Week 2: What is (are?) the digital humanities?
January 23, 2014Thanks for making our first day of class so productive and engaging. Just from listening to our initial discussion, I can tell that we’re going to have a lot of fun this semester. I hope you feel the same way, and I hope you’ll take me seriously when I reiterate this point I made during class: I want this course to help you achieve your individual goals, so if at any point during the semester you’re struggling to see the connection between what we’re reading/doing and what you want to accomplish, I hope you’ll talk to me about it.
Our first class ended with a whirlwind tour of the course policies, assignments, and calendar, but next week we’ll slow things down a bit. Here’s a brief overview of our plans:
- On Monday, we’ll try (and probably fail!) to define the term “digital humanities.” We’ll also assign “discussion superheroes” for many of our future reading days and talk about what that entails. Before you come to class, please read pages 1–66 in Understanding Digital Humanities and pages 1–26 in Digital_Humanities. In addition, please thoroughly review the course policies and the details for our first assignment, taking some time to familiarize yourself with a variety of projects linked on that page.
- On Wednesday, we’ll hold our first workshop, designed to help you establish a personal system for following the many ongoing conversations surrounding the digital humanities. For this workshop, it will be helpful if you’re using your own computer, so bring your laptop unless you absolutely can’t. Wednesday is also the deadline for selecting a project to analyze for our first assignment, so please come to class with a list of your top three choices, in ranked order. (I’d like to make sure that everyone is analyzing a different project, so the rankings might matter.)
Last but not least, remember that our classroom is changing, so starting on Monday please go directly to 1120 Torgersen Hall instead of the lab in Shanks.
If you have any questions about these plans, just let me know. Otherwise, I’ll see you on Monday. Happy reading!