English 203

Description

This course serves as an introduction to the practice of digital humanities in the field of Medieval Studies. The goals of the course are threefold:

• to explore the conceptual terrain of digital humanities and to become familiar with debates about digital humanities;
• to learn a series of basic skills in digital humanities practice, including tools for digitizing manuscripts (XML and TEI); text analysis and statistics (Voyant, Wordhoard, and others); text analysis in Python; stylometry; topic modeling; network analysis and visualization; 3D modeling; and resources for publishing and presenting research;
• to explore the extensive world of digital humanities projects in Medieval Studies, in a range of fields from literature to history to art history to musicology to manuscript studies and more.

Students are welcome to work on their own projects as their work for the course – i.e., if someone is already working on a research area that could benefit from the digital humanities tools presented in the course, she or he could develop a project based on that research. No background in digital humanities is required; all are welcome, regardless of experience.

This class is cross-listed with Medieval Studies 250.