Welcome!

In this class, you’ll learn about some of the new technologies that scholars are using for humanities research. We’ll look at the history and affordances of these tools, asking which possibilities each enables and which each excludes. We’ll also examine the history and current debates within the field of digital humanities.

This class is designed for graduate students who are “tech-curious” but not yet experienced with coding or working with data. If you’re more advanced, that’s OK, too! We can find lots of ways to challenge you. I only ask that you practice patience with your classmates and work with me to ensure that everyone reaches their goals.

My own goal is for you to leave this class with a well-developed digital humanities project that is relevant to your research interests and displays a range of skills. To that end, we will spend a significant portion of class co-working and workshopping projects, as I find that is often the best way to make progress with a new set of skills.

By the end of this class, you should be able to:

  • discuss the origins, present, and possible futures of digital humanities.
  • form your own ideas about how technology might be wielded in support of humanities methods.
  • manipulate and understand a structured dataset.
  • create multiple kinds of data visualizations.
  • create interactive web-based maps.
  • write basic HTML and CSS, and publish a website.
  • perform basic text analysis.