Innovation and Collaboration Mackenzie Brooks, associate professor and digital humanities librarian, has made an impact on campus through her innovative and collaborative approach to teaching and scholarship.

By Kelsey Goodwin
February 27, 2025

“One of the great things about Mackenzie is that she understands that teaching isn’t just about conveying information. It’s about giving students the intellectual tools to do the work themselves.”

~ George Bent, Sidney Gause Childress Professor of the Arts 

For students and faculty alike, walking into Mackenzie Brooks’ office in Leyburn Library is like stepping into a laboratory of possibility. A meeting space to the right of Brooks’ desk is surrounded by multiple whiteboards teeming with ideas from recent meetings and capstone project brainstorms. Colorful framed prints from classes and past collaborations with colleagues surround tabletop letterpresses on the left side of the room, with artfully carved linocut blocks waiting to be inked fanned out across an adjacent counter. A bulletin board behind Brooks’ desk is a collage of memorabilia from student projects and campus events.

Abbie Marie McGuinness ’27, an art history major with minors in education and digital culture and information from Virginia Beach, Virginia, said there is no place on campus where she feels as comfortable as Brooks’ office. The artwork, floor-to-ceiling windows with a view of Woods Creek and multiple workspaces are “incredibly conducive to creativity, comfort and collaboration,” McGuinness said.

Brooks, associate professor and digital humanities librarian, not only serves as the program head of the digital culture and information (DCI) minor but as the educator, guide, collaborator and cheerleader for a dizzying array of projects and people on W&L’s campus.

Brooks joined W&L as an assistant professor and metadata librarian in 2013, managing electronic collections and the university’s library catalog. Born in Salem, Virginia, Brooks said she welcomed the move to a smaller community from Chicago, where she had been living and working.

“I’ve now fully become a country mouse,” Brooks said, adding that walking through Boxerwood Nature Center and Woodland Garden is a favorite aspect of life in Lexington.

Brooks earned a B.A. in English literature and American studies from Dominican University in 2010 and completed a Master of Library and Information Science at Dominican the following year. Shortly after arriving on campus, she transitioned into the role of assistant professor and digital humanities librarian, leading digital scholarship initiatives and teaching courses on digital culture. Brooks was promoted to associate professor in 2019, expanding her involvement in curriculum development, faculty collaborations and research projects, and she led the Digital Information Management and Education team at Leyburn Library from 2021-2024. In 2022, she was appointed program head of the DCI minor, overseeing

Brooks’ teaching philosophy is centered on fostering digital and information literacy through student-centered learning and collaborative knowledge-building. As a digital humanities librarian, she works closely with students and faculty, guiding them in research, digital scholarship and technology use. Brooks also recently served as chair of the steering committee for the Institute for Liberal Arts Digital Scholarship (ILiADS), a weeklong summer institute where participants from institutions from around the world develop digital projects in teams of faculty, students, librarians and technologists.

Brooks said her educational approach values students feeling comfortable taking risks, learning from failure and seeing themselves as scholars. She said active learning approaches inspire her, and she frequently integrates collaborative research activities and hands-on digital skills training into her classes, encouraging students to work together through technological challenges.

“That’s why I’ve always referred to my office as a workspace,” Brooks said. “Whether I’m teaching small classes in my office or using one of the other dynamic classrooms on campus, I try to be really intentional about how we use and work in the space.”

Brooks was instrumental in starting the DCI minor at Washington and Lee, a program that explores the impact of the digital age on knowledge and society. Approved as a minor in 2018 and housed within the University Library, the program integrates technological skills with critical analysis, preparing students for diverse careers and responsible digital citizenship. The program sprang from the university’s digital humanities initiative in 2012 and was funded by a Mellon Foundation grant in 2015. The program developed in parallel to W&L’s data science minor, a field of study which focuses on the analysis of large data sets to identify patterns and solve problems. Coursework in DCI is centered around collaborative, interdisciplinary digital projects that familiarize students with new technologies while asking them to think critically about how technological innovations shape society. The program’s introductory course, DCI 101, covers basic web development methods such as HTML/CSS and WordPress along with data structures and visualization tools. McGuinness explored AI-generated art for her DCI 101 project, gathering definitions of art throughout time and using textual analysis software to identify themes and patterns. Another student was interested in exploring environmental activism and climate events through Google search trends data. Others in the course examined the impact of AI on their chosen career field, combing the web to form a dataset of job descriptions.

“Despite students being attached to their phones, they don’t necessarily have the deep technological fluency to use digital research methods in both the humanities and other disciplines,” Brooks explained. “DCI courses emphasize technical skills to enable new research questions to be answered and information to be presented in new and widely accessible ways. Critically, students also learn how to analyze the platforms and tools themselves to make informed choices about why they’re using a particular technology for the task at hand.”

Veronika Kolosova ’25, a double major in business administration and strategic communication with a minor in digital culture and information from Moscow, said having Brooks as her adviser has instilled in her a sense that anything is possible as she embarks on her career.

“With the experience and resources that the DCI minor has equipped me with, I feel prepared for whatever circumstances await me,” Kolosova said, “because in this program, you learn how to adapt and to think in new ways, which I believe is an invaluable skill in this ever-changing world. Professor Brooks does such an amazing job of challenging you while supporting you. She is truly the backbone of so many innovative things happening at W&L.”

