Abstract

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is quickly technologizing its society. To prepare students for this technological future, Saudi institutions of higher education must develop humanities courses capable of exploring complex human-technology relations. This article begins to respond to this need by developing a project-based digital humanities pedagogy that synthesizes Don Ihde’s post–phenomenology of human- technology relations with Michael Polanyi’s model of tacit knowing. The pedagogy emphasizes the interiorizing of machine and symbolic (literary and rhetorical) technology through apprenticeship projects in the digital humanities classroom. We argue that a synthesis of Ihde’s philosophy of technology and Polanyi’s tacit knowing provides the conceptually rich framework needed to discuss and critically reflect on curricula, syllabi, and classroom projects that prepare students for their future technology lifeworlds. The conceptual framework developed serves as a basis for developing future digital humanities courses in higher education in Saudi Arabia. The researchers develop the conceptual framework by creating a taxonomy of Ihde’s key post-phenomenological concepts, synthesizing his concepts with Polanyi’s tacit knowing, and using the synthesized taxonomy to analyze and describe the human-technology relations used to complete individual projects of digital expression.