The humanities, universities, and the world itself are amid multiple, overlapping crises. The COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns and stay-at-home orders required shifts to online teaching that continue affecting how we teach and how students learn. Our Ukrainian and Russian colleagues' working conditions and, in turn, their students' learning conditions have been immeasurably shaped by the Russian war against Ukraine. Neo-fascist politics have been entering mainstream civic discourse, targeting minoritized racial and ethnic groups, refugees, and gender minorities -and even interfering with our freedom to teach students about these topics. A looming climate crisis preoccupies our students, as their depression and anxiety rates are on the rise. These challenges magnify the perpetual crisis of the humanities: dropping enrolments in humanities majors, budget cuts, and increasing casualization of academic labour. What a time to be teaching. When the IJHAC: A Journal of Digital Humanities approached us with the editorial board's idea of a special issue on digital humanities pedagogy lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, we proposed to focus not only on the pandemic but on the many crises that are shaping how we teach digital humanities. After all, while some instructors first experienced teaching in times of crisis during the pandemic, many of our colleagues have been enduring and teaching under such conditions for a long time. We were delighted that the journal agreed to our proposal to develop a special issue based on the question of how to tackle the challenge of teaching digital humanities under such constraints. Over the last decade, the body of research that examines digital humanities pedagogy has grown significantly. Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles, and Politics (2012), edited by Brett D. Hirsch, staked a claim for pedagogy as a legitimate and rigorous area of digital humanities scholarship.

Digital humanities (DH) scholars have examined how feminist methodologies promote inclusive practices to value all stages of the development process. DH scholars can learn from feminist educators, however, about how to extend ‘cultures of care’ in DH learning spaces around feedback processes. Centring these feminist tenets, the Technology and Digital Humanities Lab at Newcomb Institute models strategies for how mentors in DH labs and classrooms can use digital tools to adapt during and beyond crises to intentionally build cultures of care and set up supportive spaces for giving and receiving feedback. During the COVID-19 pandemic interns use Zoom to conduct their weekly meetings. While others had a negative connotation with Zoom meetings, we found that the intentional use of the platform’s sharing features created opportunities to unify our community, permitting more discussion across peers when showing their work. Over time we tailored our Zoom use to create a hybrid feminist solidarity circle to meet DH students’ learning needs. We argue through adapting our use of digital tools like Zoom, primarily introduced as a crisis response, we better entrenched our feminist tenets of equitable collaboration by creating a process that encouraged students to seek feedback more openly and on their terms.

The digital scholarship department in Binghamton University’s libraries was created in 2018 as part of a larger effort to bring digital humanities (DH) efforts to Binghamton. The initiative was largely spearheaded by one person who became one of the biggest digital scholarship (DS) champions on campus. They, along with the new DS librarian, founded a Digital Humanities Research Institute igniting the creation of smaller working groups and initiatives across campus. Our article discusses the role of DS champions on Binghamton’s campus, including the types of advantages they were able to leverage, their interests and goals for a DS community, and what happens when they leave. Champions are a well-researched phenomenon in business and health sciences spaces, but there is sparse research on DS champions, despite the fact they often share characteristics with champions’ roles in those areas. Understanding more about who champions are and what drives them would help DS communities plan for building sustainable and robust communities should their champions leave or no longer be able to participate in the communities they built.

The rediscovery of Greek novels in Europe, in particular Heliodorus’ Aethiopica, together with its literary emulations by Lope de Vega or Miguel de Cervantes, had a deep impact in the renewal of motifs, fictional devices and character descriptions, for example the explicit or implicit presence of foreign languages or the predominance of female characters. The analysis seeks to quantitatively identify the multilingual character and the position of the female protagonists in novels using network analysis. We have approached both aspects from a twofold methodological perspective – first, using taxonomies that help to describe more precisely the concept of multilingualism for quantitative studies; second, making use of measures of centrality to locate the protagonist. Taking into consideration various network metrics together with the language attribution, we can compare the correlation between character importance and languages. The results validate the hypothesis that the novels show a strong thematization of foreign languages, but the female heroines fall behind their male counterparts in protagonism.

