The following pages shall begin by describing the institutional context of the Plan de Estudios de la Licenciatura en Historia[3] (PE, its acronym in Spanish). Next, the features of the subject by the name of Seminario Taller Especializado (Specialized Seminar-Workshop) shall be explained, as well as the way in which this space has been able to become a laboratory for the introduction of digital humanities in the History Course. Section 3 shall present a study case combining the teaching experience and the pedagogical work in the classroom. Some of the digital objects produced in the Seminar-Workshop will be introduced in Section 4.

This model for a course and its orientation towards the digital humanities is a first attempt at including this area of study at an undergraduate level, which made it necessary to describe the complementary work carried out outside the classroom (section 5). From the experience with the Seminar-Workshop, however successful it may have been, the authors were able to identify a series of shortages in the use of technology and of the internet by the undergraduate students of History. For this reason, an introductory course was offered to the students of the Class of 2016 before the beginning of the school year (section 6). In the final section, the authors suggest strategies for the inclusion of digital humanities in updating the university curricula at the UNAM –this, within the context of an expansion process of DH in Latin America.

The current Plan de Estudios de la Licenciatura en Historiawas approved–after several discussions, surveys and debates–in 1998, and implemented the following year. Even though by then computers, as well as the internet, were starting to become everyday use tools in the academic field, throughout the eighty-three pages of the first volume in which the PE is described, no mention is made of the need to include specific subjects in the curricular map that would allow students to acquire digital skills in the four years of the course.

The Plan de Estudios students have to go through includes a series of seminar-workshops that center their goals in research abilities. In particular, the Seminario Taller Especializado owes its name to the fact that its contents focus on the “use and application of specific research techniques, particular ways of teaching and media for the circulation of historical knowledge, such as video, films, CD-ROMs, the theater, radio scripts, etc.”  [Programa de la Licenciatura en Historia 1999, 60].[4] As a result of these guidelines, the Seminar-Workshop must ensure the conclusion of concrete products for two spheres: teaching and the circulation of knowledge. Thematic flexibility has allowed the renovation of the specific contents of each of the seminars. This has brought about a constant introduction of innovative themes and methods in the classroom. For instance, at the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, a traditional place as regards infrastructure for the Humanities–i.e. classrooms, blackboards, seats for students and desks for the teachers–there is audiovisual equipment available; however, there is not an efficient wireless network, which creates some challenges.

The PE has undergone two certification processes–evaluations carried out by outside institutions authorized by the state–but its structure remains the same. In 2015, a commission of teachers and students began its revision, though the whole process will take about two years. The flexibility of the PE allows, on the other hand, the existence of a wide thematic offer of subjects for students in their third year of the History Course: from Museum or Heritage Studies to contents for the radio or the press.

In this context, the Head of the Colegio de Historia (History Department), Dr. Lucrecia Infante Vargas, shared with us her interest in setting up a seminar in order to train students in ‘the digital world’. This, as well as the previously mentioned characteristics of the Plan de Estudios, brought an opportunity to bring forward a Specialized Seminar-Workshop, which we called “Digital Humanities and History”. Its syllabus includes epistemological considerations and, of course, the practice with, and the analysis of, resources and digital tools for the historical research.

It is worth stating that the PE is based on two elements of the discipline: Historiography and research. Not being provided with a teaching model of its own due to the academic autonomy the university has had ever since the first decades of the twentieth century, academic freedom constitutes one of its most important symbols. Even though the History PE establishes a graduate profile and some goals, these have been set by a community more interested in the development of historiography, “the questions, the methods and the conclusions of the historians of the past”  [Programa de la Licenciatura en Historia 1999, 5], than in the teaching of guidelines to train future historians. While the body of research and the considerations on the teaching of history are scarce, some investigations are actually beginning to emerge, though not always from this specific field, but mostly from pedagogy. The Secretaría de Educación Pública (SEP)[5] accepts university studies provided that some basic criteria are met, such as a certain amount of class hours, a number of credits, some mandatory and also supplementary requirements, equivalent to those of the other undergraduate courses in the country. The use of the internet within the academic context has brought about its inclusion in national educational policies. For this reason, even though our students have high quality training as humanists–which implies reading and critical thinking–it has become necessary for them to be able to apply this training to the digital world.

