About

Practicum in Digital Humanities

This seminar has an experiential, hands-on and project-based component and aims to offer students the possibility to apply their learning in the field of Digital Humanities and move forward on their personal research project. It will offer a set of practical skills that goes from general principles of computing, web technologies, command line, electronic text analysis and distant reading, text encoding and XML markups, mapping, and network visualization. Students should expect to carry out many practical exercises with programming languages and digital tools, conduct a relatively small amount of readings, and work towards a digital final project.

Learning Outcomes

Students will first and foremost gain knowledge:

1. They will learn to think critically and apply digital methods to articulate projects in the humanities;
2. Integrate digital methods to their specific inquiry discipline (genre studies, history, Iberian, Latin-American, French studies, cultural studies, literary studies, etc.);
3. Appreciate the value of open access and open source to share and reuse code and data;
4. Deepen their knowledge with programming languages;
5. Gather, produce, understand, analyze, process and use data with different digital methods and tools;
6. Strengthen their ability to evaluate and criticize digital sources and data; 5. Understand the relevance to apply and use design critically;
7. Acquire the capacity to outline a digital infrastructure to publish and preserve a digital outcome; 7. Work collaboratively.

Course Readings, and additional hands-on work:

This course has a relatively small amount of general readings, since it prioritize a hands-on dedication. However, this list might be modified depending on the student’s projects. Also, as it is specified in the assignments section, each student has to complement it with an annotated bibliography with readings relevant to his/her project.
Additionally, students have to be aware that this course involves hands-on work that must be performed outside the classroom before every session. Most of the time this work will consist on the completion of online tutorials and exercises to be discussed then in class.