DATA40230: Digital Humanities: Practice and Theory

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• 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.

• 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.

Subject-specific Knowledge:

• 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.

Subject-specific Skills:

• 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.

Key Skills:

• 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.

• 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.

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