How does the digital modify, enhance, or contract the humanities? Conversely, what happens to the human that is at the center of the humanities when refracted through the digital? More modestly and disciplinarily, can we know or ask something new about texts through the digital humanities (dh)? We’ll address these epistemological and methodological questions by reading widely in dh scholarship and related criticism (e.g., new media studies), and by examining digital humanities projects. We will focus our attention on what happens when digital environments, new media, and computational methods are used to create, represent, and circulate texts and textual analyses. Balancing theory with praxis, we will not only study but also practice the digital humanities. To do so, we’ll learn and experiment with some key digital humanities methods and forms for textual analysis, such as “distant reading,” archive building, and new modes for scholarly communication. As such, this course offers an introduction to digital humanities for studies of language and literature.
Credit
The course is inspired by and builds from syllabi by Alan Liu, Amardeep Singh & Ed Whitley, Lauren Klein, Ryan Cordell, Todd Pressner, Matt Kirschenbaum and Matt Gold & Steve Brier, among others.
The course title riffs off of Liu’s course he has taught at UCLA, “Literature +.” I use “Text +” to evoke textual scholarship (with its attention to a long history of the technologies of texts) as well as to gesture toward the layers of context, mediation, and interpretive frames that structure our textual encounters.
