Undergraduate Course: Digital Humanities for Literary Studies (ENLI10378)
Course Outline
| School | School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures |
College | College of Humanities and Social Science |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 10 (Year 4 Undergraduate) |
Availability | Not available to visiting 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 |
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.
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
| Additional Costs | None: all software used is free, and all texts are available online |
Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Students should be able to use a selection of digital tools with practical applications for their study and their life beyond the university, including tools for textual analysis, web publishing platforms, applications that facilitate collaborative working, and georeferencing tools.
- Students should be able to think critically about what they are doing when they read, write, search for information and engage with others in an online environment, using the tools of critical reading and writing they have already begun to develop through their study of English literature.
- Students should be able to produce writing in a number of genres, and to understand their writing as something that can be a contribution to knowledge and that is done with an audience in mind.
- 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.
- Students should be able to situate developments in digital technology of the past several decades within the broader historical context of textual technologies; 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
Compulsory
Darnton, Robert. 'Google and the Future of Books.' New York Review of Books 12 February 2009. Web. 13 Dec. 2013.
Drucker, Johanna. 'Pixel Dust: Illusions of Innovation in Scholarly Publishing'. Los Angeles Review of Books (2014). Web. 22 Jan. 2014.
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.
Juola, Patrick. 'Authorship Attribution.' Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval 1.3 (2006): 233'334. Web. 21 Oct. 2011.
Keim, Brandon. 'Why the Smart Reading Device of the Future May Be ' Paper.' Wired 1 May 2014. Web. 8 May 2014.
Kirsch, Adam. 'Technology Is Taking Over English Departments.' The New Republic 2 May 2014. Web. 8 May 2014.
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.
Madrigal, Alexis. 'How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood.' The Atlantic 2 Jan. 2014. Web. 18 Nov. 2014.
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.
Other relevant critical material will be made available on Learn.
Recommended
Bartscherer, Thomas, and Roderick Coover, eds. Switching Codes: Thinking Through Digital Technology in the Humanities and the Arts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Print.
Bodenhamer, David, John Corrigan, and Trevor Harris, eds. The Spatial Humanities: GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Print.
Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999. Print.
Davidson, Cathy N. Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn. New York: Viking, 2011. Print.
Gold, Matthew K., ed. Debates in the Digital Humanities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Print.
Gregory, Ian, and Paul S. Ell. Historical GIS: Technologies, Methodologies, and Scholarship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Print.
Jockers, Matthew Lee. Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013. Print.
Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008. Print.
Lang, Anouk, ed. From Codex to Hypertext: Reading at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012. Print.
Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for A Literary History. London: Verso, 2005. Print.
Ramsay, Stephen. Reading Machines: Toward an Algorithmic Criticism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011. Print.
Schreibman, Susan, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth, eds., A Companion to Digital Humanities. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Web.
Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody. London: Penguin, 2009. Print.
Siemens, Ray, and Susan Schreibman, eds. A Companion to Digital Literary Studies. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. Web.
Terras, Melissa, Julianne Nyhan, and Edward Vanhoutte, eds. Defining Digital Humanities: A Reader. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. Print.
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Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
A. Research and Enquiry (Graduates of the University will be able to create new knowledge and opportunities for learning through the process of research and enquiry): developed through readings and in-class activities; tested by class participation activities, presentation and project.
B. Personal and Intellectual Autonomy (Graduates of the University will be able to work independently and sustainably, in a way that is informed by openness, curiosity and a desire to meet new challenges): developed through class participation activities and presentation.
C. Communication (Graduates of the University will recognise and value communication as the tool for negotiating and creating new understanding, collaborating with others, and furthering their own learning): developed through presentation, class participation activities and project, which ask students to communicate their ideas and understanding in different formats (eg. speaking aloud vs. informal digital writing vs. formal digital writing).
D. Personal Effectiveness (Graduates of the University will be able to effect change and be responsive to the situations and environments in which they operate): developed through the class participation activities, especially those designed to help students understand their digital presence in a fast-changing online environment, and also the collaborative work required to complete the project.
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| Keywords | digital humanities,computational analysis,computational linguistics,GIS,digital mapping,digital |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Anouk Lang
Tel: (0131 6)51 1716
Email: |
Course secretary | Ms June Haigh
Tel: (0131 6)50 3620
Email: |
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