Coordinator:
Aims:
Digital Humanities Now
Susan Schreibman
The term Digital Humanities seems an oxymoron. What, you
might ask, has computation to do with centuries old arts and
humanities disciplines. Hasn’t tried and true methods of
creating arguments with pen and paper (or now word
processors and printouts) served the field admirably? What
do the concerns of other disciplines, such as information
science (standards, metadata, ontologies, controlled
vocabularies) and computer science (database modelling,
semantic web, human-computer interaction, scripting) have
to do with a discipline like literary studies? The answer is
everything.
This course will explore the burgeoning field of digital
humanities – how computational methods are being used to
further research and teaching in literary studies. This course
will explore how advanced and experimental computational
techniques are being used to challenge and change the very
nature of what it means to do research in the field of
literature.
We will explore areas such as thematic research collections, a
new genre akin that melds features of scholarly articles and
monographs with traditional archival practice; 3D virtual
recreations of ancient cities or monastic ruins; born digital
literature that embraces sound, images, and video as easily as
text and poses new and substantial challenges in the area of
preservation; and the experimental field of datamining and
visualization which may provide us with more effective ways
of ‘reading’ hundreds, even thousands of texts.
The primary textbook for this course will be A Companion to
Digital Humanities (Blackwell 2004), augmented by online
articles, tools, and projects
Preliminary Syllabus
(subject to change)
26 Sept: What is Humanities Computing
3 Oct: Thematic Research Collections
10 Oct: Virtual Worlds
17 Oct: Electronic Literature
24 Oct: The Future of Reading
31 Oct: Text Encoding and Text Analysis
14 Nov: Data Curation and Preservation
21 Nov: Distant Reading
28 Nov: Visualisations
5 Dec: Cyberinfrastructure
12 Dec The Future of DH