Focusing on graduate student education and professional development in the humanities, we examine how crises of the last few years – COVID-19, precarious employment and racial reckoning, among others – exposed iniquities in digital humanities (DH) and pedagogical training. This article explores how Emory Center for Digital Scholarship’s (ECDS) outreach initiatives operated through and responded to recent years’ crises post-2020. ECDS is committed to creating equitable opportunities for DH and pedagogical training for graduate students through long-term training, six-week intensives and an evolving open educational repository. The Digital Scholarship Training Program (DSTP) is a paid training programme for graduate students to learn digital skills through project-based learning. For students who cannot commit to a long-term practicum, ECDS offers two six-week intensives to provide equal opportunities for pedagogical training with emphasis on digital methods and tools. Currently, ECDS is building a repository hosted on WordPress to provide more flexible graduate training opportunities. By attuning ECDS offerings to varying levels of time and access, this suite of options aims to create equitable opportunities for graduate professional development that could serve as examples for other institutions. We conclude that DH methods and modalities can be deployed effectively to help address gaps in graduate student training.

In the midst of COVID-19, I adapted an upper-year-undergraduate digital editions class to a contract grading method. I struggled to find models that suited the needs of my class. My course demanded a single, core final assignment (a digital edition), but almost all models are for smaller, cumulative assignments with which students make up their contracted grade level. The intervention of this article is methodological: what might contract grading look like in a way that supports scaffolding to a single, larger assignment? And it is critical and theoretical: how does this particular case study interact with theories of improved learning and equity and accessibility in the classroom? Jordana Cox and Lauren Tilton’s theories of argument or rhetoric as ‘gift’ in the context of the digital public humanities provides a framework through which to consider the ways that contract grading and student DH projects together might imagine co-operative argumentation.

This article outlines what a successful artificial intelligence digital humanities (AI DH) curriculum entails and why it is so critical now. Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping our world and is poised to exacerbate long-standing crises including (1) the crisis of higher education and the humanities, (2) the lack of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in computer science and technology fields and (3) the wider social and economic crises facilitated by new technologies. We outline a number of ways in which an AI DH curriculum offers concrete and impactful responses to these many crises. AI DH yields meaningful new avenues of research for the humanities and the humanistic social sciences, and offers new ways that higher education can better prepare students for the world into which they graduate. DEI metrics show how an AI DH curriculum can engage students traditionally underserved by conventional STEM courses. Finally, AI DH educates all students for civic engagement in order to address both the social and economic impacts of emerging AI technologies. This article provides an overview of an AI DH curriculum, the motivating theory behind design decisions, and a detailed look into two sample courses.

The arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic and its disruption of post-secondary education turned future planning for online courses into an immediate reality. Given the in-person limitations, courses centred on experiential learning (EL) opportunities were challenging to offer without their curricula undergoing extensive reconsideration. This article highlights how two Italian Studies courses at the University of Toronto (U of T) and University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM), known for their in-person EL opportunities and study abroad, were able to provide highly interactive, global learning spaces online through the deployment of digital technologies and inclusion of redesigned high-impact practices (HIPs). What emerged from these new virtual spaces and adjacent components (e.g. virtual lectures, tours, workshops, assessments) were models for the preservation of academic integrity, frequent peer-to-peer interaction, and innovative ways to put learners into direct contact with Italian culture. Drawing from these successes and from current scholarship in teaching and learning, the courses at the centre of this article – Modern Italian Culture (ITA358/9Y0, U of T) and Italian Culture through Food (ITA235H5, UTM) – are presented as case studies which champion the inclusion of digital learning tools, open access and virtual opportunities across humanities curricula, regardless of delivery mode.