This repository serves as a public collection of carefully crafted instructions and prompts for AI assistants, designed to support teaching and research in the digital humanities. It is maintained by a digital humanities librarian and educator, Kate Thornhill, at the University of Oregon Libraries, to facilitate efficient, context-aware, and ethically-grounded collaboration with large language models.
These instructions are a collaborative effort between human expertise and AI assistance. I leverage AI to help draft, structure, and refine the language of these prompts. My role is to provide the core professional expertise, pedagogical framework, and nuanced understanding of student needs. The AI's role is to help organize these complex ideas into a clear, comprehensive, and well-structured document that is effective for repeated use.
The instructions within this repository are built on a framework that integrates multiple professional roles. These are not separate functions but an intertwined set of perspectives that inform every decision:
- Digital Collections Specialist & Collections Expert: I understand the full lifecycle of a digital collection, from policies and standards to preservation and access. My guidance ensures that student projects not only get published but are also designed with sustainability and professional rigor in mind. Educator, Digital Pedagogy Practitioner & Instructional Technology Specialist: As an experienced educator, I design curriculum and assessments that account for platform limitations and the unique ways humanities students approach technical concepts. I focus on scaffolding complex tasks and building in moments for critical reflection.
- Project Manager & Team Facilitation Expert: I am an expert in managing complex, multi-phase projects and navigating team dynamics in academic settings. The instructions are designed to anticipate common social and technical bottlenecks, and to build in accountability and peer assessment.
- Critical Digital Humanities Practitioner & Information Literacy Instructor: I am committed to teaching students to think critically about the tools and data they use. My prompts help the AI to guide students in recognizing how technical choices embed cultural biases and how to ethically collect and describe digital materials.
- Open Education Specialist: My approach prioritizes sustainable, low-barrier technical solutions that are accessible to all students. I aim to use and create open educational resources that serve as models for future work.
The instructions here are designed to be copied and pasted directly into an AI chat interface to provide a comprehensive, reusable "persona" and set of guidelines for your assistant. This allows the AI to act as a highly specialized collaborator, providing tailored advice that goes beyond basic summaries or content generation. There are also prompts specifically designed to solve common problems faced by DH practitioners.
- Instructions for Integrated Framework for LIB350m/DSCI350m AI-Supported Digital Humanities Pedagogy: A comprehensive, multi-faceted instruction set for an AI assistant, built for a digital humanities librarian teaching an undergraduate course. The instructions define the librarian's professional expertise, course constraints, pedagogical philosophy, and a wide array of anticipated challenges. The core of the instructions is a tailored response model that integrates technical, pedagogical, and critical perspectives, while explicitly acknowledging the course's compressed timeline and the instructor's limited support capacity. It establishes clear distinctions for communication, distinguishing between content for the instructor (in-depth, complex analysis) and content for students (simplified, scaffolded). The document also anticipates and plans for common technical, social, and assessment-related "pain points" to ensure all AI-generated guidance is practical, sustainable, and directly aligned with the course's learning outcomes.
- Deep Background: Contextualization, Fact-Checking and Claim Analysis Instructions Deep Background is a lengthy instruction prompt that outperforms unmodified LLMs in multiple dimensions using Claude Pro. It was created by Mike Caulfield. You paste it to project instructions to make the LLM act differently. With the prompt in place, your LLM will come to better conclusions, hallucinate (much) less, and source conflicting perspectives more systematically. It also models an approach that is less chatbot, and more research assistant in a way that is appropriate for student researchers, who can use it to aid research while coming to their own conclusions. The most recent version of the prompt can be found on Caulfield's Deep Background website.
This repository is a work in progress and a learning tool. I welcome contributions from other digital humanities professionals and educators.
Unless otherwise noted, all content in this repository is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).