Digital Humanities (Minor)
Departmental Guidelines
The Digital Humanities Program seeks to bridge the human and the digital to provide students new, exciting pathways through their Denison career and beyond. The minor serves to empower students to develop technological capabilities and humanistic problem-solving skills by creating Digital Humanities projects. The emphasis is on the making, doing, and presenting of Digital Humanities knowledge.
The Digital Humanities minor applies digital tools and methodologies to humanistic problem solving and research design, and it uses digital tools to curate and exhibit humanities research in ways that allow different forms of accessibility, structure, navigability, and engagement. In doing so, it explores the history, forms of representation, networks of information, ethics, and structures of power in our increasingly digital culture, and it explores how new technologies are shaping the human condition in ways so ubiquitous that they have become invisible. In short, DH applies humanistic methodologies to analyze and critique the practical and theoretical challenges of a digitized world.
DH students can use digital tools to create new objects of study for the humanities. For example, social networking algorithms can help humanists understand the complex relationships between historical actors and/or events; or characters within a book/movie. See, for examples, these visualizations of the intellectual network of Sir Francis Bacon [Six Degrees of Francis Bacon] or characters from the Star Wars Universe [Star Wars Social Networks].
DH students use digital tools to analyze humanistic data in different ways. For example, textual analysis algorithms allow humanists to “read” large bodies of texts and synthesize the information in those texts differently to make compelling arguments. See, for example, this discussion of a study on Gender Bias in Economics (by an undergraduate) or gender bias in the Harry Potter novels.
DH students can use digital tools to create new narratives out of data. For example, mapping technology enables humanists to locate spatial relationships in an effort to understand social, political, cultural, and historical relationships in different ways. The maps created by mapping technologies are new narratives, new texts, new objects of study, and they offer non-linear methods of analysis to emerge. See this Interactive map of eighteenth-century Jamaican Slave Revolts.
Faculty
Chair
Professor Frank T. Proctor III
Committee
Associate Professors Regina Martin, Francisco J. López-Martín
Digital Humanities Minor
Digital Humanities (4 courses):
| Code | Title |
|---|---|
| DH 101 | Introduction to Digital Humanities |
| DH 200 | Digital Humanities Practicum (DH Practica (x2) -Cross-listed DH courses offered in Humanities Departments or standalone courses) |
| DH 400 | Senior Seminar - Texts, Maps, and Networks |
Computational Methods (2 courses):
| Code | Title | |
|---|---|---|
| CS 109 | Discovering Computer Science | |
| or CS 111 | Discovering Computer Science: Scientific Data and Dynamics | |
| or CS 112 | Discovering Computer Science: Markets, Polls, and Social Networks | |
| or CS 113 | Discovering Computer Science: Physical Computing | |
| or CS 114 | Discovering Computer Science: Computing for the Social Good | |
| and one of the following: | ||
| DA 101 | Introduction to Data Analytics | |
| or CS 181 | Data Systems | |
| or EESC 215 | Special Topics in Earth & Environmental Sciences | |
| or SES 222 & SES 223 | Geographic Information Systems I and Advanced GIS | |
| or MATH 120 | Elements of Statistics | |
| or MATH 220 | Applied Statistics | |
Experiential Component:
Required DH 050 - Experience.
DH 101 - Introduction to Digital Humanities (4 Credit Hours)
Digital technology increasingly shapes how we communicate; how we form, maintain, and end relationships; how we construct communities; how we store, retrieve, and analyze information; how we organize our time...the list can go on and on. For students in the humanities, these revolutionary changes have made new kinds of study possible by opening up myriad new avenues for creativity, scholarship, and global engagement. This class is an opportunity for students to learn and play in these new spaces between traditional humanities inquiry and the digital.
DH 199 - Introductory Topics in Digital Humanities (1-4 Credit Hours)
A general category used only in the evaluation of transfer credit.
DH 200 - Digital Humanities Practicum (4 Credit Hours)
These courses are opportunities for students to apply computer-based problem-solving to humanities-based research problems and questions and/or share humanities knowledge in digital forms. Students will make and do digitally-based humanities research projects. These cross-listed classes from departments across the Humanities division will combine high levels of engagement with digital tools and established humanities-based learning modes within a specific disciplinary context.
DH 221 - Mapping Piracy and Captivity in the Ottoman Mediterranean (4 Credit Hours)
This course will examine the early modern (16th to 18th century) Ottoman Mediterranean world as one historical landscape with a focus on the issues of identity, conversion, and captivity in the context of sea-based piracy, slavery, and migration. We will ask: What part did loyalty, economic incentives, religious conviction, and coercion play in the decisions that communities, captives, sailors, and commanders made in their pursuit of their interests? By taking a wider view of these historical phenomena and studying them as forms of economic, cultural, and violent exchange, we will have the opportunity to look at the Mediterranean world as a place of both interaction and conflict. This class will have a digital humanities component. As a result, one of the central focuses of this class is using visualizations of historical information as an analytical tool to gain insights about the past and communicating those insights in clear and innovative ways.
DH 230 - Multimedia Storytelling (4 Credit Hours)
This course explores nonfiction storytelling across multiple platforms. Students will learn how to edit audio and video stories using relevant and up-to-date programs. Most importantly, they will learn which is the most effective vehicle for the story they are telling.
DH 281 - Analyzing Linguistic Data (4 Credit Hours)
Analyzing Linguistic Data is a course for students interested in analytical approaches (both quantitative and qualitative) to language. The goals are effectively twofold: to introduce students to the subdisciplines of Linguistics and to give students the tools to approach the analysis of those subfields. To further these goals, students will become familiar with Rstudio, PRAAT (program for phonetic analysis), online syntactic corpora (in the Penn family), and other related programs/web resources. This will be accomplished with a weekly laboratory session, where students will use the aforementioned programs to understand linguistic problems. Part of these laboratory assignments will involve a creative production component in which students will be asked to creatively display the data that they work with. Additionally, with each laboratory assignment students are expected to reflect on what the laboratory assignment entailed and to express in words how the laboratory assignment provides insight to the study of language and what potential consequences might be for those interested in the study of language. This is a special topics course. Crosslisted with DA 281 & GERM 303-02.
DH 282 - Digital Mapping & Recovery of Invisible U.S. Cities (4 Credit Hours)
Title: "Digital Mapping & Recovery of Invisible U.S. Cities.
DH 284 - Old Books in New Media (4 Credit Hours)
This class will recreate three classic pieces of British literature as twenty-first-century.
DH 299 - Intermediate Topics in Digital Humanities (1-4 Credit Hours)
A general category used only in the evaluation of transfer credit.
DH 361 - Directed Study (1-4 Credit Hours)
DH 362 - Directed Study (1-4 Credit Hours)
DH 363 - Independent Study (1-4 Credit Hours)
DH 364 - Independent Study (1-4 Credit Hours)
DH 399 - Advanced Topics in Digital Humanities (1-4 Credit Hours)
A general category used only in the evaluation of transfer credit.
DH 400 - Senior Seminar - Texts, Maps, and Networks (4 Credit Hours)
This course serves as the capstone experience for DH minors. It will provide students with a significant design and research experience culminating with a significant, team-based, multinodal, digital humanities project. The public presentation of their work will also be an important element of the course. DH 400 is required for all Digital Humanities minors.
DH 451 - Senior Research (4 Credit Hours)
DH 452 - Senior Research (4 Credit Hours)