Introduction to Digital Humanities is a free online course by Harvard University to develop skills in digital research and visualization techniques across subjects and fields within the humanities. It is provided on edX platform. The course is open April 30 – October 31, 2019.
Contents
1 Course Description
2 What You'll Learn
3. Course Outline (Syllabus)
3.1 Lesson 1: Digital Humanities and Data
3.2 Lesson 2: Digital Humanities Projects and Tools
3.3 Lesson 3: Acquiring, Cleaning, and Creating Data
3.4 Lesson 4: The Command Line
3.5 Lesson 5: Working with Tools - Voyant
4 Instructor
5 Website
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Course Description
As primary sources of information are more frequently digitized and available online than ever before, how can we use those sources to ask new questions? How did Chinese families organize themselves and their landscapes in China’s past? How did African slaves from different cultures form communities in the Americas? What influences informed the creation and evolution of Broadway musicals? How can I understand or interpret 1,000 books all at once? How can I create a visualization that my students can interact with? The answers to these questions can be explored using a wide variety of digital tools, methods, and sources.
As museums, libraries, archives and other institutions have digitized collections and artifacts, new tools and standards have been developed that turn those materials into machine-readable data. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), for example, have enabled humanities researchers to process vast amounts of textual data. However, these advances are not limited just to text. Sound, images, and video have all been subject to these new forms of research.
This course will show you how to manage the many aspects of digital humanities research and scholarship. Whether you are a student or scholar, librarian or archivist, museum curator or public historian — or just plain curious — this course will help you bring your area of study or interest to new life using digital tools.
What You'll Learn
- What the term “digital humanities” means in different disciplines.
- How common digital tools work and examples of projects using them.
- How various file types can be used to create, gather, and organize data.
- How to use command-line functions to analyze text.
- How to use free tools to create visual text analysis.
Course Outline (Syllabus)
Lesson 1: Digital Humanities and Data
Instructor
SEE ALSO
Lesson 1: Digital Humanities and Data
- Explain the term "digital humanities," and how it is understood across humanities disciplines.
- Describe the research journey as a partnership between researcher and library collections and staff.
- List examples of the limits of classification.
- Describe the implicit and explicit hierarchies that are created when gathering and analyzing data.
- Distinguish between what counts as data and what does not.
- Identify different data formats and how they fit into a research workflow.
- List tools of data analysis that can be applied to text in any language, space, networks, images, and statistical analysis.
- Evaluate existing digital platforms based on features that can be used for data analysis within different fields such as literature, history, art, and music.
- Identify the differences between unstructured, semi-structured, and structured data.
- Distinguish between different file types, their definitions, and applications.
- Apply intellectual property rights to the downloading and sharing of data.
- Practice different ways of downloading or creating data.
- Understand how command line functions work.
- Apply command line functions to text files.
- Create smaller text files from larger files using command line prompts.
- Create data from multiple text files using Voyant.
- Compare data results across text files using visualization in Voyant.
Instructor
- Peter K. Bol (Charles H. Carswell Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University)
Website
- Introduction to Digital Humanities (Visit this link. This webpage has a link "Take Course on EdX" which directs to EdX website. Now you have to register at EdX and start the course).
SEE ALSO
- Library and Information Science Encyclopedia
- Library and Information Science Study and Training Courses Programs and Resources for Future-Ready Librarians
CITATION INFORMATION
Article Title
- Introduction to Digital Humanities - Online Course by Harvard University
Website Name
- Librarianship Studies & Information Technology
URL
- https://www.librarianshipstudies.com/2019/04/introduction-to-digital-humanities.html
Last Updated
- April 22, 2019
Original Published Date
- April 22, 2019
