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Fall 2017 Courses

Interested in learning more about the Digital Humanities? Check out one of our courses for the Fall 2017 semester. 

DIGH 400: Introduction to Digital Humanities Research
Dr. Kyle Roberts
Thursdays, 7:00 pm - 9:30 pm

This course is an introduction to the role of New Media and the Digital Humanities in the service of cultural heritage. It will focus on examining the ways that emerging media have affected our historical understanding in the past and present and on developing facilities with digital applications, methodologies, and platforms that scholars and public history professionals increasingly need to use in the present and future. This includes archiving, blogging, digitizing, digital storytelling, editing and analyzing, social media, virtual exhibitions and web design. It will also take up broad social and ethical questions surrounding media and contemporary culture, including accuracy of evidence, intellectual property, and open access to knowledge. By the end of the semester, students will have produced a digital portfolio of their work.
Cross-listed with HIST 479: Public History New Media

DIGH 500/595: Digital Humanities Project
Dr. Elizabeth Hopwood
Tuesdays, 7:00 pm - 9:30 pm

This capstone course will pull together the curriculum by requiring the student to work first on a Center research project (fall semester) and produce and publish online an innovative electronic project of their own design (spring semester). Depending on student interests and faculty expertise, options may range from writing a conventional research essay in digitally publishable form, to creating a sample electronic edition and writing a rationale to support it, to building and explaining a media database or digital tool that demonstrates important theoretical and practical points in digital humanities work. The student will be required in each case to specify real-world institutional contexts within which the work would make a contribution to the digital humanities.
The 6-hour course sequence is designed to be distributed over two consecutive semesters.

COMP 436: Markup Languages
Dr. Nicholas Hayward
Wednesdays, 4:15 pm - 6:45 pm

This course is concerned with XML and its various component frameworks. The core frameworks to be covered include Document Object Model (DOM), Simple API for XML processing (SAX), the XML Path language (XPath), and XSLT. A number of real-world XML languages will be explored: Math Markup Language (MathML), Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), and Ant Build Files (to name a few). The course concludes with a discussion of XML and Network Services (e.g. SOAP and XML/ RPC). Visiting speakers and affiliated researchers from various disciplines may help the class ‌contextualize the learning of markup languages, TEI/DocBook, as well as XML, XSLT, RDF, etc.

From the histories of sugar plantation slavery in the Caribbean cane fields, to President Lincoln's proclamation of Thanksgiving as a national holiday, to Quaker Oats' introduction of the Aunt Jemima character to sell pancake mix, to the more recent controversy surrounding the publication of the Thug Kitchen Cookbook in 2014, food has played a consistent yet complicated role in the shaping of national histories, social relations, and personal experiences and cultures.
In this course, students will examine the relationship between food and the textual histories of race, gender, and class in the Americas and the Caribbean from the early nineteenth century to the present.

This interdisciplinary course will introduce students to leading theories and methods from the fields of food studies, history, textual studies, new media, and the digital humanities. Students will consider both the history of food writing and food writing history across a range of genres and media, such as newspapers, visual advertisements, cookbooks, novels, film and TV.

Students will also participate in the remixing and rewriting ('forking') of these histories through in-class discussion, archival research, and collaborative project building while also learning digital tools and methods including digital curation and exhibit building, and data analysis.