In this free course, Digital humanities: humanities research in the digital age, you will learn how the digital transformation of our cultural heritage and our daily lives is changing the way humanities scholars conduct their research and share it with the world. This course will introduce you to the growing area of scholarship known as ‘digital humanities’ and explain its relevance to the study of the past and of the present.You will learn about the opportunities offered by the growing availability of digital data and about the challenges of using it ethically and responsibly. You will become familiar with core concepts of digital research such as digitisation, metadata, ‘big data’, the FAIR principles, data wrangling, qualitative and quantitative analysis and knowledge infrastructures. While this course will not teach you how to use specific tools or programming languages, it will provide you with a good theoretical foundation upon which you can build more specialised skills in areas that complement your humanities interests. Above all, through this course you will develop your critical thinking skills and apply humanities perspectives to interrogate the digital data, tools and methods you encounter in your life as a researcher, user and creator of digital technology.This course Digital humanities: humanities Research in the Digital Age was developed bythe Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRCDoctoral Training Partnership thanks to funding from the Arts andHumanities Research Council, part of UK Research and Innovation.
Overview
Syllabus
- Week1Week 1: Digital transformations
- Introduction
- Session 1 Why digital humanities? History, challenges, opportunities
- 1.1 What is digital humanities?
- 1.2 A short history of digital humanities
- 1.3 Session summary
- Session 2 An introduction to digitisation
- 2.1 Who digitises cultural heritage materials, who uses them, and why?
- 2.2 From dust to digits: capturing cultural heritage materials in digital forms
- 2.2.1 What gets digitised and how?
- 2.2 Digit[al]isation: the challenges of a new kind of archival system
- 2.3 Session summary
- Session 3 Metadata and search
- 3.1 Seeing through machines
- 3.2 Search engines
- 3.3 Web crawlers and metadata
- 3.4 Critical search
- 3.5 Searching the past
- 3.6 Session summary
- Session 4 An introduction to born-digital data
- 4.1 The ascent of the born-digital
- 4.2 Encountering the born digital data in research
- 4.3 Challenges and questions
- 4.4 Session summary
- 5 Summary of Week 1
- References
- Further reading
- Acknowledgements
- Week2Week 2: Digital approaches
- Introduction
- Session 1 Large scale v small scale
- 1.1 The scale of scholarship over the centuries
- 1.2 Tools for analysing digital library content today
- 1.3 DIY tools
- 1.4 Session summary
- Session 2 Intellectual Property, access and digital humanities research
- 2.1 Making digital copies
- 2.2 Licensing and copyright
- 2.3 Understanding the CC license components
- 2.4 Open Access publishing
- 2.5 Accessing or creating data for your research
- 2.6 Stewardship of your own data: writing your data management plan
- 2.7 Ethics and data protection
- 2.8 Session summary
- Session 3 Data wrangling
- 3.1 You’ve got data! Now what?
- 3.2 Primum non nocere: a primer on data ethics and personal data regulations
- 3.3 Session summary
- Session 4 Data analysis: making your data speak and shine
- 4.1 Bridging the digital divides
- 4.2 Data analysis: qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods
- 4.2.1 Quantitative analysis
- 4.2.2 Qualitative analysis
- 4.3 Mixed analysis
- 4.4 Session summary
- 5 Summary of Week 2
- References
- Further reading
- Acknowledgements
- Week3Week 3: Digital reflections
- Introduction
- Session 1 Publishing and communication
- 1.1 Scholarly communication over the centuries
- 1.2 Reproducible research
- 1.3 Session summary
- Session 2 Conclusions and next steps
- 2.1 Discover more digital resources
- 2.2 Read digital humanities research papers and journals
- 2.3 Reflection
- 2.4 Session summary
- 3 Summary of Week 3
- References
- Acknowledgements
