Christina Boyles article talks about how digital humanities should be taught to students. She starts off with her trip to Puerto Rico, where she was gathering the peoples experience with Hurricane María. She could only obtain information from a handful of groups so she made sure her choices was very diverse. But, despite this she knew that no matter how many interviews she conducted, she could not capture the full traumatic experience of the Hurricane. On top of that she also knew that the narratives of her research highlighted could shape, for better or worse, public perceptions of the hurricane’s aftereffects. It could work as a tool for political liberation, but also as a tool for social oppression. She states that “To teach our students about the structures underpinning our information systems, we need to ensure they possess information literacy skills to assess, critique, and respond to societal narratives and injustices. One of the best ways to explore the consequences of meaning-making is to teach our students about the processes that go into developing our archives, databases, and information resources.”

She goes on to say that seeing how digital archives is prevalence in producing and communicating, it is crucial to train the students to understand the ways in organizations often use the processes of selection, preservation, and publication to reinforce Euro-capitalist views of the world. Collection, curation, and publication highlights the types of choices that archivists and information systems make every day, and students should practice these skills. In addition, through their own processes of collection development, students have the opportunity to critique and intervene in these systems. These abilities are especially important for members of marginalized communities, who are frequently the subject of disinformation and bigotry.

Next Miss Boyles says, that rather than creating their own archives, students selected materials centered on the social movements we were covering in class, such as: #BlackLivesMatter, #SayHerName, and #ProtectPlannedParenthood. This provided opportunity for students to raise important issues about information maintenance and management, such as “What should be preserved?”, “How should this information be presented to the public?”, and “Who has control over this information?”. At the same time, curation pushed students to become subject experts by requiring them to analyze and criticize a range of literature on their topic.

Miss Boyles designed courses to encourage students to engage in the process of making and breaking. Course readings were paired between the work of feminist activists and the works of critical digital humanities scholars. Students were then challenged to make linkages between these texts and an actual social movement of their choosing, with groups emerging around subjects such as reproductive rights, civil rights, and modern feminist politics. Using these ideas as a basis, these groups created four digital projects over the course of the semester, each with the objective of both building new models of knowledge and destroying oppressive narratives: 1 Case, 2 Text Analysis Essay, 3 Timeline Project, and 4 Final Project. Some of the projects the students presented were better than others, but after gathering feedback form the students Miss Boyles found that the most successful projects involved students in making, breaking, or even both.