During our research on formal DH programs, we found the Short Guide to the Digital Humanities, by Burdick et al. [Burdick et. al. 2012]. There, they mention the practice and the institutional aspects of DH teaching. Following this approach, our proposal is also linked to the fact that both of us teachers belong to the RedHD(DHNetwork) and are members of a research team within this field in which we organize seminars, colloquia and research projects. In Mexico, DH has had significant development in the last few years [Svensson 2014], this being part of the context in which our course proposal and the teaching of digital humanities emerged. The Facultad de Filosofía y Letras at the UNAM includes in its academic offer this DH Seminar, a space for discussion for the RedHD, attended by academicians from various disciplines and different Mexican and foreign institutions. Since 2015, the Seminar has had a schedule of itinerant meetings, which opens up the dialogue with students and teachers from the universities in the city and its outskirts.

Originally, we were reluctant to include “Digital Humanities” in the title of the Seminar-Workshop. Despite the recent boom this field has had in the Mexican academy, it still remains quite unknown in undergraduate programs of study, which implies that the students to whom the seminar is directed are initially unaware of what they will be dealing with throughout the academic year. This is why we decided to profit from such bewilderment with the aim of arousing curiosity among students, and thus include this relatively new field of study in the university curriculum.

We also faced the never-ending debate between DH and Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). Among university staff and administration, the mere mention of “technology” in the description of a course takes us to the use of technologies from the point of view of pedagogy or of teaching in the different areas of knowledge and the different educational levels. Such reductionist use of these concepts makes the students assume that the Seminar-Workshop will be a space where they will learn how to use the tools, but not where they will discuss about them or develop reflective abilities and/or practices. Fyfe has pointed out that this fact causes two problems: the first one is the belief that the training is restricted to the command of a digital tool, and the second one is the idea that only already known mechanical tasks can be performed with it [Fyfe 2011]. The aforementioned limits the analysis of this kind of resources in the learning process.

For this reason, from the start, the proposal of our seminar implied the presence of two teachers from different humanistic disciplines–Philology and History–who would teach the course in a computer lab, the idea being this does not only involve the use of digital tools.

Following Fyfe, the Specialized Seminar-Workshop has several aims [Fyfe 2011]. At an institutional level, we believe that the biggest university in the country should have students who, besides knowing the methods and debates specific to the majors they follow, should be able to profit from the tools and resources available, among which are the digital ones, and to take part in the debates about their use.

For this purpose, some goals were set: when finishing the academic year, students should know about the main discussions on the use of DH tools and models applied to the historical research, as well as about different digital tools for humanistic research. Besides, the students would get guided training for the reflection upon the methodological problems related to knowledge-building in digital contexts, especially from the design of a digital research product, which would be studied in the second semester of the academic year.

From the beginning of the academic year, experience has shown us that students had unsystematic empirical knowledge of digital tools and platforms, which seldom is the result of a full knowledge or of the reflection upon the changes in the creation of knowledge in the area of the humanities. Every now and then, for example, it became necessary to clarify, for example, the difference between an operating system and software, or the differences between various publishing licenses. Students use, on an everyday basis, several social networks for recreational purposes; some follow blogs for leisure; however, few use the internet to carry out academic tasks. This is due, in part, to the prohibition of the use of information from the internet throughout their previous studies, which causes a series of misconceptions about this matter.

The first group of students who attended the Seminar-Workshop–who was used to a working dynamics of discussion in the classroom, but also to attending lectures–was initially puzzled, for our Seminar was at a computer laboratory, a space they only used when they needed to print something or to use the internet, or even to write their papers, but not to attend a formal class.

Once the dynamics of the class–readings, debates, and above all, enquiry–was explained, students became active users. First, we talked about what DH is and its origins, its different aspects and the main debates about it. Then, we read and reflected upon what the historical discipline has done in this field of research, with an emphasis on the generalized view on digital, digitizing and original production processes–what D’Iorio and Barbera [D'Iorio and Barbera 2011] call “conditions of possibility,” summarized as “quote, consensus and preservation”–which have preserved the humanistic academy throughout history. The change in humanistic work is not precisely in the principles of the discipline, but it suggests the correct inclusion of appropriate technologies and trends at each step in the process of knowledge-building. This debate remained constant in the Seminar-Workshop throughout both semesters.

We also dealt with some aspects regarding the evaluation of websites and digital tools. For this, we resorted to one of the forms put forward by members of the RedHD, though other options were also explored. At the beginning of the semester, the students started a practical evaluation activity which revealed their lack of awareness about the different elements that should be taken into consideration; however, this made them realize about the importance of this task in order to check whether digital publications and projects follow the same criteria as products edited and printed in paper. Later on, when we analyzed projects connected to the historical discipline, students always did some research and found other similar projects to compare. We realized that students are actually both curious and fully capable of analyzing digital projects; however, for this to be carried out they need a school environment which encourages them to explore and also offers them the necessary tools to differentiate and evaluate information. In fact, third year students of History already have this kind of training, applied only to publications in paper: they can identify types of works, degree of specialization, publishing houses, and academic journals. We believe it is essential to offer students, on the one hand, the basic tools for analysis; and, on the other, the confidence for them to develop their abilities in such a way that the result of their training should be the critical reading of any kind of text or project.

