As I wrote the syllabus for the new graduate course that I developed with support from the Humanities Engage Curriculum Development Grant, “Digital and Critical Approaches to Asian History,” many things went as planned.  I obtained licenses for Tableau Online for my students and explored the resources for teaching them data visualization.  I looked for datasets that would allow them to try different visualizations, from maps to time series analyses.  I decided on the three assignments that would culminate in a blog post on the Humanities Commons site.  Students would use this blogpost to discuss their own research, critically engage with relevant literature, review archives and primary sources, and explore what a data visualization could and could not contribute to their work.

Before the course began, a Qualtrics survey of my students taught me that this was a diverse group who worked on East, South, and West Asia and who had a variety of language skills.  The group included graduate students from both Pitt and CMU, from three disciplines, and from every stage of a graduate career.  Some did not have a topic yet; others were four months away from submitting their dissertation.  Some were interested in digital methods, some were not, but most knew little if anything about data analysis and visualization.  They had enrolled in the course primarily because it promised an exploration of how some sources provide evidence for a concept like “Asia” while other sources support completely different concepts, such as nations, oceans, religions, or highlands.

My first task in the course is to teach data visualization to students who have not signed up for a course in data visualization.  Luckily, the work that the Humanities Engage grant allowed me to do during the summer prepared me for this task.  The aim of the class is not to integrate data visualization into each students’ research.  At the end of the class, some might decide to do so, but others might not.  The aim is to think with and think through data visualizations.  Understanding the possibilities and the limits of each data visualization and the datasets and databases with which it is produced is a way to uncover the possibilities and limits present in all types of sources, whether quantitative, visual, textual, or otherwise.  In the final blogpost, what will matter most will not be the data visualization itself but its critique.

The next task is to help graduate students juggle coursework and their own research.  On most weeks, the class requires students to read about one book and to begin a discussion about it by posting a couple of paragraphs on the discussion board.  Everything beyond this requirement directly relates to the students’ own research.  The book review that they write will be about a book that is relevant to their own research, as will the review of three primary sources - one textual, visual, and data-based.  The data visualization and its critique will also be related to their own research as will, of course, the final blogpost.  In this way, I seek to both teach new methods and to help my students think about their own research project using these methods, all without increasing their often heavy workload.

There were setbacks, of course.  My plans to videotape my visits to archives in Japan, to interview archivists, and to explore how the rules of each archive, the interests of the institution that housed it, and the politics of the past affected which documents became available and which did not came to naught.  The resurgence of COVID-19 closed most archives in Tokyo, severely limited what could be done in others, and made archivists unavailable.  That said, even without these videos, we will still discuss these issues.

The lockdown, however, also opened new opportunities.  Distance learning forced us academics to engage with video, a medium that is more central to the lives of many of our students than text.  Once I engaged with video, I came to realize its potential.  Before the lockdown, I customarily asked students to post discussion points before class and to engage in discussion during class.  Now, I also posted after-class videos that summarized and commented on the discussions that took place before and during class.  What was a two-step learning process became a three-step process, with each step reinforcing the skills and objectives of the previous one.  Furthermore, the videos that I made encouraged me to further flip the classroom.  Students watch video lectures before class, spend most of class time engaged in discussion, and then watch an after-class summary and commentary on the in-class discussion.

The Humanities Engage Curriculum Development Grant was important in ways that I expected, in ways that I might not have expected but which I suspected, and in ways that were completely unexpected.  At its core, it provided its recipients with the most valuable commodities, namely with the incentive and the time to explore new ways to teach our students new methods and to connect them with a broader public beyond academia.

Digital and Critical Approaches to Asian History Syllabus (PDF)