Editor’s Note: Today’s post is by  Jess Ludwig. Jess is Director of Product Management, Digital Humanities, at Gale.

Digital humanities students typically spend a lot of time selecting, managing, and analyzing data, all of which build cognitive abilities and technical knowledge. What educators may overlook is that, in addition to these fundamental digital literacy skills, digital humanities courses, internships, and centers teach students critical social-emotional skills.

Definitions of social-emotional competencies vary, but one of the most commonly used frameworks comes from the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), which details five core competencies for social–emotional learning (SEL):

1. Self-awareness;
2. Self-management;
3. Social awareness;
4. Relationship skills; and
5. Responsible decision-making.

CASEL’s primary focus is K-12 classrooms, but its framework is relevant to higher education as well. Writing about how strategies for promoting, self-management, and social awareness may improve engagement in STEM disciplines, Chiara Elmi, the author of “Integrating Social Emotional Learning Strategies in Higher Education” identifies the key skills that students must develop to master three of the core competencies.

Communication is central to each domain, and of course virtual, hybrid, and in-person environments pose different communication challenges for students. In the online environment, Yoram Eshet, professor at Open University of Israel, recognizes “socioemotionally-literate users … as those who are willing to share data and knowledge with others, capable of information evaluation and abstract thinking, and able to collaboratively construct knowledge.” Given the interdisciplinary, collaborative nature of the digital humanities, social awareness and relationship skills are vital to students’ academic success. For example, projects may require collaboration among humanities, information science, and computer science departments at campuses across the country or around the world.

When students graduate and enter the workforce, social-emotional skills including self-awareness, curiosity, and resilience continue to be immensely useful. The World Economic Forum (WEF) lists these competencies among its “Top 10 skills on the rise,” explaining that their increasing importance in the workforce is driven by technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and the need for workers to manage through disruptive change.

The examples below explore how digital humanities projects prepare students for academic and professional success by helping them develop self-awareness, social awareness, and community awareness.

Self-Awareness

Tools that encourage students to reflect on their actions, motivations, and expectations can help increase self-knowledge and efficacy. In Gale Digital Scholar Lab (full disclosure, my employer), a Notebook embedded within the tool’s text- and data-mining workflow gives individuals or groups a way to track decisions, share information over the course of a project, or complete a reflective assignment. Similarly, Padlet is a tool that supports users in creating a “wall” for posting and sharing ideas that inspire self-reflection activities.

Clayton McCarl, writing about project-based digital humanities internships for Digital Humanities Quarterly, notes that this combination of collaboration and reflection leads students to develop “capacities for critical thinking, communication, and problem-solving, as well as time and project management and outreach skills. These experiences can help students build confidence, gain a sense of achievement, and develop awareness of their own potential.”

Social Awareness

Humanities capstone projects often include fieldwork or group work in which students partner with each other or local organizations to create an archive, tool, or other resource. These activities require students to communicate and make collective decisions. Within tools like ARCGIS StoryMaps, Omeka, and Gale Digital Scholar Lab, digital humanists regularly share information and collaborate to create a resource that can be published and distributed to a wider audience. Another good example that weaves together self-awareness and social awareness is Jackson State University’s interactive quilt, built in FigJam to capture reflections as part of its “Weaving Black Futures” symposium.

Community Awareness

Clearly, these different awarenesses overlap, build on one another, and develop over time. Around the globe, humanities labs and centers encourage students to apply what they have learned while working with others on a broad array of projects. At the University of Virginia’s Electronic Text Center in the early 2000’s, I was one of many graduate student research assistants applying HTML, XML, and TEI for the first time. We learned those coding skills from other graduate students who worked in the Center and then taught them to faculty and students. Indeed, UVA’s early humanities-focused centers led the way for current initiatives like The Praxis Network that reimagines methodological training and collaborative research in the humanities.

One ongoing initiative that is particularly exciting because of its focus on the intersection of digital humanities and feminist leadership is The Technology and Digital Humanities Lab at Tulane University’s Newcomb Institute. Through Tulane’s Lab, students learn collaborative product development methodologies such as scrum (a framework for self-organizing teams used in software development) and are encouraged to think critically about technology and social justice issues including gender equity.

Conclusion

The digital humanities discipline provides students with opportunities to master an array of technical, cognitive, and social skills. Through collaborative tools and experiences in many environments, digital humanists also develop social-emotional competencies that are useful in school, work, and life.