Crafting Digital Learning
The COVID-19 health pandemic has challenged postsecondary institutions to extensively reconfigure their teaching and learning models. And while there has long been impassioned discussion on how the contemporary university might continue to evolve to match our increasingly digitally centred realities, the health crisis necessitated that all classes move online in the span of about a week.
“Moving everything to the web all at once presents a challenge for teachers and students,” says Professor of History and Digital Humanities, Shawn Graham.
“This isn’t ‘online learning’; it’s emergency content delivery. Either way, the result can feel like it’s divorced from the person who created it, and their intensely personal research and teaching style.”
Nevertheless, Carleton University’s faculty and instructors have answered the call, made sacrifices, and prioritized students’ wellbeing while working through this unprecedented full transition to online teaching and learning.
Luckily for Graham, he has had several years to fine tune his online course, Crafting Digital History (which was first developed courtesy of an eCampusOntario grant). The third-year methodology course is, in part, a reflection of Graham’s own trajectory as both an academic and teacher of Digital History. “‘Digital history’ isn’t just the history of the internet or the web; it’s also about how what we can know or what questions we can ask are changed by the fact of the digital. What does history look like when you can ‘read’ tens of thousands of documents at once, right? It’s also about what a historical perspective implies for the future of digital technologies and how knowledge is constructed,” explains Prof. Graham.
Professor Shawn Graham puzzling over python code. Photo by Fangliang Xu.
A Course Overview
Taught over six weeks, the course fosters authentic student experiences and collaboration, breaks down digital literacy barriers, helps students cultivate a professionalized presence online, and celebrates “glorious failures”.
Beyond teaching students how to use digitized historical resources, it offers many more lessons during these uncertain times about flexibility, personal growth, and compassion for oneself and others.
“Things might be chaotic in the rest of the world, but in this course it’s okay to ‘fail’,” says Graham.
“We learn so much from our mistakes. That is to say, it’s when things – the tech, the approach, the workflow – break that we really see what the digital is doing to our historical senses, or what a historical sensibility offers our digital culture. A glorious failure is when we use our fails to push others further.”
Failing as learning is a concept that lies very close to Graham’s heart. His 2019 book Failing Gloriously and Other Essays is an honest, humorous, and modern take on the academic memoir which documents his personal “odyssey through the digital humanities and digital archaeology against the backdrop of the 21st-century university.”
Graham acknowledges that students will be approaching the course with varying levels of digital literacy and historical research practice. He says students needn’t be ‘techy’ to be successful, but that they do need to be open and discuss what’s worked and what hasn’t. In this way, the exercises each week should push them out of their comfort zone, and into the zone where real learning happens.
“The point is to push yourself until you get stuck, sort out how and why you’re stuck, and talk to others,” he says. “Digital History is a team sport, and the students have to come together.”
Each week builds on the previous week’s work, and students need to set up the course communication and collaboration essentials – Discord, Github, and Hypothes.is – before diving any deeper. All necessary links and instruction can be found on the easily navigable course site Graham built using Github/Hugo. Graham is part of the ‘open science’ movement in digital archaeology, and so his course materials are meant to be reusable and sustainable. They are written as simple text files that then get pushed through a series of HTML templates using the Hugo static site building engine. All the source files are hosted on the code sharing site Github, which allows other people to take copies of his materials for their own work. ‘Crafting Digital History’ isn’t just a course website; it’s a living document that models how actual digital historians do their craft.
Weeks two and three launch participants into an overview of basic tools and methods utilized by digital historians; this also includes a series of exercises associated with them. For many course participants, this will be the first time they have encountered such tools or thought about how they might make use of them when conducting historical research and showcasing findings.
Examples include implementing regular expressions, or ‘regexes’ which can be used to find patterns in many text and document editors (imagine a complex version of CTRL + F that allows you to search for patterns rather than keywords: [0-9]{4} will find every year in a document, whereas CTRL + F ‘1999’ will only find that one year), and OCR (optical character recognition) and machine learning — a suite of technologies that enable you to convert images of handwritten or printed text into machine-encoded text.
In week four, a lesson titled ‘Of Macroscopes and Microscopes’, Graham explains how these tools can help students toggle between both close and distant readings of materials. Zooming out assists historians to identify broader patterns, while zooming in helps them to understand why patterns exist.
