An Introduction to the Field of Digital Humanities

This lecture by Dr Anouk Lang will introduce attendees to the field of Digital Humanities (DH). Beginning with some background on the field’s intellectual history, interdisciplinary character and major debates, we’ll then move on to an investigation of a few digital projects and tools in the areas of history and literary studies. We will consider what it means to work with data when you are trained in a humanities discipline: where one’s data comes from, how to manage it, how to analyse and manipulate it. We’ll identify resources for keeping up with the field in relation to both research and teaching – Twitter feeds, web resources, discussion forums and recent scholarly collections – and end with a consideration of the kind of technical skills participants might find it useful to begin developing if they are interested in pursuing work of this kind for themselves. Attendees are encouraged to bring a laptop in order to explore some of the interactive tools and projects as we go along.