The next step in the development of the Seminar-Workshop was to encourage our students’ creativity, taking into account the basic publication norms, such as the use of the “physical” and the digital content, production licenses and the circulation of knowledge, collaborative and interdisciplinary work, etc. Their own use of the network and their consumption of information created conflict when faced against the way they would carry out their projects. Would they like to offer open or restricted access to a particular content? Would they rather carry out a collaborative or an individual project? Such questions were meant to raise awareness in students as users of digital resources and tools. It is important to generate a digital culture, a series of good practices that will allow them to profit from the means available to them in order to grow as historians and users.

The result of the first year, besides the impact on their perspective regarding their training, was a series of individual projects that showed a certain attachment to a “traditional” way of producing historical knowledge. Students decided to undertake the construction of blogs, and one student even suggested the development of a network for historians, initially in Mexico City.

In the first case, after some evaluation, the students chose the blog platform of their preference according to the type of contents they wished to publish; whereas, in the second case, the student had to carry out a detailed inquiry on the platforms that would allow her to materialize such project. Her solutions were conditioned by the logistical need of a server, which the institution was not able to provide. The decision of using the account one of the teachers had in a commercial server was made in order make her project possible. Despite the setbacks, we managed to carry out the students’ proposals, and two of them are currently starting to bring forward further digital projects, which they will provide in written form as their undergraduate theses and afterwards at their defense.

As a guide for the evaluation of the products of undergraduate dissertation examinations, we had the work by Koh, in which she describes her own course: “you and your students are all already digital humanists, because you all use technology in your daily lives”  [Koh 2014]. Given the fact that we needed to demonstrate to the academic community what students are capable of producing, we selected three outstanding projects:

After this first experience teaching the Seminar-Workshop, it became necessary to perform a self-evaluation on the contents as well as on the level of efficiency in the fulfillment of our goals. This made us adjust our syllabus and we thought that the next time we taught the Seminar-Workshop, it would be beneficial to create not different projects, but a single, collaborative project. As a result of the revision and the comparison of our syllabus with others focused on DH and digital culture, and based on the results published by Rockwell and Sinclair, we decided it was necessary to broaden the scope, which now included the students’ acquisition of competences oriented to the management and development of digital projects [Rockwell and Sinclair 2012].

Having said that, our students managed to fulfill the goals set at the beginning, they presented products and brought forward new projects; however, the History student population amounts to over a thousand. The Seminar’s success in the general context could be seen as a grain of sand in the desert, though not less significant for this reason: we believe that the training of students in the creation of digital objects remains the best way making DH known, and their application in undergraduate courses, a necessity.

However, we need to mention that the infrastructure in our Facultad does not always allow the availability of proper spaces for a seminar like this one. Not so long ago, only the Geography Department–and, occasionally, the Pedagogy Department–made use of the computer laboratories for teaching. Although there are other computer rooms, these are set aside for the use of the whole community of teachers and students, which renders them unable to be used exclusively during teaching hours. At the moment, the Facultad has three computer laboratories specifically used for teaching: at the main building, there are the “Giordano Bruno” room and room 313, provided with sixteen and twenty-five computer equipments respectively; at the annexed building, there is a bigger laboratory, with a total of thirty computers. These spaces are meant to meet the needs of a population that, according to official data, consists of 8129students of the thirteen different undergraduate courses offered at the Facultad. It becomes too clear that such demand cannot be satisfied only with the three laboratories available now. What is more, even though there exists a wireless network system (RIU, its acronym in Spanish), it does not have the capacity required to provide service to such a vast community. Academic activities, which require the use of a stable network, exceed the current conditions at our Facultad. The everyday-use classrooms do not have a wireless network; neither do they have nodes for ethernet. This limits the development, not only of seminars such as ours, but also of other subjects which need the use of the internet and of audiovisual equipment. This shortage has yet to be solved due to the relation between the resources and the size of the academic community; this is why there is not a detailed assessment of this situation. The effort that has been put into having some computer rooms and laboratories is important, but it is clear that the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras shows some backwardness in comparison to other Facultades, be them of Social Sciences, or Engineering, or similar disciplines. Perhaps the Romantic idea of a philosopher, historian or philologist sitting alone holding a printed book is one of the reasons why the Facultad’s community does not believe a twenty-first century humanist requires new spaces such as computer laboratories or services such as an efficient network in order to carry out his/her activities.

