What is Static Web and What's it Doing in the Digital Humanities Classroom?

Almost a decade ago, Matthew Kirschenbaum and Micah Vandegrift presented compelling and well-argued ideas about where the locus of Digital Humanities, or, more broadly, digital humanists should be within the academic context. The intervening years have demonstrated the unique capacity of DH to thrive in a variety of departments, centers, and libraries with specialties that range from making things to theoretical discourse, and encompassing everything in between. As the community of DH practitioners has grown, so too has the popularity of several entry-level DH tools. In the classroom context, popular platforms like Omeka and Scalar play an important role in removing barriers and facilitating a relatively easy entry into web authorship for those without coding skills. New static web based approaches, however, have emerged as important additions to the DH pedagogical toolbox. These approaches, and the tools that facilitate them such as Ed, Wax, and CollectionBuilder, continue to implement the critical thinking, curation, and storytelling literacies that these tools teach, while also expanding DH students’ technological literacies into more fundamental areas of computing.