Module DATA40230: Digital Humanities: Practice and Theory

Department: Natural Sciences

DATA40230: Digital Humanities: Practice and Theory

Prerequisites

• None

Corequisites

• None

Excluded Combination of Modules

• None

Aims

• To introduce students to contemporary debates on the future of the humanities in an increasingly digital world.
• To introduce students to the most important technical tools for representing and manipulating cultural artefacts in digital form.
• To introduce students to theoretically informed contemporary practice within various domains of Digital Humanities.
• To enable students to apply cutting-edge theoretical frameworks and technical tools to practical problems in Digital Humanities.
• To enable students to critique the claims made by advocates of digital approaches to the Humanities.
• To enable students to critique the ideological basis of digital culture and associated issues of ethics and bias.
• To provide students with the knowledge and skills required to create a digital resource and reflect and write about it critically under the guidance of members of staff.

Content

• A sample of the topics covered in the practical part of the module may include:
• How computers represent information; licensing of data and code.
• Representing text, images, audio, video; codecs and compression; Unicode.
• Manipulating unstructured text: basic regular expressions.
• Advanced regular expressions in Python.
• Markup and schemata: HTML, XML, TEI.
• XML- and HTML-related technologies: CSS, XPATH, DOM.
• Manipulating structured text: parsing XML with Python.
• Semantic web; digital ontology; JSON.
• Natural Language Processing and literary stylometry with R and Python
• Deep Learning and vector space representations of language.
• LSTMs, Transformers and AI-generated text; neural machine translation.
• Analysing artistic style with RNNs and neural style transfer.
• A sample of the topics covered in the theoretical part of the module may include:
• The uses of distant reading.
• Quantitative critiques of the canon.
• The future of the book and user-centred design for DH projects.
• The principles of digital editing of texts.
• The curation of cultural artefacts in digital form.
• Research data management and project management for DH.
• The threats posed by the obsession with STEM to the contemporary humanities.
• The reinvention of cultural studies for a digital age of consilience.

Learning Outcomes

• Students will be able to:
• Understand the main positions of those advocating for and critiquing a greater use of technology in the humanities.
• Understand a range of current applications of digital technology to the humanities, their affordances and limitations.
• Understand how computers represent cultural artefacts as media.
• Understand how to formulate and address key questions in the humanities by manipulating digital texts and media.
• Know how to design and create a new DH resource and reflect critically upon its capabilities, limitations, biases and ethical implications.

• Students will be able to:
• Actively critique digital culture in general and DH projects in particular.
• Use standard digital tools and libraries to manipulate and query texts, images and other media.
• Identify a problem in the humanities, formulate a research question and create a digital tool to answer it.
• Identify and make use of relevant theoretical literature and technical tools, libraries and APIs.
• Document the creation of that tool and reflect critically upon it in a clear and well-structured essay.

• Students will be able to:
• Identify an interdisciplinary research problem in DH.
• Locate the necessary theoretical and technical resources required to address the problem.
• Create and document a useful digital tool.
• Think clearly and independently about the intersection of humanistic and ethical questions and digital solutions.
• Write in a clear and rigorous style.
• Manage time efficiently.

Modes of Teaching, Learning and Assessment and how these contribute to the learning outcomes of the module

• Each week the teaching will begin with a one-hour lecture in whcih the lecturer will present an overview of the theory for the week's topic.
• This will be followed by a two-hour seminar in which the class will practice applying the new techniques that have been presented in the lecture.
• There will also be a weekly surgery for raising questions and discussion of topics related to the current theme.

Teaching Methods and Learning Hours

Summative Assessment

Formative Assessment:

Students will submit a formative project at the beginning of term 2 and will receive feedback on it.

■ Attendance at all activities marked with this symbol will be monitored. Students who fail to attend these activities, or to complete the summative or formative assessment specified above, will be subject to the procedures defined in the University's General Regulation V, and may be required to leave the University