DIGITAL HUMANITIES 1: INTRODUCTION TO DIGITAL HUMANITIES

This course will serve as an introduction to the field of Digital Humanities and to the main concepts related to them. It will provide the students with a broad overview of the Digital Humanities: what they are, what we mean with digital humanities, why do we need them. It will also explore how the practice of Digital Humanities is dramatically changing the way we study history, languages, literature and all the other disciplines that fall under the label of humanities. It will then delve into some basic concepts of computational thinking that will be useful to the students in the advanced classes of the Minor.

Students will be able to understand the different approaches to Digital Humanities.

There are no prerequisites: students should have a basic understanding and practice of the most common informatic tools and social media.

After an introduction to the Digital Humanities covering their broad range, the course will concentrate specifically on some of them in order to analyse them more deeply and will look at the way traditional research produces knowledge comparing it to the way knowledge is produced by computational support. We will observe how the DH approach has changed the way we look at data and the way we ask questions to extract knowledge from it.
We will look at what is computational thinking, where does it occur, why should one care, and how it is being applied. We will briefly explore then the main concepts like Algorithms and Patterns and look at how to apply Computational Thinking to the domain or subjects of interest of the students.

Specific readings (open access or provided in pdf format through the platform) will be proposed to the students in advance of classes.

Students will i) present the appointed readings through Lighting talks followed by discussion in class; ii) take a test (multiple answers style) to verify their knowledge of the concepts explored in class; iii) produce an essay defined at the beginning of the year.

Seminar style classes; tutorials; Flipped classes (students will be asked to look at home at short videos and other materials and use the class time to present and /or discuss them). Hands-on activities.

written and oral