Course Description
First coined by (at the time) iSchool Dean John Unsworth for the 2004 book, A Companion to Digital Humanities, “Digital Humanities” (DH) is a field that resists a singular definition. Depending on who you ask or which institution you survey, DH can encompass everything from critical theorizing of new media and technologies, to new digital interfaces for humanities scholarship and pedagogy, to computational studies of digitized cultural materials. This course introduces students to the breadth of the field and the ongoing debates over its definition, but focuses on helping students develop critical competencies for working with humanities materials—broadly conceived—using computational tools.
To begin addressing these big topics, IS578DH will take “humanities data” as its central organizing concept. What does it mean to work with digitized cultural materials and what is humanities data exactly? How do we find, curate, and collect this data? What are the benefits and limitations of working digitally in the humanities? To help answer these questions, this course combines weekly seminar discussions and hands-on workshops to help students gain experience with DH tools and data, but also develop a critical perspective on these emerging practices.
Each week students will be introduced to new topics and methods in DH, and therefore, this course assumes no previous experience with digital humanities, or working with data and digital tools. Given that this course is in an iSchool, it will also be oriented towards how digital humanities intersects with Library and Information Sciences. In particular, students will have the opportunity to develop their own DH workshop, as a basis for either a future public DH workshop, or eventually DH projects or publications. Overall, the goal of this course is to introduce students to some of the latest developments in DH and help them navigate this shifting terrain of how we work in digital humanities.
Overall Learning Objectives
Upon successful completion of the course, students will:
- Gain an overview of the breadth of digital humanities research; develop a critical perspective to working with humanities data; and an introduction to some of the more popular methods and tools in digital humanities
- Craft a digital humanities workshop that could, if students choose, serve as the foundation for publishable future DH projects
- Ultimately, the course aims to marry theoretical and practical approaches in a way that will equip students to comfortably experiment with new DH technologies and theories in the future.
Acknowledgements
In teaching DH over the years I have learned from many colleagues, but I particularly thank Alan Liu, Miriam Posner, Whitney Trettien, and Scott Weingart for graduate syllabi from which I drew particular inspiration. Even greater thanks to my iSchool colleague Zoe LeBlanc, from whom I have learned an enormous amount about teaching DH, and from whose previous section of IS578 this syllabus and website are both adapted.
In addition, thanks to colleagues on social media who offered suggestions and feedback about this syllabus, including Allie Alvis, Lawrence Evalyn, Erik Fredner, Gabi, Kathy Harris, Jennifer Isasi, Matthew Kollmer, Alan Liu, Dez Miller, Rebecca Parmer, Jonathan Senchyne, and Amanda Wyatt Visconti.