DHRIFT (Digital Humanities Resource Infrastructure for Teaching Technology) is an open educational resource (OER) and publication platform for teaching digital skills. Designed by humanities scholars for humanities scholars, DHRIFT includes a core set of reviewed and tested curricula on common digital humanities (DH) topics, enables the ready creation of websites to support workshops, institutes, and intensives, and provides a minimal computing, accessibility-aware, and interactive functionalities. DHRIFT’s core curricula benefits from extensive classroom testing and has been used as the basis for workshops and classes at more than 20 colleges and universities across the United States.

If you are new to DH, start learning instantly by using DHRIFT’s sample Digital Humanities Research Institute curricula to learn foundational concepts in DH computing. Or, if you are someone who already teaches DH workshops, consider building your own workshop using DHRIFT using our style guide (Forthcoming). Perhaps you are interested in hosting your own institute. Fork our GitHub repository and follow our tutorial to build your own stand-alone, static DHRIFT site using GitHub pages. You can select workshops from our directory to include in your site, design your own, and customize the site with your workshop’s details.

DHRIFT’s features

The following features make DHRIFT unique:

  • Core workshops include interactive code editors in the browser, which avoids complicated installations and allows students access to resources on phones, tablets, and ChromeBooks. It also circumvents security locks on computers that prevent downloading and installing software without IT approval.
  • Our workshops meet standards that are based in humanities values. Every workshop includes: prerequisites, preparatory reading suggestions, ethical considerations, sample DH projects that use concepts introduced in the workshop, suggestions for further reading, and a theory-to-practice section to help students figure out their next steps.
  • Sites are minimalist and our team is committed to improving download time, reducing dependency on stable access to wireless internet and increasing access for students whose internet is unreliable.
  • DHRIFT-generated sites are static pages, which can be hosted for free through GitHub pages, reducing costs and increasing stability.
  • A director of existing, tested workshops that cover a wide variety of DH topics in the digital humanities, reducing the time, resources, and redundany of having to build new workshops every time you teach.
  • DHRIFT’s workshops are Creative Commons licensed, and the code for the site generator is open source. We invite contributions, pull requests, and ideation.
  • In addition to providing DHRIFT infrastructure, the DHRIFT team supports those teaching in the digital humanities through community events and outreach.

History

DHRIFT is a socio-technical intervention for hosting, sharing, and creating DH open educational resources (OER) that builds on curricula created and revised since 2016 and piloted at over 20 colleges and universities across the United States as part of two previously funded NEH grants for the Digital Humanities Research Institute (DHRI) HT-256968-17 & HT-267293-19. The Digital Humanities Research Institutes have individually supported 48 digital humanists who led 30 subsequent local institutes that have reached more than 500 humanities faculty, students, and administrators. Read more about the Digital Humanities Research Institutes on our website: dhinstitutes.org.

DHRIFT employs community-engaged design and development practices. Our identification of the need for DHRIFT is based on input from our two cohorts of DHRI Community Leaders (CLs) as they have expressed interest in and enthusiasm for a low-barrier tool to start and sustain their local digital humanities institutes. Prior to 2020, DHRI CLS reported challenges they faced in their local settings while planning for and leading local DH institutes: computer labs with restrictions on downloading and installing software, students with limited access to computers capable of installing required software, limited staffing to assist with troubleshooting, and limited internet bandwidth. While these challenges were present prior to 2020, the situation of the global pandemic in 2020

invested into the tools to share and then backfill their technical skill sets once they have a transformed, more confident relationship with the digital tools. We find that participants can direct their mental and intellectual energy and creativity to customize their lessons and content, responsive to their community, rather than mired in troubleshooting.

Questions?

Have questions? Get in touch with the DHRIFT team, or take a look at our FAQ.

DHRIFT materials are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License