Jacob Heil | February 14, 2026

For the last few years, we’ve partnered with Dr. Jon Heggestad to teach with and about virtual reality (VR) in his Intro to Digital Studies (DIG 101) classes. The classes have been great fun, not least because of how collaborative they are; the lessons haven’t really looked exactly the same any two semesters as we’ve flexed together so that we might accommodate changes with the technologies, our spaces, and the questions of the day. Students typically read something – e.g. Lisa Nakamura’s piece on the limits of VR to induce empathy – and then we give them their own opportunities to engage critically with this embodied technology. What does it feel like to be “in” a virtual reality? How does narrative change? Of course, it’s just fun to debrief with students after they’ve tried – maybe unsuccessfully – to force their bodies to walk out onto a virtual plank suspended 50 stories above virtual city pavement, but it also exemplifies the team’s core mission to enable our learners’ critical engagement with technology.

I’m writing about VR here not because I’m an expert with this technology in particular, or even with extended reality (XR) more generally. Rather, I’m writing because I’m not.

Even though the only Shakespeare I read these days is to my kids, I was at one time a trained scholar of early modern English drama, a book historian, and only a reluctant digital humanist. (If asked – or in introductory blog posts, apparently – I tell folks that my dissertation was on “Shakespeare and friends,” giving them enough information to know whether they want to avoid the details.) I backed my way into thinking and teaching with and about (mostly digital) technologies by way of DH post-docs and a keen sense of how projects fit together, and now I’ve been doing that kind of work for well over a decade. Along the way I have learned a little bit about a lot of things; I’m an inch deep and a mile wide, one might say. Over the years, I have mostly leveraged that breadth to help folks think about how digital technologies might be able to help them tell their scholarly stories.

I have the luxury of being expertly inexpert because I lead a team of folks who know a lot more than I do about their particular areas of expertise. And soon we’ll all be moving into a newly imagined Scholars Studio in the George Lawrence Abernethy Library here at Davidson College. My great hope for that space is that folks who have stories to tell (arguments to make, things to say) will come to the Scholars Studio, not necessarily because they want to exercise a certain domain expertise that they bring with them, but because they want to explore with us what’s possible. For our parts, we’ll continue to cultivate our own areas of expertise – from ideation, research, and citation all the way through creation and publication – while keeping one eye on the evolving ways our learners can critically engage with information and technology.

Of course, we’re not waiting for the Abernethy Library to open (projected fall 2027): activating our learners’ critical understanding of their media-rich information ecosystem is what we’ve always done and will continue to do in classes like Dr. Heggestad’s “Introduction to Digital Studies.” Learners might also see us in their Writing 101 or Humes sections, in their disciplinary methods classes, and even consulting for independent studies. And if I’m the librarian they’re encountering, I’m the one who knows just enough to be dangerous, and I’m always looking forward to learning more from you.