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Tisha Brooks writes about a digital anthology assignment in her 200-level African American literature survey in which students act as “knowledge curators.” Brooks’s assignments use literary and visual texts to “bridge multiple literacies and historical gaps,” and to encourage students to think critically about representations of violence against black bodies. Student work culminates in a group digital anthology project that helps them “move from mere consumers of knowledge to critical thinkers who use the archive to make meaning of its artifacts and the history and literature connected to them.” By selecting multimedia artifacts across periods, students become adept at representing the historical continuities between past and present.

In this chapter, Amy Earhart shows how the connection between digital humanities and American literature is intimately linked to the historical development of activist DIY digital projects built by scholars to provide alternatives to a predominantly white, Eurocentric canon. Earhart’s students construct a digital archive that puts Texas’s 1868 Millican race “riot” in broader cultural context by using historical newspaper articles about lynchings and editorials about voter rights. As students curate materials related to the Millican “riot,” they help to revive a period in African American literature and history that is being recovered by scholars as a period of resistance. Earhart’s essay shows how structural hierarchies, in the biases of historical newspapers and in the technologies we employ today, can limit access to the literary voices that once animated the period.

Celeste Tường Vy Sharpe and Timothy B. Powell describe how they use the design of digital platforms as teachable problems to engage students in a digital humanities course about the stories of Indigenous peoples and the Eurocentric “control over time.” Sharpe and Powell task students with creating a digital project that explores a more culturally specific and nuanced model of Iroquois or Haudenosaunee temporality. In the process, students and teachers alike imagine solutions that may enable digital humanities tools to more accurately represent how Indigenous peoples tell their histories.

Augusta Rohrbach details her collaborative work with six graduate students to build Digital Emerson: A Collective Archive. Rohrbach uses a set of theoretical and critical readings that engage students in reflections about Emerson’s conscious rupture of pedagogical barriers and how his philosophy might be realized in digital environments. Rohrbach and her students think outside argument-based rhetoric and explore the importance of visual literacy and design thinking. With these techniques, her graduate students imagine an audience beyond academia for their work, one that includes a broad community of interested readers.

Ashley Reed describes her work with students to create an annotated online edition of a nineteenth-century scrapbook by Prudence Person, a member of a prominent North Carolina family. She outlines the lessons she learned as the project progressed from its first phase in a classroom of nineteen students to an independent study with only two. When the smaller group integrated more field-specific knowledge, the students and the project thrived: they visited historic sites, presented at undergraduate research forums, and took ownership of the content. Reed addresses the difficulties and benefits of launching a context-rich DH project in a general education classroom, and she imagines its future iteration as the centerpiece of an intensive upper-level course on nineteenth-century print culture.

Wyn Kelley describes how students in her seminar Mapping Melville use tools developed in MIT’s HyperStudio to make new and surprising discoveries of deeply canonical texts. As students experimented with digital tools for reading, mapping, editing, and comparing texts, they expanded their power to track verbal patterns, share comments, and develop reports and essays. Kelley thinks of her pedagogical methods as a platform for design thinking in the humanities classroom, and she demonstrates how nineteenth-century American literature is especially hospitable to such an approach.

Catherine Waitinas leads readers step-by-step through a digital manuscript project on Walt Whitman’s poetry that she created for a variety of courses from general education to graduate seminars. Using handwritten manuscripts digitized in the Walt Whitman Archive, Waitinas’s students meld old and new technologies, placing penmanship in conversation with big data analysis and The Walt Whitman’s Archive’s tools like the archive’s search engine. Waitinas describes how archival assignments like these are infinitely scalable; they can be used in relation to many other archives, and Waitinas gives suggestions for one-day to full-unit versions of the assignment.

Ken Cooper and Elizabeth Argentieri discuss their collaborative project about the Genesee region of Western New York, Open Valley, which invites students not just to think and act locally, but, less obviously, to gather in one location otherwise unconnected types of knowledge: literary, economic, ecological, and historical. Engaging students in archival projects that stretch the possibilities of the academic term, OpenValley invites them to connect with institutions beyond the college campus by collaboratively analyzing commercial documents, building a digital map of nineteenth-century food infrastructure, and editing as-yet unpublished diaries from a local farming family. Combining in real life (IRL) experiences for students in the form of community-engaged service learning with digital humanities pedagogy, students bring local materials to new and wider audiences.

In this chapter, Caroline M. Woidat describes how classroom “archival explorations” transform the ways that students think about literary texts, American history, and their roles as scholars. Animated by feminist scholarship and pedagogy, Woidat describes a course that aims to recover the roles that literary editors, critics, and communities perform—the vital work that is often effaced or demeaned as “secondary” and peripheral—along with “primary” texts by women authors. Students in Woidat’s class become editors engaged in literary recovery to reevaluate the canon and its primacy.

Cynthia L. Hallen describes her launch and development of the Emily Dickinson Lexicon (EDL) project, a dictionary of all the words in the poet’s collected verse. With English and linguistics majors volunteering as apprentice collaborators, Hallen, starting in the 1990s, began the ambitious project of digitizing the Franklin edition of Dickinson’s poems and using the newly developed WordCruncher concordance program to amass the lexicon. Hallen describes her use of the EDL along with other digital philological tools in a senior capstone course where students learned principles of philology as well as skills of lexicography, etymology, exegesis, rhetoric, style, translation, discourse analysis, and literary interpretation.

Nicole J. Aljoe, Eric Gardner, and Molly O’Hagan Hardy describe the development of Just Teach One Early African American Print and its focus on texts excluded from critical and historical narratives of black literature. The chapter describes JTO: EAAP’s plans to link its work with other DH projects like the Early Caribbean Digital Archive and the Colored Conventions Project, and to build bridges to lesser-known collections, including historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and church collections, in order to aid text sharing, identification, preservation, and technological engagement. Recognizing its responsibility to preserve black cultural heritage, the essay describes JTO: EAAP’s decision to use TEI standards to encode texts on the site and provides an extended example from Aljoe’s classroom project on “Theresa: A Haytien Tale.”

Ed Whitley’s chapter describes a project in which students study the curatorial work of Harriet Beecher Stowe in The Key to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” alongside current examples of digital activism to understand how groups mobilize and share information to effect change. Students “reverse engineer” the composition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin by searching through digital archives of abolitionist texts and images to discover how Stowe’s inclusion of some materials and exclusion of others shaped her novel. Students then consider how social activists similarly sort, organize, select, and reject the documentary record of social injustice appearing online in real-time. As students compare historical periods and media forms, they reflect on the processes through which texts are created, disseminated, structured, stored, and used to change the world.

This essay co-authored by Robert Davis and his students in a theater class at New York University describes the interdependence of close and distant reading practices in their creation and analysis of a representative corpus of nineteenth-century drama. With irregular scholarly and theatrical attention given to nineteenth-century American theatre, the archive of plays and productions is frustratingly fragmented with few playbooks and only limited accounts of their staging. This chapter demonstrates how students used corpus linguistic and spatial analysis tools like Voyant, Antconc, and Tagxedo to recover a neglected century of American theater. Students found that the use of digital tools to perform text analysis, mapping, and network visualization sparked new scholarly ideas about nineteenth-century theatre.