Teachers
The Centre for Digital Humanities offers various forms of support for teachers of the Faculty of Humanities at Utrecht University. On this page, you can read more about what services our teams provide for humanities teachers.
We also offer training opportunities for all humanities staff and students as well as weekly Digital Humanities walk-in hours.
Digital literacy learning outcomes
Why would you integrate computational and data-driven methods into your teaching? Virtually all humanities students, whether they pursue further studies or enter the job market after graduation, will engage with digital materials and tools. Digital humanities (DH) methods provide students with the opportunity to work with a wide range of digital sources, formulate new research questions, work with large datasets, and present their assignments in innovative ways.
This is why, at the Faculty of Humanities of Utrecht University, digital literacy has recently been included as an intended learning outcome (Dutch: eindterm) in all bachelor programmes. This means that humanities teachers need to include digital skills as learning outcomes (Dutch: leerdoelen) in their courses. The CDH offers assistance and advice for teachers to reach these goals, in a way that aims to lighten their workload.
Course enhancement
The CDH can support teaching staff of the Faculty of Humanities in enriching their courses with digital techniques by:
- Providing technical support, including assistance with upscaling, setting up pilots and demos, preparing sample materials, or updating small databases or corpora;
- Offering substantive support and personal consultation with a DH expert on possible student assignments, sources, and methods;
- Providing (guest) lecturers for working groups in courses, workshops, and lectures.
There is also funding available for course enhancement via our Small Grants programme.
Small grants
The Centre for Digital Humanities (CDH) has launched three ongoing Small Grants programs to promote the integration of digital humanities methods into the courses of the Faculty of Humanities and to expand the teacher’s digital skills.
Funding and support is available via the CDH for:
Course enhancement
With this Small Grant, the CDH aims to promote the integration of digital humanities methods into the BA and MA courses taught in the Faculty of Humanities at Utrecht University. We call on you to submit concrete plans to digitize your course. You can apply if you are appointed as a lecturer, assistant professor, associate professor or full professor with a minimum of 0.2 fte teaching load within the Faculty of Humanities at Utrecht University.
Expanding teachers’ digital skills
With this Small Grant, the CDH aims to increase and broaden digital humanities skills among teachers by offering various options for tailor made professionalization. We call on you to submit a proposal on how to enhance your knowledge and skills. You can apply if you are appointed as a lecturer, assistant professor, associate professor or full professor with a minimum of 0.2 fte teaching load within the Faculty of Humanities at Utrecht University.
(Co-)funding Digital Humanities workshops
The Centre for Digital Humanities is pleased to introduce a new small-scale funding program aimed at supporting the organization of workshops that align with our mission to enhance the computational perspective in the humanities. This CDH Small Grant is particularly intended to foster intellectual exchange and the development of research and education projects with a core focus on digital humanities.
Responsible use of GenAI in education
As generative AI (GenAI) continues to have a significant impact on society, it is crucial for humanities staff and students to address its applications and potential risks in education.
Utrecht University support
Utrecht University has established the UU guide on Generative AI in Education where you can find guidelines and educational and examination regulations (OER) related the use of GenAI. This comprehensive practical Intranet support page offers a step-by-step plan and useful documents for teachers and program coordinators on how to navigate GenAI in the classroom.
Faculty of Humanities taskforce
Within the Faculty of Humanities, the Taskforce Responsible and Ethical Use of GenAI operates. The aim of this taskforce, coordinated by the Centre for Digital Humanities, is to guide educators in promoting responsible use of AI in the classroom.
The team has developed educational material to support teachers in incorporating Generative AI, such as ChatGPT, into their courses responsibly. The material includes two slide decks for both students and teachers, providing background information on Generative AI and guidelines for its responsible deployment. Additionally, a whitepaper offers more in-depth information, assisting educators in making pedagogical choices aligned with course objectives.
You can find the two slide decks and whitepaper in the Intranet knowledge base. They also offer guidance on further questions regarding AI in education.
The taskforce consists of Renske Bouwer, Karin van Es, Rianne van Lambalgen, Judith Thissen, Hugo Quené, Antal van den Bosch, and Jan Broersen.
Research software in humanities education
The Research Software Lab (RS Lab) can advise on and assist you with:
- Effectively utilizing digital tools in your teaching;
- Suitable existing software for your course;
- Developing new tailor-made educational tools;
- Navigating large digitized full-text corpora;
- Creating, sharing, and archiving datasets securely.
Impact & collaboration
The Data School impact advisor can assist you with questions related to:
- Data ethics: Responsible data practices, algorithms, and AI (in education);
- Collaborating with societal and cultural partners;
- Providing development opportunities for both students and professionals.
Experimental linguistic research
Institute for Language Sciences (ILS) Labs facilitate experimental linguistic research by:
- Providing consultation and training on psycholinguistic experimentation, data preprocessing and statistical analysis, for ILS faculty, postdocs and PhD candidates;
- Building and maintaining experimental setups;
- Providing lendable equipment for psycholinguistic research, e.g. for research using behavioral and bio measures;
- We provide (limited) support for BA and (R)MA student research in courses, internships and theses; please note that such student research is possible only when fully supervised by an adequately trained ILS-affiliated faculty member or postdoc.
Websites & IT infrastructure
If you require a custom WordPress website for your project or have inquiries regarding information systems architecture, IT security, or performance; our experts at Humanities IT Services are available for:
- Delivery and maintenance of tailor-made server environments for research, utilizing modern “DevOps” automation practices to ensure efficient and timely delivery;
- Provision of a multisite WordPress environment, enabling quick creation of project websites with a wide range of available components and themes. Specialist support is also provided;
- Consultation on technological topics such as information systems architecture, IT security, performance, and different options for making research tools accessible.
Affiliated members
Our team of affiliated members comprises six academic staff members, along with a strategic advisor and director, who are part of the four humanities departments at Utrecht University. With their diverse and extensive expertise in the field of digital humanities, they are readily available to address any inquiries you may have. Click the link below to access detailed biographies and contact information.
Library DH support
Are you looking for digital sources for educational purposes? Do you need assistance with preparing your digital literacy training or want us to support students with theses with a digital component?
The Digital Humanities Team at the Utrecht University Library is comprised of a diverse group of specialists who can provide you with valuable information and advice on various topics.
Topics
- Digital literacy skills
- (Online) Library guides & training courses (24/7)
- Using digital techniques and methods in teaching and research
- Working with digital text corpora
- Responsibly collecting, evaluating, and analysing digital sources and data
- Using search systems, search strategies and online source collections
- Managing bibliographic data with reference tools (Zotero)
Advice on thesis supervision
You supervise students whose thesis contains a digital component. Whether the student makes use of digitized material, wants to carry out text mining analyses or wants to save a dataset, from our expertise we like to offer help and advice during the process of supervising a thesis.
Resources
We provide an overview of digital humanities resources like training materials, reading tips, corpora, datasets and digital tools on our Resources page. Use the filter ‘For teachers’ and filter by theme and format to find what you are looking for.
Other questions?
Do you have a different question related to digital humanities or are you not sure whom to turn to? Contact us via the Contact page or by sending an email to cdh@uu.nl.
You are also welcome to visit our weekly Digital Humanities walk-in hour on Thursdays from 14:00 to 15:00 hours, in the Digital Humanities Workspace or online.