This module will offer students in English and in related areas of study the opportunity to explore the area of scholarship known as ‘digital humanities’. Students on the module will encounter and evaluate the ongoing digitization of cultural heritages, and will consider the various ways in which new arrays of digital tools are transforming traditional humanities subjects as well as culture industries such as publishing and heritage. Introducing students to key concepts in book history and digital textuality, and showing their relevance to a number of major digital humanities initiatives and ongoing projects, the module will support the development of critical thinking skills and reflexive awareness of the way their own learning has been shaped by the availability of digital resources and tools. We will investigate topics and concepts such as digitisation, metadata and research infrastructure systems and undertake projects to develop and apply our understanding. Hands-on workshops will provide guidance and practice in the fundamentals of digital scholarship, and offer extensive opportunities for students to develop their own projects. By engaging at both practical and theoretical levels with one of the most important ways in which literary research, or wider field of English Studies, is at the cutting edge of humanities research, students gain access to an important context in which to combine and synthesize skills and knowledge gained across their course of studies. Encouraging students’ self-realization as reflective learners and digital humanists, the module also aims to support their progression towards research careers or research-related employment in the culture industries.
A. explain key concepts in digital humanities and digital literary scholarship. B. produce a piece of original digital scholarship, demonstrating an initial skillset for digital humanities and digital literary scholarship in the markup, encoding and annotation of texts, informed by a theory of the text and of the user or reader. C. critically evaluate historic and contemporary digital humanities projects in relation to a set of clearly defined principles, and relate these to their own practice.
Lectures offer information on the nature, history and current situation of digital humanities research and practice as well as ideas about how such developments have affected the fields of literary and cultural studies. Seminars offer opportunities to understand and evaluate the lecture material in specific contexts and to consider specific digital humanities projects and their impacts in detail. The class will consider published guidelines for evaluating digital humanities research from scholarly associations such as the AHA and MLA, and consider how to adapt these in carrying out our own evaluations of historic and contemporary projects. Seminars will also provide continuous guidance on the use and abuse of generative AI in the production of coursework assessments. Workshops/Lab Practicals provide guidance and practice in the fundamentals of digital scholarship, and offer extensive opportunities to develop their own projects, building upon their own interests and skills of reading and comprehension. The project that students produce should be some form of digital scholarly edition (or, subject to the module leaders’ agreement, archive, virtual museum or related form). The assessment for the module involves students presenting: 1. a brief proposal for a project drawing on key concepts in digital humanities and digital literary scholarship; 2. sample pages of a project using commonly accepted standards; and 3. a short reflective essay (appropriately referenced) that explicitly relates the project to an existing published digital humanities project and a critical evaluation of that project. Word counts are to be determined in the module handbook, but no individual item should exceed 2,000 words.