Digital Humanities

Required Courses

ENGL 4885: Intro to Humanities Computing

Three More Humanities Computing classes from the following list:

ENGL 4886: Text and Corpus Analysis

ENGL 4888: Humanities Computing I

ENGL 4889: Humanities Computing II

ENGL 4832: Writing for the World Wide Web

What are the Digital Humanities?

Digital Humanities (DH) began a few decades ago with the application of computer tools to problems in literary stylistics, text processing, and text linguistics (including corpus linguistics, machine translation, and other computational problems). Today, the field is dominated by mark-up languages like HTML and XML, the meta-language used to "tag" writing for machine processing (display, searches), a new dimension of textual information in the twenty-first century. Mark-up is closely related to "scripting," the specialized form of programming for text operations and interactive Web pages. Thus mark-up has become the means for an essentially new form of writing in which the medium and the message are more intimately and intricately interconnected than ever before.

Notable DH projects in the department include

Emma: a suite of software applications for writers designed to foster a writing community in classrooms

The Linguistic Atlas Project: the site through which the Atlas distributes text and audio materials related to American English, especially using GIS tools

While all DH programs of study will necessarily include familiarity with at least one period of English literature, the flexibility of graduate requirements in English will allow students to follow their own interests in the selection of their coursework.