dhcu.ca

1. Syllabus

DH, eh?

The course catalogue will tell you that this course is about an “Introduction to the theoretical and practical aspects of the Digital Humanities, including the historical and ongoing debates over its boundaries, methodologies, objectives and values.” I suppose that’s more or less correct. Doesn’t actually tell us much about what ‘dh’ is about. Let us turn to the web:

definingdh meme data-capta lizard

Well, still no good answer, which is great, for it gives us much territory to explore. I’m loathe to define DH. But I will say this much:  it’s not just about tool use or shiny new digital toys applied to humanities-type materials. It is also about exploring what our tools do to us. I would suggest that’s the more important aspect. Archaeology teaches us that our things help make us us as much as we make our things. What kind of a world are we building? There is no such thing as ‘data’. There are only ‘capta’.

We will read, and we will make. We will build!

Let us begin. Take a look at Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, “What is Digital Humanities, and What’s It Doing in English Departments?” ADE Bulletin 2010.

I am grateful to people like Ted Underwood, Alan Liu, Miriam Posner, Tanya Clement for sharing their syllabi online; and also to the broader DH community on Twitter for sharing and discussing materials.

Required materials

  • A free account for Slack (our space is ‘https://dhcu-2019.slack.com'). You will receive an invitation email from me by the end of September- check your spam folder if it hasn’t turned up by October 2nd or email me!
  • An account on Github http://github.com
  • An account with Hypothesis https://web.hypothes.is/
  • Twitter is worth lurking on since many digital humanities folks are on there, and that’s where a lot of the field is discussed (Amanda French and Dan Cohen maintain excellent lists here and here.

One of the first things we’ll do (and discuss) is setting up an online scholarly identity. We’ll probably use this template to get started..



finger Next: Assessment

Cover image: Davide Cantelli, Unsplash