Abdurrafey Khan ’17, a digital systems and support specialist within the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said Brooks played a pivotal role in shaping his academic and professional journey, beginning with a 300-level French class lab where she introduced him to digital humanities. Under her guidance, Khan digitized and analyzed medieval French manuscripts, creating websites that showcased their details, from transcribed music to marginal illustrations.

“Her engaging, laidback teaching style made learning feel like a collaborative club rather than a formal class,” Khan said.

Inspired by this experience, Khan pursued summer research in digital humanities and became a digital humanities fellow , deepening his expertise as Brooks provided mentorship and support along the way. Beyond academics, Khan recalls Brooks as a compassionate mentor who has continued to impact his life.

“Our connection has continued into my professional career. Most recently, I sought her advice on developing a digital humanities program and collaborated with her at the ILiADS institute where she was the conference chair,” Khan said, adding that Brooks’ stewardship of the DCI minor provides an invaluable benefit to students seeking to step into the professional world empowered in their digital literacy.

“DCI might be the most important course of instruction right now,” said Khan. “In this age of AI, misinformation and the increasingly online aspects of our culture, I think it’s crucial that everyone gets a basic understanding of digital culture and learns how to use it to advance their knowledge and get their work out to more people and also how to recognize the less helpful and harmful aspects of the digital world.”

Brooks is also involved with the ongoing work on campus with On These Grounds, a nationwide project to design and test a data model to describe events in the lives of enslaved people gathered from historical documents; W&L became a partner institution in the project in 2022. Olivia Schweiter ’28 has spent her academic year researching the project, transcribing and organizing historical documents such as estate appraisals and contracts to piece together the lives and experiences of enslaved people. Schweiter, who met Brooks as an Advanced Immersion and Mentoring (AIM) researcher last summer, said her supportive dynamic with Brooks as a mentor has been instrumental in her academic development and personal growth.

“The digital humanities is an amazing new way to look at things – it gives us a broader picture and allows us to visualize knowledge in a new way,” Schweiter said. “My work with Professor Brooks has fostered my passion for history and led me to my decision to major in the field.”

Brooks’ impact on campus extends beyond the classroom, as she also trains faculty in digital humanities methods, helping them integrate new technologies into their research, and colleagues describe Brooks as an equally inspiring collaborator in their learning journeys. Holly Pickett, professor of English, said that having Brooks as her mentor during her Harte Center Fellowship — a program that encourages faculty to explore a learning opportunity outside their expertise and then create and share a reflective narrative about how the experience relates to their teaching — has been a joy. Pickett is learning how to use the printing presses in Brooks’ office and create linocut, a form of relief printing. Pickett said Brooks, who has attended the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School to learn more about printmaking, is a patient instructor who is always willing to meet her where she is in the learning process, even when struggling with new techniques.

“She has a humorous, light touch that takes the pressure off, which is so important, particularly in creative work,” Pickett said, adding that she also meets regularly with Brooks and Harte Center director J.T. Torres to discuss how her project ties into scholarship on teaching and learning.

Brooks has been an integral partner in the Florence As It Was (FLAW) project, which the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) recently selected to receive a Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant. FLAW is a digital reconstruction of Florence, Italy, as it appeared at the end of the 15th century. Brooks has been working with George Bent, Sidney Gause Childress Professor of the Arts, and Dave Pfaff, senior academic technologist and director of the IQ Center, on the project since 2016. Bent said the project would not be where it is today without Brooks.

“Mackenzie encouraged me to create the database we now have of over 2,000 images from the city of Florence,” Bent said, “which has turned out to be the most significant piece of the entire project.”

Katherine Dau ’19 worked as a student researcher on FLAW from 2017-2019 and spent the summer of 2018 in Florence working on creating models of the Bargello and the Baptistry as well as the artwork in the Uffizi Gallery. She said Brooks was the reason she and the other student researchers were able to contribute meaningfully to the digital components of the project.

“She was so supportive of us,” said Dau, who now serves as W&L’s director of annual giving. “I really came into the project with zero computer science or technical background, but she took the approach of letting us try, letting us fail and then being there to help us solve the problems we created.” Without the skills and confidence she built during her work with Brooks, Dau said she might never have proposed her subsequent Fulbright project of creating a digital map of a cathedral in Vienna.

“One of the great things about Mackenzie,” Bent said, “is that she understands that teaching isn’t just about conveying information. It’s about giving students the intellectual tools to do the work themselves.”

For McGuinness, that approach has shaped her dreams in profound ways.

“Professor Brooks showed me all the different directions I could go with my interests and that there wasn’t just one ‘right’ path,” McGuinness said. “I realized that the GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) life is for me. I am applying to several archival and research projects this summer, and I’m not sure I would have pursued those areas without Professor Brooks’ mentorship and the wisdom she has shared. I look at my future differently now, largely because of her.”

Brooks has amassed an impressive list of passion projects outside the classroom. In addition to an interest in sewing and textile arts, she has volunteered with the Rockbridge Area Master Gardeners Association for five years. And she has recently added photography to her list of pursuits. Her foray into photography grew from her travels around Rockbridge County, conducting historical research with colleagues for various projects. Brooks said she researched information about developing film on YouTube, purchased a vintage camera and taught herself how to develop film at home, even if it meant losing a few rolls.

“I tell students all the time that you just have to have the confidence to try,” Brooks said.

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