This course provides a graduate-level introduction to the digital humanities. The course introduces major types of digital humanities work and central topics and controversies. It asks students to develop project ideas and public visibility in their intended professional field in its relation to the digital humanities. Major topics include: the emergence of the digital humanities; the relation of DH to the humanities and data science; the logic of text encoding and methods of text analysis (including quantitative analysis, topic modeling, and social network analysis); theory and issues of the archive in the digital age (including in relation to issues of diversity); space and time in the digital humanities (including mapping and timelimes); data narratives; and the new horizon of neural-network artificial intelligence methods.

A key aspect of the course is the balance it seeks between ideas and technology. Far-reaching ideas from both the human past and present are reexamined from a technological perspective, and, just as important, vice versa.

Assignments in the course train graduate students in the digital humanities (through practicums); develop their knowledge of and professional profile in their intended research field (through blog research posts, an essay, or the creation of an online bibliography); and incubate a “mock grant proposal” for a digital-humanities project (which might be the basis of later work included in a dissertation). (Due to the constraints of a 10-week quarter, the proposed project need not be fully implemented.

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