Student Success Story
Part time undergraduate student Jeff Blackadar took an earlier iteration of Graham’s course in 2017, and says it fundamentally changed how he studies history. Working fulltime in IT, and with years of experience programming computers, Blackadar says the course has also expanded other skills he can apply to his work.
“Recently we had a challenge at work to mask confidential data in a bunch of documents,” he says. “That project was stuck, and we were looking at hiring a specialized firm to ‘find and replace’ the confidential information. Using regular expressions that I learned about and practiced in Crafting Digital History, I was able to craft a program to locate the confidential information.”
Additionally, Blackadar has applied similar digital methods for projects in other university courses which helped him uncover new insights.
“For one project, I was able to map the spread of potato blight in allotment gardens in Wales by text mining the official Gazette for garden closure orders, and then plotting them on a map of Wales,” he says.
Blackadar says he has also had the chance to do interesting follow up research with computer vision, and that he often uses the R language he familiarized himself with in Graham’s course.

What began as a part-time effort in 2015 to complete remaining credits for his undergraduate degree, has transitioned into the pursuit of a Master’s in History with a specialization in Data Science, along with various publications and conference contributions. Unsurprisingly, his supervisor is Prof. Graham.
The methods and programs Blackadar will employ for his Master’s work will be well documented and reusable by other researchers down the line. This generosity of practice comes naturally to Blackadar, but was also encouraged by Graham’s course. In fact, the latest version of Crafting Digital History is now open to the public.
“I’ve made the course open so that materials can be remixed, reused, and reach beyond Carleton University,” says Graham.
The open access version is available for the general public to follow along week by week and to participate. Graham even offers a “social chat” and “questions chat” for open access participants to discuss their progress.
“Dr. Graham has built an online learning community where learners also help provide answers to questions and thus learn more,” says Blackadar. “We were encouraged to ‘work in the open’ and our work was shared in a supportive environment. The course is in a league of its own, and I think there should be more like it.”
Professor Graham presents his talk “Failing Productively in Digital Archaeology.” Photo by Jackie Belden Hawthorne, Michigan State University.
Evaluating the Pedagogical Approach
One of the readings for Graham’s course is a 2017 white paper called Digital History and Argument which features this quote from the late Dr. Roy Rosenzweig: “One of the most vexing and interesting features of the digital era is the way it unsettles traditional arrangements and forces us to ask basic questions that have been there all along.”
Graham kept Dr. Rosenzweig’s quote in mind as he concurrently developed his course and self-evaluated his pedagogical approach. Given our current moment, teachers worldwide are undoubtedly faced with similar considerations.
“It occurs to me that the shift to emergency online content delivery, which is a different thing entirely from ‘online teaching’, offers us an opportune moment to reassess what is most important or powerful about our pedagogy and to reconsider what precisely a university education is supposed to achieve,” says Graham.
“When you pay for your tuition, you’re not ‘buying’ a degree,” he says. “It’s about what you’re learning from your instructors along the way. You’re paying for ice time with the coach; you’re not buying the Stanley Cup.”
The final requirement of the course is for students to share what they’ve learned throughout their six week journey. Graham calls it the ‘Exit Ticket’ – a concept he came across in a book by Cathy N. Davidson called The New Education in which she discusses how the university as we know it has come to be.
In a weekly podcast component of the course (which Graham has recorded himself), he discusses “upending the game of being a student.” The Exit Ticket is intended to provide an opportunity for students to frame their own learning and their personal journey, encouraging them to reflect on their successes, their failures, ways they’ve helped others and ways they were helped along the way.
Graham asks students to compare where they were, as historians, and their relationships with the digital in the beginning of the course with where they are now.
“It’s your opportunity to set the terms for how the story of your time in this class gets told,” he says.
“Students will know whether this class has changed their approach to history. And this class was never about assessing whether they could write Python code or not. It has been designed to challenge student habits of thought, and to help them learn how to learn, and develop resilience in the face of ‘fails’ of all kinds.”
In Crafting Digital History, Graham offers wisdom and compassion in equal measure. A section of the course site labelled Learning Outcomes includes a subsection titled “When Life Intervenes” and encourages students to reach out if they’re struggling – no questions asked.
“There’s nothing we can’t roll with in this class,” he says.