Digital Literacy Through Cultural and Literary Topics

Fall 2021
Monday - Wednesday 3:30-4:45pm
Classroom: Dooly Memorial 208

Prof. Susanna Allés Torrent
Modern Languages and Literatures, 210-23
University of Miami
susanna_alles@miami.edu
Office hours: M-W 11am - 1pm, and by appointment

In this course, we explore the intersection of digital technologies and the humanities, and we delve into the growing field of the Digital Humanities (DH). In doing so, we will pay special attention to initiatives done within the Hispanic world and to how the “Humanidades digitales” differ from the mainstream anglophone DH. You will grasp how digital methods can be applied to texts and other cultural records, and you will become familiar with the basic principles of computing and the fundamentals of some markup languages, such as HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) and XML (eXtensible Markup Language), as well as with the principles of the Text Encoding Initiative. The course will also offer some theory and practice on 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). Also, we will analyze how the cultural record is digitized, preserved and catalogued through metadata standards in GLAM institutions (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums). The course mixes theoretical readings, hands-on tutorials, digital assignments, and the creation of an online portfolio.

By the end of the course, students will:

  1. Appraise the role and value of the digital humanities as a multilingual and diverse discipline
  2. Identify the main trends within the Hispanic World and the meaning of “Humanidades digitales”
  3. Apply concepts of literary studies and adopt techniques through digital tools and digital methods
  4. Critically evaluate digital humanities projects
  5. Relate the mechanisms through which humanities and technologies benefit each other
  6. Examine the concept of “data” in the humanities
  7. Experiment with structured humanities data and apply digital techniques (text encoding, text analysis, mapping, visualization, etc.)
  8. Learn to work collaboratively in a digital project