Digital Humanities for Historians and Other Scholars

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What are Digital Humanities? What does the library of the future look like? Will the single-author peer-reviewed article survive the DH storm that is coming? How will the DH impact the ways we do historical research? And what ethical and legal problems arise from the use of DH methods? In this course, we will familiarize ourselves and experiment with a variety of Digital Humanities tools, such as network analysis, geospatial mapping, text mining, and crowdsourcing, interrogating how the DH reshape the ways we approach textual and material culture, ask research questions, process data, publish, and store academic scholarship.

• Elias Muhanna, "Islamic and Middle East Studies and the Digital Turn"
• Christian Lange, Maksim Abdul Latif, Yusuf Celik et al., "Text Mining Islamic Law"
• Melissa Terras, "Crowdsourcing in the Digital Humanities"
• Cecilia Palombo, "Digital Transit Ports for the Illicit Trade in Antiquities"
• Maxim Romanov, "Toward Abstract Models for Islamic History"
• Bridget Whearty, Digital Codicology. Medieval Books and Modern Labor

Weekly readings of ca. 100 pages. Out of 12 weeks, students are expected to complete a total of 10 assignments and post their results in the course portal. Weekly assignments include short responses to your peers in the course portal. For the final "unessay" project, students may create a podcast, poster, website, video, or app or choose to write a traditional essay.

Term Assessments:

• Project(s) - 40%
• Presentation or performance - 10%
• Participation - 20%

Final Assessments:

• Final paper, problem set, or project - 30%

• Multimedia Student Project Required
• Statistical, design or other software use required