Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities at UIUC’s School of Information Sciences

Office Hours

By appointment, using calendly link (available on Canvas or Google Drive)

Class Meetings

Thursdays 4:00pm-6:00 pm CST

Course Description

First coined at the iSchool in 2005, “Digital Humanities” (DH) is a field that resists definition (though many have tried). Depending on the campus, DH can encompass everything from critical theorizing of new media and technologies, to new digital interfaces for humanities scholarship and pedagogy, to computational studies of digitized cultural materials. This course introduces students to the breadth of the field and the ongoing debates over its definition. However, the primary focus will be on helping students develop critical competencies for working digitally in the humanities.

While this description may sound straightforward, but requires answering many unresolved questions: how does working digitally transform research and teaching in the humanities? What does it mean to work with digitized cultural materials and what is humanities data exactly? How do we find, curate, and collect this data? What are the benefits and limitations of working digitally in the humanities? To help answer these questions, this course combines weekly seminar discussions and hands-on workshops to help students gain experience with DH tools and data, but also develop a critical perspective on these emerging practices.

Each week students will be introduced to new topics and methods in DH, and therefore, this course assumes no previous experience with digital humanities, or working with data and digital tools. Given that this course is in an iSchool, it will also be oriented towards how digital humanities intersects with Library and Information Sciences. In particular, students will have the opportunity to develop their own DH workshop, as a basis for either a future public DH workshop, or eventually DH projects or publications. Overall, the goal of this course is to introduce students to some of the latest developments in DH and help them navigate this shifting terrain of how we work in digital humanities.

Overall Learning Objectives

Upon successful completion of the course, students will:

  • Gain an overview of the breadth of digital humanities research; develop a critical perspective to working with humanities data; and an introduction to some of the more popular methods and tools in digital humanities
  • Craft a digital humanities workshop that could, if students choose, serve as the foundation for publishable future DH projects
  • Ultimately, the course aims to marry theoretical and practical approaches in a way that will equip students to comfortably experiment with new DH technologies and theories in the future.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to John R Ladd, Melanie Walsh, Brandon Walsh, Meredith Martin, Sierra Eckert, Anelise Shrout, Cameron Blevins, Lincoln Mullen, Benjamin Schmidt, Lauren Klein, Miriam Posner, Alan Liu, Ted Underwood, and Ryan Cordell for sharing their syllabi - all of which have been immensely helpful and influential.

I also want to especially thank Rebecca Munson, who remains an inspiration for how I think and teach about data and who is sorely missed but will never be forgotten.