MA Degree Requirements

The Digital Humanities MA major

Degree Requirements

The curriculum involves the following three components:

1. A core of twelve hours, including:

  • HUM 5835: Intro to Digital Humanities I: Humanities Data, a course on data analytics. This course covers a variety of methods and techniques for the digital analysis of humanities data. A significant portion of the course covers text analysis, including text mining, machine learning, topic modeling, and sentiment analysis. Other topics include networks, visualization, and introductions to machine learning and photogrammetry. Students will learn and work in R and Python.

  • Hum 5837: Intro to Digital Humanities II: Knowledge Curation, a course on how digital information is collected, organized, and published. Topics include website development, databases, specialized tools for museums and libraries, archives, and associated technologies.

  • Hum 5838: Digital Pedagogy, a course which gives students hands-on experience in communication technologies relevant to modern pedagogy. This serves both as a required pedagogy course for graduate student instructors in digital humanities and involves work both in online teaching and with in-class technologies.

  • Hum 5915: (Supervised Research): Digital Portfolio, a final project which each student pursues in his or her area of interest. Projects can be done with specific faculty members, with particular organizations inside or outside the university, or as internships.

2. At least twelve hours of courses in either humanities-focused digital-humanities seminars or more skills-focused classes.  These courses can be found in many departments and so should be chosen in consultation with the graduate coordinator. The list of such classes includes (but is not limited to) courses from:

  • Communication (including courses on web design, digital media, and project management)
  • English (including appropriate HoTT- or Rhet/Comp-related classes)
  • Geography (e.g., GIS)
  • History (including public-history and digital-history classes)
  • Information (including courses in multimedia, information management, and
  • markup languages)
  • Scientific Computing

Sample classes are as follows.  Courses followed by asterisks are “umbrella” courses that offer various iterations; on occasions, these courses are appropriate for this major.

ARH 5806* (Seminar in the History and Criticism of Art), COM 5338 (Web Site Usability and Design), COM 5339 (Interactive Programming and Design for the Web), COM 5364 (Foundations of Digital Media), COM 5450 (Introduction to Project Management), COM 5467 (System Thinking and Project Management), ENG 5801 (Introduction to History of Text Technologies), ENG 5805* (Studies in Textual Production), ENG 5807* (Studies in Textual Transformation), ENG 5933* (Topics in English), GIS 5101 (Geographic Information Systems), HIS 5067 (Public History Theory and Methods), HIS 5082 (Introduction to Archives), HIS 5165 (Digital History), HIS 6087 (Museum Studies and Practice), ISC 4933/CAP 5771 (Data Mining), LIS 5313 (Digital Media: Concepts and Production), LIS 5362 (Design and Production of Networked Multimedia), LIS 5408 (Management of Information Organizations), LIS 5590 (Museum Informatics), LIS 5703 (Information Organization), LIS 5782 (Database Management Systems), LIS 5786 (Introduction to Information Architecture), LIS 5787 (Fundamentals of Metadata Theory and Practice).

Selection of these courses for each student will be carried out in consultation with the Director of the Graduate program.

3. Up to nine hours of courses in humanities departments which are not DH-specific. Students are encouraged to develop digital final projects or to develop extended proposals for large-scale digital projects that cannot be completed during the course of a term.

4. In addition, students are expected to take part in the Digital Scholars Reading Group. (It is offered 3 out of 4 semesters on a two-year cycle.) Students can register for ENG 5998r (Tutorial in English) on an S/U basis. Students should also take advantage of the regular events (colloquia, symposia, conferences, lectures) related to DH work during the semester and sponsored by many different units on campus. These include activities through the newly launched Center for Data Humanities and symposia or events in humanities departments regularly. Students should plan to to participate in a selection of Digital Humanities events put on by the University Library’s Office of Digital Research and are encouraged to attend relevant talks throughout the year.