Core Courses in Digital Humanities (MA)

Digital Humanities Core Courses

These courses are required for students in the Digital Humanities MA program but are open to all graduate students in any department of the university. No prior experience or previous courses are necessary. Note especially that the DH2 course does not require that students have already taken DH1.

HUM 5835: Introduction to Digital Humanities 1: Humanities Data (Fall)

This course seeks to train students in current methods of data analytics central to Humanities disciplines and humanistic activities. This class is a blend of three types of instruction or classrooms: discussion/seminar, tutorial, and lab. Through readings and discussion we will situate the practices of data analytics in a humanistic framework and in terms of humanities questions. Through tutorial and practice we will get hands-on experience working with the tools and methods of humanities data analytics. Through experimentation and project-based work we will test the abilities and limits of current methods in Humanities. Students will work with the following (in varying degrees): Python, data visualization, network analysis, machine learning (including text mining and neural networks), Rapidminer, web-scraping, APIs, and more. In the final weeks of the course students apply these methods to a larger project of their choosing. The course is intended, in part, to help students advance their own research and scholarly activities.

HUM 5837: Introduction to Digital Humanities 2: Knowledge Curation (Spring)

This course covers topics in a variety of areas that might broadly be construed as "knowledge curation." How do humanists organize, publish, and present online digital data? We will focus primarily on web technologies (starting with static site generators and then moving through basic server setup, html, css, and a variety of development tools) and work with databases and archives (relational vs. graph vs. document databases, Omeka and specialized tools for collection management). At the same time, we will ask questions about web technologies as humanities methods. Students will gain an understanding of scholarship and projects in related areas of digital humanities. The format is a mixture of discussion seminar, workshop and project-based lab.

HUM 5838: Digital Pedagogy (Fall)

This course is a hands-on and practical seminar designed to develop graduate student teaching skills, expertise, and critical judgment regarding pedagogy. Students learn about education technologies both in face to face instruction and in online instruction while also grappling with critical issues in humanities pedagogy. Technology is a means to think through and highlight issues of pedagogy rather than an end in itself. Students in this class will improve their performance in the classroom as a lecturer, as a discussion leader, and running a course; gain facility in curriculum design and assignment development; learn how to implement, test, and refine current pedagogical scholarship and learning models in the classroom; gain practical experience designing, testing, and refining specifically digital technologies; work together to develop larger scale educational technology projects. Possible pedagogical projects include gamification (and building a digital game for use in the classroom) and building and programming experimental classroom tools involving wearables and micro-controllers. As a part of this work students will also gain knowledge about the resources and literature on pedagogy generally, on digital pedagogy more specifically, and on all manner of educational technology.