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, and mapping. 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;
7. Understand the relevance to apply and use design critically;
8. Acquire the capacity to outline a digital infrastructure to publish and preserve a digital outcome;
9. 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.

Grading and assignments

The assignments and distribution of the final grade will be as follows:

I. Attendance and active participation (10%)

II. Exercises (25%)

Students will have weekly digital exercises with the different technologies seen in class. They will be also asked to follow several tutorials to deepen the hands-on work and understanding of technologies and tools.

III. Formal Presentations (15%)

The first presentation will offer a basic introductory overview of the student’s DH knowledge (this knowledge may be limited or none, or may be more extensive). They will outline their personal research goals for the course seminar and offer preliminary ideas for both the skills they hope to require and the projects they may develop in the practicum. Due date: Feb. 2nd, 2023

Each student will be asked to formally guide the seminar for one class meeting. In this, they will present a clearly articulated argument about one or more of the course readings for that day, offer examples of projects, tools, and/or texts relevant to the assigned material and be responsible for guiding questions that will launch the in-class discussion. Dates will be alloted at the beginning of the semester.

Each student or group will be asked to offer a formal presentation addressing their course project at the close of the practicum. This presentation should attend to several issues: a) a general overview of the project; b) a theoretical contextualization of the digital methodology used; c) a technical description of the implementation of their project; d) key issues they have faced; e) future perspective for the preservation and further development of their project. Due date: April 28th, 2023.

IV. Annotated bibliography (10%)

Students will elaborate a formal bibliography that will include citations of sources with summary and evaluation information for each source. For this assignment, students will use Zotero. In this bibliography, they will include the readings seen and mentioned in class, plus a selection of five works not on the course syllabus and relevant to their digital humanities project. For samples, see: https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/614/03/ Also, the bibliography will have to be embeded in the digital project website. Due date: April 20th, 2023.

V. Final Digital Project (40%)

Each student, independently or in collaboration, will deliver a digital project relevant to the PhD dissertation or current research. The project can be a digital portfolio or a digital scholarly project related to your dissertation topic. The topic and any aspect of the project should always be discussed with the professor. Please note that while this course does not require students to produce an article or essay, these projects must be original, clearly articulated, and the formal presentation that accompanies them must explain in clear detail the methodological approach, argument/intervention, and relevance of the project. Due date: May 4th, 2023.

Some tips

• Technology: the course has many technical components, but no previous computer programming or web design experience is required. However, it is crucial that you demonstrate willingness to engage with technology, meaning that you are willing to experiment, try, and fail. Sometimes you will get stuck and maybe get frustrated because “things don’t work” in your machines, but you don’t have to despair: Investigate for yourself, try to fix it on your own (google it, youtube it), ask for help from your peers, etc.
• Attendance is mandatory: you must come to class and come prepared. Since this course will be mainly a discussion-based class and there will be hands-on work, your presence is essential. If you don’t come to class, you are missing the essence of the course and you probably will have issues advancing with the following topic, which eventually might disrupt the collective work of the group.
• Markdown: Almost from day one, we will be using markdown. I strongly encourage you that you start using it and that you take all notes of this course in .md. At the end of the course, you will understand why.
• Be patient with the professor as well! In this course we will see many different technologies and tools, the professor is not an expert in all of them, so please be patience and try to figure out or help in your own capacity.