Digital Humanities in Practice (DIKULT 207, Fall 2017)

Course introduction

The course focuses on the development of both theoretical and practical skills in digital humanities. Students will learn how digital platforms can be used in research in the humanities. In the theoretical component of the course, students read academic texts on digital humanities research and do practical research on selected projects in the digital humanities. The course focuses on student active research. Students gain practical research experience as digital humanists by developing projects in ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base. This knowledge base is a scientific, open access, relational database programmed in Drupal that documents creative work, research, events and actors in the field of electronic literature.

Students in the course will gain practical experience through working with one or more of the following areas:

• editing: researching, writing, and editing entries about electronic literature in the Knowledge Base
• web design and user interface development
• project planning and implementation; team-work and academic collaboration
• documentation
• visualization based research methods

This course provides a unique opportunity for students to get real-world experience working with scholars on an international research project in electronic literature and the digital humanities, and to contribute to the state of the art in these fields.

The ELMCIP Knowledge Base is based at the University of Bergen and can be accessed at http://elmcip.net/knowledgebase Contributions to the ELMCIP Knowledge Base are publicly accessible and licenced with a Creative Commons, non-commercial share-alike license (nc-sa).

Teaching Methods

There will be four hours of teaching each week for twelve weeks during the semester, split between one theoretical and one practical seminar each week. Student workload is estimated at 20 hours per week from the beginning of the semester until the exam, including during weeks without classes. This time should be spent attending classes, reading the assigned readings, completing assignments, contributing to the database projects, and gathering relevant material in the library and online (books, articles, videos, etc). If there are fewer than five students enrolled in the course, the institute can chose to reduce the hours of instruction, as per guidelines published on Mitt UiB. If this is the case, students will be able to find information about the revision of course hours at the start of the semester, before the deadline for semester registration (Sep. 1).

Assignments will be posted on Mitt UiB. UIB course page: http://www.uib.no/course/DIKULT207