Introduction to the Digital Humanities
This project is made possible with funding by the Government of Ontario and through eCampusOntario’s support of the Virtual Learning Strategy.
To learn more about the Virtual Learning Strategy visit: https://vls.ecampusontario.ca.
Nipissing University sits on the territory of Nipissing First Nation, the territory of the Anishnabek, within lands protected by the Robinson Huron Treaty of 1850. We are grateful to be able to live and learn on these lands with all our relations.
CONTEMPORARY DIGITAL HUMANITIES
This course is intended as a 2000-level (second year undergraduate) course that introduces the digital humanities from the standpoint of recent innovative digital humanities scholarship. The field of digital humanities itself is relatively recent, emerging from “humanities computing” in the 1990s and early years of the twenty-first century. The course describes the digital humanities, its history, areas and sub-areas, representative projects, computing technologies used in the digital humanities (discussed in general, non-technical terms), criticisms of the digital humanities by scholars both internal and external to the field, and possible future directions. A brief introduction to computing is also presented. This course is generally non-technical and non-mathematical, although some optional sections present basic code for students with some experience with Python.
The digital humanities comprise an emerging field of intellectual endeavor, with an increasing number of scholarly publications, scientific conferences and forums, dedicated websites and academic web logs, academic programs, educational initiatives, and funding opportunities. It is a multidisciplinary undertaking, involving humanists, computer scientists, data scientists, social scientists, librarians, and many others. Furthermore, the digital humanities are driven by the development of many new computational techniques. With the widespread availability of easy-to-learn programming languages and a vast array of software libraries and functions for these languages, these computational advances are increasingly led by humanities scholars, who use these programming tools to develop new tools and techniques to advance the field.
Although the foundation of the digital humanities is in text, particularly literary studies and in various scholarly activities in English studies, computational paradigms are making crucially important contributions to other humanities fields as well, including history, the classics, music, art, and the study of culture to name only a few. Consequently, text analysis and text mining are major components of this course and certificate program. However, they are not the only foci. Important projects in the digital humanities, both large- and small-scale, draw on and contribute to a plethora of disciplines. The scope of this contemporary introduction to the Digital Humanities is correspondingly broad-based.
The course also introduces the digital humanities from the perspective of current work – also known as state-of-the-art – in this large discipline. As with any new and emerging discipline, the digital humanities are best studied via new and recent developments, although, again like all emerging fields, a solid historical foundation is necessary, and is therefore given adequate attention.
Although basic computational paradigms used in the digital humanities are essential to success in the field, the focus of the current course is not programming. In subsequent courses, the use of the scripting languages Python and R – the two most widely used programming languages in the humanities – are presented, as well as libraries and packages for these languages that implement specific functionalities. In addition, because of the enormous effect that the Internet has had on all areas of scholarly endeavor, the basic technical concepts of Internet technology and the World Wide Web are introduced, along with the new “Web 2.0” and Web 3.0” paradigms.
The course also introduces learners to publicly available and open access scholarly resources for the digital humanities, which are primarily available on the Web. Some of these resources, such as the Digital Humanities Quarterly, contain rigorously reviewed articles that can enhance the learning experience both in breadth and in depth. Learners will gain experience in using and critically analyzing and assessing research in the field.
The digital humanities have also been criticized, mostly for an overemphasis on the “digital” aspect. Some humanists argue that this type of work is incongruent with humanities research. For instance, as will be shown in the course, “the digital” enforces a strict set of “rules” or processes, and precision through the binary code, whereas such “precision” mandated by the binary code is not conducive to humanities work, which instead celebrates and thrives on ambiguity, unusual occurrences, outliers, argumentation, and interpretation. Many of these criticisms of the digital humanities come from digital humanists themselves. Learners will become aware of the valid motives for these criticisms, and how they can be at least partially addressed. Ambiguity itself is and remains part of the digital humanities.
Learners will also be presented with potential future directions the field may take. Although technological and algorithmic advances – particularly in machine learning, advanced statistical analysis, Big Data, data science, and visualization – necessarily have an enormous effect on the development of the digital humanities, some of the most important innovations arise from the fundamental concerns and questions of the (non-digital) humanities themselves. The learner will therefore gain an appreciation not only of the enabling and empowering contributions of computation and digital technology, but also of humanities scholarship in general, and that the focus and key word of “digital humanities” firmly remains “humanities”.
Students are introduced to the digital humanities from the perspective of state-of-the-art and leading-edge work in the field. They are provided with an overview of the digital humanities, its history, large digital humanities projects over the past few decades, digital scholarship, broad introduction to computing and to the main computational tools used in the humanities, digital archives, text analysis, and criticisms of the digital humanities, and its possible future(s).
REQUIRED TEXT: Contemporary Digital Humanities, available as online content for this course.
LEARNING OUTCOMES
By the end of this course, successful students will be able to:
- Explain in detail the scope and practices in the digital humanities from an historical and state-of-the-art perspective.
- Explain and describe recent large-scale, collaborative projects in the digital humanities, and their interdisciplinary nature.
- Investigate and research publicly available resources in the digital humanities, such as academic blogs and open-access online journals (e.g., Digital Humanities Quarterly).
- Discuss the interrelationships between the humanities, the computational sciences, the social sciences, and other scholarly fields.
- Discuss the basic technical aspects of the computing field, including fundamental concepts of hardware, software, and Internet technologies, and the ways in which they fundamentally shape digital humanities scholarship.
- Apply and assess broad categories of computational tools for the learner’s own projects.
- Explain the basic concepts of text analysis text mining.
- Critically assess recent scholarship, trends, applications, and projects in the digital humanities and their subfields.
TOPICS COVERED IN THIS COURSE
Module Topic
1 What is/are the digital humanities?
2 Digital Scholarship
3 A Brief History of the Digital Humanities
4 Areas and Subdisciplines
5 Examples from Digital History
6 What is “Digital” in the Digital Humanities?
Introduction to Computation
7 Basic Computer Organization
8 Digitality: Binary Numbers and Boolean Logic
9 Computational Techniques in the Digital Humanities
10 The Relationship Between Tools and Methods
11 Close Reading and Distant Reading
12 The Text Analysis and Text Mining Workflow
13 N-Grams
14 The Internet and Internet Studies
15 Large-Scale Projects in the Digital Humanities
16 Digital Archives and Databases
17 Criticisms of the Digital Humanities
18 Possible Digital Humanities Futures
A NOTE TO INSTRUCTORS
Instructors should freely utilize material that is relevant to their class and omit or modify modules or sections of modules that are not. Advanced material and computational techniques may also be omitted without interrupting the schema of course.
Readings accessible through the Web are assigned for most sections. Most of these readings are short and are selected for students first learning the digital humanities. Some readings are websites that learners may browse to examine some state-of-the-art and leading-edge digital humanities scholarship. Many optional readings are indicated and may be used according to the instructor’s and learners’ interests. Instructors may supplement these readings with reading assignments of their own that complement the material presented in each section, or that offer different or contrary perspectives. As the first course describes the digital humanities as a field and discusses some of the current issues being addressed by digital humanities scholarship, instructors should prepare assignments specifically for the type of class they are teaching, and tailor these assignments to meet the needs of their specific students. A test bank for this course can be requested to assist instructors in preparing midterm and/or final examinations. A test bank for this course may be requested to assist instructors in preparing midterm and/or final examinations. Instructors may also use or adapt questions from this test bank for short assignments or quizzes, especially the short computational questions.
