Exploring the Field of Digital Humanities

COURSE OBJECTIVE
• Introduction to the field of digital Humanities and Social analytics and current research projects in the field
• Become familiar with a number of large and important collections of digital texts, data and images;
* Acquire basic knowledge of how DH collections are structured, and how they can be searched and analyzed with simple tools and techniques
• Learn how to critically analyse DH projects
* Exploration of usage of DH techniques for job opportunities

COURSE CONTENT
In our globalizing and increasingly digital world of big data, urge is growing for scholars who are trained in comparing complex and long term sets of quantitative and qualitative data. The sources and objects studied in history, media, literature, and linguistics are also increasingly becoming available digitally. What is Digital Humanities and what is the history of this field of research? What are the main debates, the most dominant subfields and techniques used? In this course you will be introduced to this cross-disciplinary research field, to the data collections, computational tools and methods used in the field. In class we will also discuss what is really new about digital humanities and evaluate both the promises and the limits of some digital methods. Through guest lectures by DH researchers and DH practitioners, students get a taste of current digital humanities projects in the Netherlands, the questions posed, the software used, the analytical problems, the obstacles they encounter as well as the successes achieved.

TEACHING METHODS
Guest lectures and seminars.

TYPE OF ASSESSMENT
Participation & assignments (25%), Exam (75%).