Enabling Interdisciplinary Instruction in Computer Science and Humanities - An Innovative Teaching and Learning Model Customized for Small Liberal Arts Colleges

Infiltration of data-driven computational methods of humanities research has generated mutual interests between the two communities of computer science and humanities. Larger institutions have adopted drastic structural reforms to meet the challenges to bridge the two fields. Successful examples include the integrated major programs launched at Stanford University and the collaborative workshop at Carnegie Mellon University. These types of exploratory experiments require (1) intensive resources as well as (2) strong support of faculty and administration. At a small college, both can be luxuries. We present an innovative model to carry out effective synchronized courses of computational humanities and digital humanities that pulls together efforts between two small programs and needs little additional support. This paper reviews the proposal, design, and delivery of a pair of interdisciplinary graduate courses in the small college setting. We discuss the details of our implementation and provided our observations and recommendations.