DH Certificate: Combining Humanities knowledge with digital skills
Active since 2016, our Digital Humanities Certificate has been a method for professors to incorporate digital projects into their courses and for students to use digital tools to ask new kinds of questions about humanities objects of study.
These projects have included work in all aspects of digital work from text analysis, network analysis, mapping, quantitative analysis, digital exhibits etc. Since 2016, our certificate has included over 50 courses in 7 disciplines.
The symposium celebrates the innovative teaching and learning done as part of our Certificate. The core classes for the certificate are taught by Librarians, including Meagan Duever’s “Intro to GIS” and Elliott Kuecker’s “Text Analysis” class. The praxis classes are those taught in other disciplines that incorporate a DH project as a significant portion of the class.
We embrace all kinds of explorations and the DigiLab is an active participant in these classes. We can help scope or design projects, offer instruction to students or instructors, and offer the Lab as a space to teach that is equipped with necessary technology.
The symposium highlights professors who share their experience in teaching these types of classes. First is Dr. Elizabeth Davis who is the coordinator of the Writing Certificate and Writing Fellows Program. Her presentation, “Data, Documentation, and Dialogue: A Pedagogical Intervention in the STEM/Humanities Divide” describes her novel coordination of her Technical Writing class with Dr. Shannon Quinn’s Data Science class in Computer Science.
Using a corpus of texts compiled from Project Gutenberg (the shared dataset between these two classes can be found in our GitHub repository), Davis’ class serves as the content experts and defined the questions Quinn’s students would work with using the text as data in their own area of expertise. Together these cross-disciplinary teams created, tested, and wrote documentation for their analysis.
Second, Dr. John Hale, Arch Professor of Linguistics, presented the “Text and Corpus Linguistics” class along with students Katie Kuiper and Keiko Bridwell. Hale’s class utilized the Digital Archive of Southern Speech (DASS) to investigate questions of language use and how words change over time. The Linguistics Lab has also compiled a number of additional corpora, including LDC corpora, which are available to Cooperating Academic Units. This class introduces students to methods for exploring and using corpora for research and analysis.
Text & Corpus presentation PDF
Hale will be offering the Fall 2020 edition of Text & Corpus Analysis, an interdisciplinary course originally created by Professor William Kretszschmar. No programming skills are required!
Kuiper will offer her expertise in corpus linguistics as the TA for the class this Fall, and Bridwell will apply her skills as the RA for the DigiLab next year.
These classes are the epitome of the DH certificate. Each opens up students not only to digital methods but to give students the confidence in their own skills to be stronger collaborators and to recognize the strengths of their peers.
Learn more about our certificate or add a class to our list for next year.