Last weekend, many of us in the Office of Digital Humanities attended the 9th Digital Humanities Utah Symposium at Utah Tech University. Each year, DHU is an opportunity for digital humanities scholars across the state of Utah and beyond to share research and ideas, network, and learn about the application of digital humanities across institutions.
There were over thirty presentations from universities around the state, including several BYU presentations from the library, history, editing and publishing, and of course, our own ODH.
ODH presentations
Dr. Kathie Gossett and her user experience (UX) team kicked off the conference on Friday afternoon with a workshop. Attendees learned how to apply design thinking to the digital humanities, analyzing each others’ digital resources for usability, noticing what could be improved and providing feedback on these tools. Following this exercise, participants got a taste of the UX process by working on a real DH tool: first by researching the audience (by viewing recorded interviews) and then creating an information hierarchy to solve the user’s challenges. For UX resources and more, check out UX4DH.byu.edu.
Teaching in DIGHT
Both Dr. Jeremy Browne and Dr. Brian Croxall presented on topics relevant to teaching in the DIGHT program. Dr. Browne presented on teaching programming without math, which is an integral part of his curriculum in DIGHT 210 – Programming in the Humanities. Instead of teaching programming through theoretical examples (and complicated math, which will most likely be unnecessary), we should ground students’ learning in real-world examples and focus on the students’ humanity. Sometimes it’s better to solve problems like a human rather than like a computer!
Dr. Croxall shared his experience with the cross-classroom collaboration of encoding Peanuts comic strips (an endeavor that spanned multiple semesters of the DIGHT 315 course). The project gave students autonomy in the decision-making process—should we record characters’ clothing? What about transcribing capitalized versus lowercase or script text? What other information should we include or exclude? The Peanuts project provided students with experience in the challenges and successes of research.
Tool Development
Other DHU presentations focused on the development of DH tools. Dr. Matthew Baker and I presented a new tool for editors: TrackEDT, a tool for extracting tracked changes and comments from Microsoft Word documents into a spreadsheet. To use the tool, run the .exe file and select a folder of Word documents, and it will create an Excel spreadsheet of data about insertions, deletions, and comments (and more!) that were made in the documents. It can provide the data that will help answer questions at scale, making empirical editing research more accessible. The data can answer questions like how much editors make edits, what text they edit, who made the edits, and more!
The conference concluded with a panel by Dr. Gossett, Jason Dzubak, and me, where we shared our insights from our digital humanities redesign project: WordCruncher. Dr. Gossett was brought on as a faculty member in ODH because of her UX expertise, and the first project her team tackled was the WordCruncher software. It was a huge endeavor–larger than we initially realized–but one that has resulted in an intentional redesign: branding, a logo, a website, and a new interface that will be unveiled in the cross-platform version of WordCruncher (scheduled for release in 2026). Despite challenges we faced as UX and development teams, it has been a transformative partnership that has informed the way we approach ODH projects.
ODH is grateful for the opportunity to connect with scholars and students across the state and look forward to our next opportunity to rub elbows with scholars in the digital humanities: DH2025 in Lisbon, Portugal, in July.