Instructor: Susanna Allés Torrent

Course Description

The growing field of Digital Humanities is enriching not only the academic world but also libraries and cultural institutions. An introduction to Digital Humanities is a great opportunity to introduce you to new methods and general tendencies within the humanities in general.

The seminar gives you the opportunity to survey and gain a general understanding of what is (or are) Digital Humanities and experience new ways of doing digital research. You will become familiar with the basic principles of computing: how the command line works, what is a server, how to connect and transfer files to and from a server. You will also learn the fundamentals of some markup languages, such as HTML and CSS, and few concepts of programming language, such as Javascript, in order to be able to create your own webpage.

The course will also focus on the principles of the text analysis and text mining and will present some of the most common programs, in order to ask new questions and offer new ways to view and analyze texts (that otherwise, and done by hand, would be time consuming or even impossible).

You will have the opportunity to learn other markup languages, such as XML (eXtensible Markup Language), and the principles of the Text Encoding Initiative. This will allow you to understand the great challenges that faces digital scholarly edition nowadays.

You will also get in touch, even in a superficial way, with other metadata standards used by GLAM institutions (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) and understand the relevance and mechanisms of cataloguing and structuring data.

By the end of the course, you will be familiar with digital tools and digital methods in literary studies in order to broaden your digital skills, techniques and methodological approaches to your current and future research. The class format will be part lecture, part hands-on. The course will be given in Spanish but readings and materials will be in either English or Spanish.

Even though the course has technical components, no previous computer programming or design experience is required.

The seminar has six main units:

  1. Computer basics: how the terminal works; server and connections
  2. Building a webpage: basics of HTML, CSS
  3. XML and Text Encoding Initiative
  4. Text mining and Text Analysis
  5. Metadata for GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums)

###Out-of-Class Assignments

  1. Set up a simple website hosted from a Linux Apache server (CUNIX): http://www.columbia.edu/~yourUNI/ (10%)
  2. Markup of a text in XML/TEI, transformation and creation of a small webpage (20%)
  3. Textual Analysis of a literary work with one of the tools seen in class and a written paper about the results (no more than 2 pages, typed in 12-point Times New Roman font, 1’5 space, with 1 inch margins). (10%)
  4. Description of a bibliographic item in Dublin Core, MARC, EAD, METS, RDF or MODS (10%)
  5. Final digital project (50%)

###Weekly Breakdown and assignments for each lecture Lecture 1 Introduction

Lecture 2 (Unit 1) DH Definition, History, and Projects

Lecture 3 (Unit 2) Computer basics

Lecture 4 (Unit 3) Building a Webpage Basics of HTML

Lecture 5 Basic of CSS

Lecture 6 HTML & CSS

Lecture 7 Frameworks: Jekyll

Lecture 8 (Unit 4) Extensible Markup Language & Text Encoding Initiative

Lecture 9 Extensible Markup Language & Text Encoding Initiative

Lecture 10 (Unit 5) Text Mining and Text Analysis Tools Overview: Voyant Tools, AntConc RStudio

Lecture 11 Text Mining and Text Analysis

Lecture 12 (Unit 6) Metadata for GLAM

Lecture 13 Metadata for GLAM

Lecture 14 Digital Projects presentations

Note: This course was taught for the first time in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures (Spanish G4025 section 001) at Columbia University. Fall 2015