Editors’ Choice: Teaching Literature Through Technology: Sherlock Holmes and Digital Humanities /

How do we incorporate technology into the contemporary classroom? How do we balance the needs of teaching literature with teaching students to use that technology? This article takes up “Digital Tools for the 21st Century: Sherlock Holmes’s London,” an introductory digital humanities class, as a case study to address these questions. The course uses the Holmes stories as a corpus on which to practice basic digital humanities methodologies and tools, including visualizations, digital archives and editions, mapping (GIS), and distant reading, in order to better understand the texts themselves. This approach lets students find new patterns in well-known texts, explore the function of space in literature, and historicize their own technological moment.

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