Postgraduate Course: Digital Humanities for Literary Studies (ENLI11199)
Course Outline
| School | School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures |
College | College of Humanities and Social Science |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | Digital Humanities is a field of study in which scholarly applications of technology are used to perform analyses and generate insights that would be difficult or impossible to achieve without the help of technology. This course will introduce students to a number of digital tools that will aid them both in their studies and their lives beyond university, and will help them to use these tools in a critical way. The approach taken to DH in this course is grounded in literature, linguistics and book history. We will examine computer-mediated communication, and will consider the development of digital texts in the light of earlier technologies such as the printing press. We will focus on two kinds of approaches that are particularly prominent within digital literary studies ¿ computational text analysis and digital mapping ¿ and we will explore, and critique, examples of projects which use these tools. The hands-on nature of the course is such that students will have the opportunity to learn how to use these applications for themselves, and will need to devote time each week to participating in the class¿s virtual community through regular, informative contributions to the course blog. As the main assessment for the course, students will produce a digital project which conforms to the same high standards of scholarly rigour as an assessed essay, but which is attentive to the specific imperatives of the online environment in relation to genre, design and format. |
| Course description |
1. What is Digital Humanities? Introduction to the field
2. Computational tools for text analysis 1: Voyant, ManyEyes
3. Computational tools for text analysis 2: Ngrams, topic modelling, sentiment analysis
4. Computer-mediated communication
5. Versioning: Juxta
6. Historicizing textual technologies 1: Collaborating with Google Docs
7. Historicizing textual technologies 2: Zotero
8. Geospatial technologies 1: Simile Exhibit
9. Geospatial technologies 2: Google Earth and KML
10. Scholarship in the digital age: data, privacy, presence
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | None |
| High Demand Course? |
Yes |
Course Delivery Information
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| Academic year 2015/16, Available to all students (SV1)
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Quota: 15 |
| Course Start |
Semester 2 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
200
(
Seminar/Tutorial Hours 20,
Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 4,
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
176 )
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| Assessment (Further Info) |
Written Exam
0 %,
Coursework
100 %,
Practical Exam
0 %
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| Additional Information (Assessment) |
1. 20% oral presentation delivered in class on a digital scholarly project (8-10 minutes, including description, evaluation and critique; roughly equivalent to 1200 words)
2. 30% class contribution activities, including four blog posts, participation in class Twitter feed, contributions to digital map, contributions to collaboratively authored summaries, and possibly other tasks that may arise as the semester goes on; minimum 2000 words.
3. 50% digital project (website built with WordPress which uses digital tools to analyse a text; 2000w approximate word count.)
Students will be given feedback on their oral presentation immediately, and formative feedback on their class contribution activities midway through the semester. Time will also be set aside in the final weeks of the semester for students to get help with the technical aspects of the digital project, and to request formative feedback on parts of the digital project as they complete it. |
| Feedback |
Not entered |
| No Exam Information |
Learning Outcomes
1) Students should be able to articulate some of the benefits and the drawbacks of using digital tools to approach literary analysis and the study of the humanities more generally.
2) Students should be able to situate developments in digital technology of the past several decades within the broader historical context of textual technologies.
3) Students should possess a working knowledge of a collection of digital tools that they can use to help them in their studies.
4) Students should attain a high degree of digital literacy, including the ability to evaluate online sources, navigate efficiently through large amounts of information, and critically interrogate the way they use the internet to get information, produce content and interact with others.
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Reading List
Additional reading:
Darnton, Robert. 'Google and the Future of Books.' New York Review of Books 12 February 2009. Web. 13 Dec. 2013.
Duguid, Paul. 'Material Matters: The Past and Futurology of the Book'. The Book History Reader. 2nd revised ed. Ed. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery. Abingdon: Routledge, 2006. 494-508. Print.
Flanders, Julia. 'The Productive Unease of 21st-century Digital Scholarship.' Digital Humanities Quarterly 3.3 (Summer 2009). Web. 13 Dec. 2013.
Grafton, Anthony. 'Future Reading: Digitization and its Discontents.' The New Yorker 5 November 2007. Web. 13 Dec 2013.
Gregory, Ian, and David Cooper. 'GIS, Texts, and Images: New Approaches.' Poetess Archive Journal 2.1 (2010). Web. 13 Dec 2013.
Hayles, N. Katherine. 'How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine,' ADE Bulletin 150 (2010): 62-79. Web. 13 Dec. 2013.
Hindley, Meredith. ¿Mapping the Republic of Letters.¿ Humanities: The Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities 34.6 (2013). Web. 13 Dec. 2013.
Hitchcock, Tim. ¿Big Data for Dead People: Digital Readings and the Conundrums of Positivism.¿ Keynote Address at CVCE Conference: Reading Historical Sources in the Digital Age, 4-5 December 2013. 9 Dec. 2013. Web. 13 Dec. 2013.
Kirschenbaum, Matthew. ¿What Is Digital Humanities and What¿s It Doing in English Departments?¿ ADE Bulletin 150 (2010): 1-7. Print.
Leary, Patrick. ¿Googling the Victorians.¿ Journal of Victorian Culture 10:1 (Spring 2005): 72-86. Web. 13 Dec. 2013.
McCarty, Willard. ¿What is Humanities Computing? Toward a Definition of the Field.¿ Address at Reed College, 2 Mar 1998. Web. 13 Dec. 2013.
Michel, Jean-Baptiste et al. ¿Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books.¿ Science 331.176 (2011): 176-182. Web.
Nunberg, Geoffrey. ¿Farewell to the Information Age.¿ The Future of the Book. Ed. Nunberg. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996. 103-138. Print.
Piez, Wendell. ¿Something Called ¿Digital Humanities¿.¿ Digital Humanities Quarterly 2.1 (2008). Web. 13 Dec 2013.
Rockwell, Geoffrey. ¿What is Text Analysis, Really?¿ Literary and Linguistic Computing 18.2 (2003): 209-219. Web. 13 Dec 2013.
Schmidt, Ben. ¿Reading Digital Sources: A Case Study in Ship¿s Logs.¿ Sapping Attention 15 Nov. 2012. Web. 13 Dec. 2013.
Serlen, Rachel. ¿The Distant Future? Reading Franco Moretti.¿ Literature Compass 7.3 (2010): 214-225. Web. 13 Dec 2013.
Sinclair, Stèfan. ¿Computer-Assisted Reading: Reconceiving Text Analysis.¿ Literary and Linguistic Computing 18.2 (2003): 167-74. Web. 13 Dec 2013.
Underwood, Ted. ¿Where to Start with Text Mining.¿ The Stone and the Shell 14 Aug 2012. Web. 13 Dec 2013.
Underwood, Ted. ¿Why Digital Humanities Isn¿t Actually ¿The Next Thing in Literary Studies¿¿. The Stone and the Shell 27 Dec. 2011. Web. 13 Dec. 2013.
Vanhoutte, Edward. ¿The Gates of Hell: History and Definition of Digital | Humanities | Computing.¿ Defining Digital Humanities: A Reader. Ed. Melissa Terras, Julianne Nyhan, and Edward Vanhoutte. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. 119¿156. Print.
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Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Not entered |
| Keywords | DHiLS |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Anouk Lang
Tel: (0131 6)51 1716
Email: |
Course secretary | Miss Kara Mccormack
Tel: (0131 6)50 3030
Email: |
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