Introduction to Digital Humanities for Librarians

Course Description

Digital humanities (DH) has been firmly established as a field with many subfields from Black DH to digital history and digital literary studies. One of the hallmarks of digital humanities is its transformative and collaborative nature, with DH researchers partnering with computer scientists and librarians to publish DH scholarship. As such, libraries and librarians have played a major role in development of digital humanities and many academic and research libraries have hired library staff to better engage with digital humanities researchers. This course is designed as an introduction for librarians or library school students who have little or no exposure to DH and wish to be better positioned to offer DH support or services in a library setting. Participants will read and discuss DH scholarship, learn about frequently-used software and methods, and think about why and how libraries and librarians engage DH. Furthermore, this course will discuss how DH has been used to critique digital technology and to study digital and data cultures.

Objectives:

• A basic knowledge of what digital humanities and its many subfields as well as how it manifests as scholarship in the humanities disciplines.
• Topics such as Black DH, digital accessibility, and minimal computing will be covered.
• Exposure to core tools, approaches, and methodologies employed and critiqued by digital humanists.
• An understanding of how libraries and librarians have been involved with digital humanities.
• Critical engagement with the role of librarians and libraries in digital humanities.

This class has a follow-up: Introduction to Text Encoding.

Note: While I will encourage participants to explore more complex computing approaches (and I will support those who do as best I can), this course does not presuppose computing skills such as programming or use of the command line, and will not ask participants to do much more than upload files to websites or use simple programs. Participants should have an interest and background in humanities scholarship and humanities librarianship and while the readings will focus on activities in the United States, our discussions can be more geographically wide-ranging.