ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the deployment of new digital pedagogical methods in two courses focused on segregation and violence in apartheid South Africa. The first section details four assignments designed for an undergraduate survey course on the history of the spatial dynamics of racial segregation during colonization, segregation, and the implementation of apartheid. The second section outlines a graduate course that provides students with basic literacy in Python using datasets drawn from South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The conceptual frame that unites assignments in both courses is notion of “play” within digital topoi, meaning creating virtual, semantic, or coding locations or spaces where students can engage in structured experimentation. This concept animates both undergraduate assignments which require no programming literacy and graduate assignments that encourage students to use their newfound programming literacy to create their own datasets from which they can generate novel research questions. Our intent is to contribute to existing pedagogical approaches that enmesh data literacy with close reading and synthesis of conventional sources.