In 2014, we requested the UNAM the funding of a project the purpose of which would be to make a guide on digital tools and resources for humanists. The project’s methodology implied the development of research that would improve student-centered teaching. This way, besides the impact on the curricular area, we set out to launch the creation of a digital culture, which would imply an increase in responsible users and content creators. Four teachers took part in this project, together with four students, three of whom did the Seminar-Workshop and were granted a scholarship to finish their courses, and another one who had an internship as a requisite to finish his studies.[7]

The website developed is called eLaboraHD (a word game between “elaborate” and laboratory [e-lab/ora] HD stands for Digital Humanities acronym in Spanish), and is addressed to the whole community at the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras; that is, to humanists at the UNAM, even though it emphasizes guidance to historians. The management of this product began with the request for an institutional server that would allow us to have an official extension connected to the Facultad. The creation process took several months, due to the fact that we have no Department devoted to the development of digital projects. The setting up of a platform within the institutional space demanded the consultation and collaboration with several engineers and computer technicians who granted us part of their time from daily work (the correlation between any research and this Department is focused mainly on connectivity matters for video conferences and lab maintenance) in order to help us set up a basic website management system whose use would be both flexible and simple (Wordpress). This way, we ensured content update and basic maintenance work on the website, which would also allow us to keep an institutional structure and meet the necessary evaluation standards. Despite the fact that a resource such as this one should be relatively simple, the minimum requirements of the system implied joint work with the Facultad’s IT Department, for the physical access to the server is restricted to the company of one of the people responsible there.

Because these types of activities are quite rare in our line of work, we experienced some technical setbacks that delayed the development of the site. Nevertheless, since last March, several weekly meetings were held in a computer laboratory so as to define the name of the site, its structure and the type of contents that would be published there. Discussion and consensus defined our decision-making. At the same time that technological difficulties were being solved, contents were being planned as well. Once the site had been set, and a URL had been assigned, we were able to devote ourselves to the task of building static web pages and entries at the blog on the evaluation of sites and projects, digital resources and tools to carry out works shared by the thirteen disciplines taught at our Facultad.

The site took its definitive shape in June, and even though today we still are at the content creation phase, there are a few pending chores, such as the site’s promotion from the main Institution’s site, for we are sharing resources and spaces with 130 research projects, and from the Facultad’s site, because it is the Facultad’s responsibility to guarantee the circulation of all its research projects–and for this, each must “wait for one’s turn.” We certainly have not put aside circulation through social networks, but this is not replicated by the accounts at the institution itself, which limits the knowledge such a large university population as ours may have about our contents. Again, our digital “grain of sand” seems to disappear in the desert of institutional infrastructure.

All in all, we believe that the most important thing is to create interest in the community regarding the use of digital tools and resources in every possible way: at conferences within the context of research colloquia, through our classes, at teachers’ meetings, etc. We are fully aware that it will not be easy to change the academic culture at a School that, traditionally, is used to reading on paper; however, we do believe that the ability to establish dialogues, also traditional and inherent to the Humanities, will at least allow us to cause curiosity in its population.

The funding we have received forces us to review the site in pairs, and even though we can count on two teachers who are willing to perform an assessment, it has become necessary to elaborate an evaluation guide, for historians are not used to analyzing this kind of products. For the time being, the site is being used by the teachers who belong to the project, within the classes we teach, and we have invited teachers from other institutions and levels to add the contents of the site as an additional support for their teaching activities.

The constant debate on the students’ training becomes evident in the initiative of the Head of the Colegio de Historia, who organized a series of meetings with the teachers in order to know the problems they had detected on this matter. In general terms, the teachers mentioned basic problems with reading and writing, but they also emphasized the lack of knowledge on the digital resources the university makes available to its community.

The Head office turned to us once again to ask us for some sort of course or workshop addressed to those students who would begin their studies in August. This course would not be compulsory, but the importance of attending it was stressed to them. So, we created a four-hour syllabus and divided the 270 new students into groups. Four teachers, including ourselves, took on the task of designing the syllabus and teaching it. Besides the academic life at the Facultad, we dealt with the digital resources and catalogues that the 134 libraries at the university offer their community. We explained that, as students, they have the right to get an account at the BidiUNAM (the library’s site) in order to access electronic resources, which consist of databases and allow them access to texts and indexes of articles and specialized journals at an international level.

