Assignment Overview

  • Students will work individually to extend their knowledge of a DH method
  • A writeup of ~1500-2000 words
  • Assignment can be completed at any time during the semester, but must be finished before December 12

Assignment Details

This class overviews (a portion of) the digital humanities field and surveys a range of tools and methods DH scholars use to analyze humanistic data. As a survey class, our goal is to cultivate a broad literacy about the field, but we cannot build deep expertise in any particular method. In a field so methodologically and disciplinarily diverse, no individual scholar is expert in or regularly uses all the methods gathered under the moniker “DH”—each scholar has a particular expertise pertinent to their research area and questions.

For this assignment you will choose a DH methodology and undertake a small-scale experiment using data relevant to a discipline, subject, or research question you find interesting. You can either:

  1. Choose a method we studied directly in one of our labs and develop an experiment to extend that work in complexity, theorization, or application
  2. Choose a method we did not study directly in class and conduct a preliminary experiment, for instance by following an online tutorial
  3. Develop new expertise in a method in which you already have expertise—for instance, one you use in your graduate research—and document that development

You should work with humanities-related data for this assignments. As our discussions in this class will have helped illustrate, that is a pretty capacious remit, but there are limits. Data drawn from fields like history, literature, religious studies, philosophy, and art history are clearly relevant. Data about run times or caloric intake—well, probably not. If you are unsure, chat with me about what you are thinking.

There are other options, but one very straightforward way to complete this assignment would be to follow a lesson at the Programming Historian, which publishes peer-reviewed, step-by-step tutorials about a wide range of DH methods.

After experimenting and developing your understanding of the given method, you should write a brief process paper that puts your experiments into dialogue with your research interests as well as several writers from our course to analyze 1. what you did 2. what humanistic insights those experiments offered 3. what pitfalls you noticed and, finally 4. how you might imagine developing further expertise in this method and why.

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