HEGRBTV04U Interdisciplinary Elective Subject, topic 4: Digital Humanities

Digital Humanities is concerned with the application of digital technology in the pursuit of answering questions within the Humanities, including the study of literature, history and linguistics. With the use of technology, we can perform analyses and generate new insights that would otherwise be very time-consuming or even impossible. The approach taken to Digital Humanities in this course combines literary/historical texts with a focus on linguistics. The course will introduce students to a number of digital tools that will be of use to them both in their studies and their lives beyond university.

The course is hands-on (students will have the opportunity to learn how to use various applications for textual analysis), methodological (students will be introduced to modes of reading, types of linguistic and literary inquiry, the notion of data within the humanities) and theoretical (what is Digital Humanities? How does it differ from previous technologies, such as the book? How do literary studies, history, and linguistics fit within Digital Humanities and how do they relate to one another within this framework?). In addition to this, we will explore and critique existing examples of Digital Humanities projects and work with a number of existing linguistic corpora as well as building our own corpus of literary, historical, or linguistic texts. Among the topics covered in this course are:

• Corpus linguistics (including corpus-assisted discourse studies and corpus stylistics)
• Data in the humanities (including data collection and transformation)
• Databases in linguistic and literary studies
• Digital coding of qualitative data
• Digital humanities: Challenges and opportunities
• Digital texts vs. analogue texts
• Humanistic studies of a digital reality
• New Media (social media, new text technologies, interactive media)
• Quantitative and qualitative analysis
• Scientific epistemology and digital humanities
• Text mining
• Visualisations (presentation, graphics)

Activities:

Testing hypotheses about authors, texts, passages, genres, periods, discourses, or linguistic varieties or registers

Studying how an author’s style or emphases change over time.

Exploring thematic language in texts and how this may be affected by historical conditions or events.

Digital scholarly editing of literary texts. Examining the possibilities of making texts available to a general audience, and assessing new tools available.

Annotating digital text for analytical purposes.

Why this course?

We believe that this course has sufficient breadth and that it – with its methodological focus –is relevant to all degree programmes in the department. Moreover, seeing that the digital is part of the faculty and university strategies, this course is a great opportunity for the department to 1) contribute to these strategies and 2) foster an interest in the digital among our students and staff.

As well as earning an academic qualification in Digital Humanities, the course will also give students transferable skills that will prepare them for a position within or outside academia where analysis of data and the use of digital tools are required