Computing Applications    

               in the Humanities

An Introduction to Digital Humanites
Our course this semester provides an introductory grounding to the digital humanities. How do digital tools, methodologies, and environments affect our attempts to preserve, disseminate, and understand human culture? Taking an interdisciplinary approach, we'll look at familiar activities-- writing, reading, communicating-- along with some less familiar objects of study-- gaming, messaging, linking, searching-- to forge a 21st century perspective on thinking in the humanities. We'll spend quite a bit of time early in the semester reading and thinking about the role of the computer in the humanities, attending to the ways in which the digital frustrates, constrains, and facilitates humanistic inquiry. As we build a strong theoretical and practical basis for engaging in critique, we'll shift focus slightly in order to directly engage with a diverse array of specific applications and technologies in the digital humanities. Students will participate in discussions, write analyses of texts and technologies, and produce either a term-paper or a digital humanities project. Welcome!