Abstract
This chapter analyzes the nature and implications of studying and practicing digital humanities (DH) within a modern languages (ML) context based on my own pedagogical experience in teaching Spanish-language courses in a university in the United States. First, I explore the challenges of introducing digital literacies to a student body population that has traditionally been exposed mainly to language, culture, and literature courses. An audience that frequently has no previous experience with DH and that can potentially feel doubly challenged by the fact of studying in a foreign language. In this sense, concepts and contents need to be situated and critically appraised in the target language and culture, along the lines of what has been called Critical DHML. Second, I approach the relative lack of pedagogical materials and computational resources available in Spanish, and I discuss the value of recent resources, which now help to partially overcome this situation. Third, I showcase several ways, born out of my pedagogical experience, to introduce digital methods in the classroom while exploring the cultural and literary past, digging into the present, and appraising the extent of digital data. Examples include experiments in text encoding, mapping, and text mining. Finally, I also insist on questions of knowledge creation and the implications of technological choices, especially in the context of data-driven projects. Values such as open-access, open-source, and the ethical practices of minimal computing need to be situated in social and cultural backgrounds to better understand the digital object.