are of course important reasons to produce accessible digital afterlives for nineteenth-century Black writers, newspapers, and archives. Benjamin Fagan has shown how the exclusion of Black newspapers from major open-source nineteenth-century periodicals databases like Chronicling America has “devastating consequences for digital humanities projects that grapple with vast amounts of data” (11). They reprint and circulate a print culture of white America, upholding white supremacist and segregationist principles through their omission of Black and other periodicals. As Fagan notes, the databases that do include major full-text repositories of Black periodicals with structured data behind them are for-profit, inaccessible to those unaffiliated with large-budgeted libraries, and also tend not to make their backend data available for analysis… We have seen here how crucial archival and reprinting projects have been in the creation of usable pasts for Black organizing and aesthetic life, as well as for scholarship. (“The Digital Afterlife of Nineteenth-Century Black Writing”)

Indeed, one of the most exciting implications for greater access to historic records is the opportunity to share with a wider audience the recorded experiences of writers who have been marginalized rather than viewed as representatives of the literary canon.

Participants

The purpose of the survey was to learn more about perceptions of digital humanities and the need for tools to help facilitate and create opportunities for canonical representation in literature instruction at the college-level. Participants were recruited through invitations via email and via list-serv. The intention of sending invitations through departments and list-servs was to reach a wide variety of instructors who were professionally affiliated with colleges (specifically, two-year colleges). The primary investigators crafted emails which were then routed to their departments for approval and to be disseminated among the departmental faculty and any other English and composition faculty they wished to share the survey with. The two primary investigators' academic contexts are English departments in metropolitan-adjacent and semi-rural community colleges in Georgia and in California, respectfully. Below is a sample email that was sent to one department. 

Greetings!

As part of my doctoral research project, I am interested in exploring how college English/literature instructors are using (or would be interested in using) digital humanities to research and analyze non-canonical authors (with the goal of adding the voices of these non-canonical authors to future class lessons). To do so, I have created a relatively brief survey and we would love to hear your thoughts: 

https://forms.gle/DA8JCbdwgs2eKz4E7

This survey asks about perceptions of the digital humanities as well as perceptions about how the digital humanities may help with expanding representation in literature and composition instruction. The information collected will be used as part of our capstone project. Thank you in advance for your time!

The first question of the survey asked respondents to identify their primary academic context. In total, 32 participants completed the survey, with 31 of the 32 (96.9% of respondents) also identifying their academic context as community colleges and one respondent (3.1%) identifying their academic context as a technical college. The respondents represented a wide variety of institutions, with some representing the same mid-size community college in California which one of the primary investigators also teaches at, and with some representing the technical college at which the other primary investigator teaches. Other respondents did not identify the name or location of their college (as they were not asked to do so), but they learned of the survey through fellow faculty, friends, and/or professional English list-servs. 

Participants were also recruited via English and composition professional organizations such as the TYCA (Two-Year College English Association) list-serv. TYCA is a group affiliated with the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). Sharing the survey invitation and survey link via this list-serv allowed for a broader representation of opinions on how digital humanities are being used in the classroom as well as perceptions of the need for broader canonical representation. As a token of appreciation for taking the time to fill out the survey, respondents were invited to share their email addresses if they wanted to be entered for a chance to win a gift card.

Data Collection Method

The survey instrument was an anonymous Google survey completed via Google Forms. The survey included a mixture of multiple-choice, short-answer questions, long-answer questions, and interval scale questions (Likert scale questions). The survey instrument was an anonymous Google survey completed via Google Forms. The survey included a mixture of multiple-choice, short-answer questions, long-answer questions, and interval scale questions (See Appendix).  If participants selected “Yes” to Section 1’s question about participation, they were moved forward to Section 2, titled “Survey on Digital Humanities and Expanding the Literary Canon.” Section 2 contained 12 required questions plus one optional question where respondents could share any additional thoughts or questions. Each question was either a multiple-choice, short answer, long answer, or an interval scale question.

Rationale

We sought to gauge community college English literature instructors’ interest in expanding canonical representation in their courses (via a short, anonymous Google survey using Google Forms). We sought to survey college English literature instructors regarding their familiarity with digital humanities and their interest level in using digital humanities to expand canonical representations of writers’ voices in their own courses. The survey responses helped to determine the current interest level in both canonical representational expansion as well as whether the way to do so may be through digital humanities applications. The researchers also sought to provide concrete models for how the digital humanities may be leveraged to expand literary representations in English literature. Practical applications of digital humanities being used for introductory-level college English courses are provided on this website so as to present a blueprint instructors may utilize for their own courses. This research was necessary to better understand the gaps in knowledge regarding writers who are not often the subject of scholarship and/or anthologizing.

Data Analysis Method

Google Forms is a tool that allows for the creation of basic survey instruments. Surveys on Google Forms include qualitative and quantitative questions, a variety of question types (such as Yes/No, short response, long response, Likert scale responses, and multiple choice) and Google Forms provides simple analysis of responses such as graphic breakdowns of responses. (For example, one question in our survey asks respondents how many years they have been teaching, with options including 1 year or less,  2-5 years, 6-10 years, 11-15 years, and 16+ years. Respondents may only select one option. The responses were presented visually in a pie chart representing the percentages of answer selections.) Qualitative questions (such as short-response and long-response questions) were presented in a list format and were analyzed by the researchers for repetition of terminology, response theme similarities, and more.

Google Forms supports data validation and skip logic. As survey administrators, we utilized statistical, qualitative, and quantitative data analysis via Google forms. Data from the Google survey can be downloaded as a CSV file or an Excel file. The researchers utilized this function for additional analysis to visualize the data and obtain averages. After the survey was administered, Google Forms provided bar charts, pie graphs, and space or comma-separated qualitative data.

Limitations

Limitations included the number of respondents. Though 32 is a significant number of respondents, it still only represents a small cross-section of English practitioners at the college level in the United States. While each response from a representative of a different institution helped to provide a unique perspective from that specific context, it is hard to draw broad conclusions for any one particular region without looking at a broad array of responses from the same institution. With the geographic breadth of respondents, one could draw global patterns on patterns on digital humanities and the literary canon. However, due to a lack of depth of responses from any one particular region, more responses would be needed to characterize the specific academic needs by region. Other limiting factors may have included the length of the survey. While every effort was made to streamline the survey and make it as short as possible, it still included a variety of questions and the time commitment needed to fill out the survey may have dissuaded some potential respondents from completing it. 

The authors of this project created a survey titled "How Are Community College English/Literature Instructors Utilizing Digital Humanities to Research and Analyze Non-Canonical Female Authors?" See the tab above for detailed images of each question, possible responses, and the results and discussion of the survey.