Digital Humanities Courses

Surveys current research and practice in Digital Libraries, which seek to provide intellectual access to large-scale, distributed digital information repositories; current readings from the research literature which covers the breadth of this interdisciplinary area of study. Prerequisite: graduate classification in computer science.

Digital representations of literary and other texts are reshaping scholarship in English and other humanities disciplines. Digital English: Text, Image and Interface will introduce students to the theory and practice of digital representation in the humanities through a team-taught course that includes scholarly readings, practicums, case studies, and workshops in digital practice. This course will be team taught by Dr. Amy Earhart and Dr. Maura Ives. Prerequisite: 12 credits of English, including 3 at 300-level; Honors.

This course is an introduction to electronic scholarly editing, consisting of a historical survey of Anglo-American editorial theory and a concentrated study of contemporary electronic editorial theory and practice. The historical survey will provide background for students unfamiliar with editorial theory, introducing key concepts and topics of debate (intentionality, textual authority, text as social document, text as process). The remaining readings emphasize the impact of electronic media upon scholarly editing, focusing upon the digital turn in textual studies-that is, the ways in which early models of computer-assisted editing that concentrated upon automation of certain aspects of editorial procedure have given way to a digital archive model that places emphasis upon new editorial goals such as textual multiplicity and user-determined textual manipulations. The second half of the course will look more closely at editorial methodology in the digital environment, with emphasis upon the role of technology in investigating textual transmission and in representing and facilitating textuality for scholars (text encoding; digital imaging; the question of apparatus within the digital environment; design issues). Students enrolled in ENGL 689 will be expected to attend the September workshop on text encoding sponsored by the Department of English and the College of Liberal Arts.