The course included the implementation of a survey to the Class of 2016 about different aspects. We would like to highlight here part of the results on the knowledge about, and the use of, digital devices and the internet in their academic training. We discovered that 234 of the students beginning their undergraduate course have laptops, 137 have tablets and 175 have smartphones, and that 94% of them make use of these devices to carry out academic work. Although they did not state which particular tasks they did, from individual conversations with them we were able to infer that the use of these devices tended to be for basic search of information. Despite previous restrictions over the use of the internet in their studies, 89% of the first-year students are in favor of the use of the internet to perform their research throughout their undergraduate course, although they are not aware of the names of resources and applications; i.e., they are familiar with the use of text editors, blog management software or social networks platforms, but they do not know the differences between the various digital objects.

These surveys have allowed us to conclude our first diagnosis and to identify several aspects that should be incorporated to the Plan de Estudios of the undergraduate History Course. First, we believe that the use of the internet and of structured data should be included, for they allow both the macro- and microanalysis of our objects of study. We also maintain that, within the graduate profile at the PE, we should include students’ abilities to broaden the field with the search of theoretical, monographic and documentary information in order to carry out research work that would allow them to solve problems.

Even though interdisciplinary work is still pending, it could be made real by means of the joint elaboration of digital projects. The relationship among the different Facultades at the UNAM, and even among the different undergraduate courses within our own Facultad, could offer humanists the ability to develop collaborative and interdisciplinary work, because faculty members must actively participate in the digital training of their students. Certainly, for this, it will also be necessary to spread the use of updating software for those teachers who are currently working there. It would be desirable for teaching staff to include in their syllabuses some activities involving the use of digital resources or tools in order to develop academic products within the theme and the objectives of each subject.

To implement the inclusion of these aspects, it seems necessary to sensitize both teachers [Trinkle 2004] and students regarding the importance not only of digital technologies, but also of the reflection about the implications that their use has in each of the disciplines, as well as of the advantages of using them properly. It will definitely be necessary to have the infrastructure required so as to achieve these goals, which is already part of the policies and working plans of the administration.

While the debate develops and the appropriate decisions on the changes in the PE are made, we have brought forward two workshops addressed to teachers, the academic technical staff and teaching assistants within the Programa de Actualización y Superación Docente (PASD, its acronym in Spanish)[8] from the Dirección General de Asuntos del Personal Académico (DGAPA, its acronym in Spanish)[9] at the UNAM: an introductory one and another one for the development of digital projects. This entails a new challenge: we believe that it is now imperative to broaden the impact of our proposal of creating this digital academic culture which will have an effect not only on the way knowledge is produced within our university to this day, but also on the criteria for the evaluation of the teaching-learning process as well as of teachers’ productivity. And, even though this is an aspect that requires an open debate among academicians, it goes beyond the scope of this article. The active involvement of teachers, now and in the near future, in the development of digital products and projects as part of their teaching work will depend on this debate.

The case of study here presented and the efforts made within the UNAM classrooms owe much to the existence of the RedHD, which was created in Mexico, though together with members from different parts of the world. Several collaborators in this network have taught workshops to various academic groups, both at a national and at an international level. One way or the other, these workshops have begun to make an impact in the development of projects –some of which were already being carried out, though they were still not identified as DH work. The spreading of DH, as well as of the responsible use of the internet and of digital tools have been some of the main goals. In fact, the authors of this article, together with Ernesto Priani Saisó, have collaborated with institutional projects, such as Comunidades Digitales para el Aprendizaje en Educación Superior (CODAES, its acronym in Spanish), which was coordinated by the University of Veracruz. As mentioned above, the need of training teachers as well has been acknowledged, but some workshops have been offered in other institutions outside the UNAM. For instance, in South America, within the context of the HASTAC 2014 Congress (Lima, Peru), the workshop “On Arriving at the Digital: Describing Critical Paths into the Digital Humanities” was organized by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and taught with guests from Mexico, Peru and Argentina. What is more, some workshops have been carried out in the Primeras Jornadas Nacionales de Humanidades Digitales (Buenos Aires, Argentina 2014) [Peña 2015]. In Central America, some workshops have been organized at the University of San Carlos de Guatemala and at the National Autonomous University of Honduras, as well as at the Latin American Social Sciences Institute of Honduras [Domínguez 2016]. Therefore, the case study at the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras is part of an expansion process of DH–for the time being, within the Mexican and Latin American academic institutions. Isabel Galina has discussed this issue in several texts since 2013 [Galina 2013] [Galina 2015] [Galina 2017].