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DLA Courses

2025

Digital Cultural Heritage
January-May 2025 (Aisling Quigley)

2024

Critical Race and Digital Studies
September-December 2024 (Tia-Simone Gardner, Getiria Onsongo, and Aisling Quigley)

Course Description:
As media and technology continue to transform our everyday lives, it is important to think through the human and more-than-human ways that we use and design technology. This course will provide a space for students to explore how and why technology and justice continue to depend on one another. Algorithms, bots, and biometric surveillance technology are quite literally in the palms of our students’ hands, yet the implications of these technologies are not always evident (or are intentionally obfuscated). ChatGPT was released with great fanfare but few people know the technology behind ChatGPT came at a huge personal cost to laborers in Kenya earning about $2 an hour to make it less toxic. Our exploration of everything from the use of AI to extract information from documents, to the bias inherent in controlled vocabularies, surveillance systems and classification systems, imparts critical knowledge through an exploration of the ethical implications of everyday systems. Students in this class will engage with readings and various media related to critical digital race studies and examine how these technologies often end up perpetuating oppressive structures and harming vulnerable and minority populations. We believe that introducing students to the intersection of data and technology studies, Black feminisms, and computing will simultaneously seed stronger critical thinking skills in future technologists from the fields of Computer Science, Media and Cultural Studies, and the Information Sciences.

Digital Cultural Heritage
January-May 2024 (Aisling Quigley)
Course website

Course Description:
Cultural heritage sites, including libraries, archives and museums, have existed in some shape or form for a very long time. Computers, on the other hand, have only been a part of these institutions for about sixty years. Although technologies offer more efficient and cost-effective ways to store and disseminate information and promise greater accessibility to materials, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they successfully facilitate the missions of these cultural heritage sites or the needs of their visitors. Why is this the case? Do digital technologies truly have the potential to decentralize and democratize these spaces? What can they tell us about what we value, as a culture? In this interdisciplinary course, we will reflect on the impact of digital technologies on cultural heritage sites, and museums in particular, starting in the 1960s and continuing through the present, including discussion of how museums responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. Among other things, students will learn how to collect, curate, and digitize objects, write and design an object label, and contribute to an online exhibition. No prerequisites.

2023

Introduction to Data in the Humanities
September-December 2023 (Aisling Quigley)

Course Description:
What do data look like in the humanities? How can data and databases inform our understanding of culture, or, alternately, be manipulated to distort the truth? Increasingly, computational methods are being used to ask questions and look for patterns in cultural data (from museums, libraries, archives, and elsewhere). This class provides an introduction to some of the digital methods and tools used to investigate humanities data and databases, while encouraging critical engagement with the many ethical and design questions that arise in the collection, analysis, and presentation of data. In this course we will read articles from a range of disciplines, engage in activities reflecting on our own collecting practices and daily routines, and explore and articulate ways that digital technologies may be used more effectively and ethically.

2022

Digital Cultural Heritage
January-May 2022 (Aisling Quigley)

2021

Introduction to Data in the Humanities
September-December 2021 (Aisling Quigley)

Introduction to Data Storytelling
January-March 2021 (Module 3) (Aisling Quigley)

2020

Introduction to Data Storytelling
Spring 2020 (Aisling Quigley)
Syllabus

2016-2018

Starting in Fall 2015, the former Digital Liberal Arts Postdoc, Rebecca Wingo, began building a partnership between Macalester College and Rondo Avenue, Inc. (RAI). RAI represents the Rondo neighborhood in St. Paul, a historically Black neighborhood that was intentionally bifurcated by the construction of I-94 in the 1960s to create a diaspora of the community there. Courses included:

Resettling the Plains: Homesteading and Data Visualization 
Spring 2018 (Rebecca Wingo)

Public History in Action: Archives
Spring 2017 (Rebecca Wingo)
The archives course centered around a hands-on archival project in partnership with Rondo Avenue, Inc. (RAI). Students mined microfilm of local historically black newspapers for old business advertisements. They then plotted the businesses on a map and made available the ads for each address. 

Public History in Action: History Harvest
Spring 2016 (Rebecca Wingo) and Spring 2017 (Crystal Moten)
The History Harvest is a student-driven, community-based archive in which students work with community members to create a digital repository of the objects they find most valuable and relevant. Students digitize the artifacts, record stories about the items, and then the community member takes their object back home. View the archive here.