In June 2026, I co-led a half-day pre-conference workshop with Lisa Boutin Vitela (Cerritos College) titled, “Envisioning DH at your Teaching-Focused Institution” for the Association for Computers in the Humanities. I participated at the invitation of Pam Lach and Brandon Walsh, who were leading this pilot year of workshops. It was a great experience! While I didn’t know Lisa before this project, I learned so much from her, especially about the community college context. Coming from a well-resourced institution, it was important to me that this workshop covered a range of situations. We also leaned into our respective librarian vs. faculty perspectives, which balanced our attendee backgrounds nicely. I really appreciated Pam and Brandon’s efforts to create a supportive and accountable environment for workshop leaders as well.

Since I am pretty terrible about attending virtual conferences myself, I knew our workshop needed some kind of non-virtual element. Brandon and I have presented before on paper-based pedagogy, so I had some background to draw on. Recently, I was inspired by Viewfinder, a “toolkit for facilitating ethical reflection about responsible AI in libraries and archives” that has a card-based option (presentation at DLF 2025). I was also inspired by this set of cards from a presentation from years ago (DLF? pre-2020?). The front features archival images and the back has a series of prompts and space to write. I can’t remember who made them, but the images are all from University of Iowa. It’s nice to have some physical reminders of projects and presentations! I have a big bulletin board in my office where I save these things.

So we decided a printable workbook would be a good addition to the workshop. It would give attendees a place to focus when their attention inevitably drifted away from Zoom. The result was a 16 page workbook full of questions and reflection prompts on the current status of DH at your institution and your future goals. It concludes with space for next steps. It also asks you identify and wrestle with your feelings which I feel like is a part of the process that can’t be ignored when you’re trying to build a thing at your institution over many years. And it’s because of the feelings that I’m not going to share the slides from the workshop publicly, except to say our basic outline was:

  1. Aligning Vision and Values - go through workbook and share out
  2. Empowering Faculty and Staff - case studies about our institutions
  3. Crystallizing Your Vision - small group discussion and action item development

We’d love to share the workbook for anyone who would like to complete it themselves or adapt for their own workshop or context. You can find it on Knowledge Commons, but I am also willing to share a Canva link if you would like the ability to edit easily. Assembly note: print double-sided, flipped on short edge. Fold in half to create your workbook!

Workbook on Knowledge Commons

PRINTABLE-ACH2026-PreConference-EnvisioningDH-printbooklet by Mackenzie Brooks