Dr. Katherine Bowers and Dr. Kate Holland (University of Toronto) co-authored an article on “A Dostoevsky Laboratory: Creating a TEI Training Workshop for Undergraduate Students Using Minimal Computing” in the December 2025 issue of the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy. The article is part of a special issue on “Minimalist Digital Humanities Pedagogy.”
The article discusses a Text Encoding Consortium (TEI) training workshop created by the “Digital Dostoevsky” project team as an example of minimalist digital humanities (DH) pedagogy. In designing the workshop, the team turned to the minimalist DH computing heuristic proposed by Roopika Risam and Alex Gil: “What do we need? What do we have? What must we prioritize? And what are we willing to give up?”
This heuristic helped the team prioritize not just material and practical considerations, but also ethical and humanistic decision-making. A focus on method (the TEI), training, and communication in the workshop’s design over direct oversight resulted in student autonomy and long-term engagement in the “Digital Dostoevsky” project. The workshop’s communication structure relied on proprietary software including Google Docs, Slack, and Zoom, despite their known privacy issues, and created a true sense of community, a collective feeling of scholarly impetus, among the students and project team members.
These digital spaces became, in fact, even more creative than the traditional literary classroom: a collective laboratory where students and professors discussed and debated the nuances of Dostoevsky’s stylistic quirks and tics in the original Russian texts, unmediated by translation. The TEI training workshop had transformative, long-term effects on the individual students as well as the “Digital Dostoevsky” project and team. As an example of minimalist digital humanities pedagogy, this case study demonstrates the way minimal computing methods can empower students in their learning and professional development, as well as strengthen a digital humanities project, creating spaces for inclusivity and experimentation that have far-reaching impact.
