New for Spring 2024, GSLIS will offer a course in Digital Humanities (709.3), taught by Assistant Professor S.E. Hackney, who has worked in DH for nearly a decade. The class will be held synchronously online Wednesdays 6:40 - 9:15pm, and is a Zero Textbook Cost course, and utilitzes Open Educational Resources whenever possible. 

This course examines the history, methods, tools, and scholarly practices of teaching and research in the digital humanities (DH), including ways in which the library can engage with, enhance, and support those activities. The course will focus on digital humanities as a burgeoning field in its own right, as well as the development of digital methods in specific disciplines within the humanities.  Students will consider their role as information professionals in the creation, cleaning, storage, and dissemination of digital humanities datasets and research projects, as well as gain hands-on experience with some of the tools and methods used in these activities.

Students in this course will have the opportunity to both study DH as a field, as well as create their own digital projects using DH methods. They will learn techniques to identify potential datasets, collect that data, clean and prepare it for analysis, and to identify appropriate tools and methods to answer DH research questions using data. Additionally, we will engage specifically with the role that the library and larger information professions play with regards to the collection, storage, and curation both of data with the potential for use in DH work, as well as the broad range of deliverables and project types that can result from DH research.

Students completing this course will be able to: 

• Understand, define, and explain to others what DH is, the types of research and scholarship activities associated with DH, and the general history and development of the field 

• Conduct secondary research on DH topics using academic and popular sources, tools, networks, and services, and synthesize, organize, and describe the findings of this research 

• Identify and describe various digital data formats, as well as tools and techniques appropriate for the gathering/cleaning/storing of that data. 

• Identify and evaluate tools and methods for conducting DH research/developing DH projects 

• Articulate in-depth the research practices, trends, tools, and methods for conducting DH research within a specific humanities field of their choosing 

• Identify and evaluate the research lifecycle as it uniquely relates to digital projects, and the role of LIS workers in the creation, maintenance, dissemination, and preservation of DH projects