LIBR 220-03
LIBR 220-12
Resources and Information Services in Professions and Disciplines
Topic: Digital Humanities
Fall 2012 Course Information
Dr. Katherine Harris
E-mail
Course Description
Introduction to Digital Humanities
Digital Humanities has been living in libraries and academic departments for fifty years under the name of Humanities Computing. In the last five years, though, Digital Humanities has become a hotbed of debate on issues around open access, scholarly communication, digital literacy, educational technology, preservation, archives ? all issues that libraries have dealt with for decades. By collaborating on these questions Digital Humanities and libraries are beginning to grapple with some of the major issues surrounding the future of libraries and the curation of our cultural heritage. This semester, we will listen in on some of those debates and further contribute to this collaboration between libraries and Digital Humanities.
The assignments will approximate a few real-world scenarios such as grant writing, collaborating in a group, managing a digital project, and learning basic mark-up languages. We will also investigate and interact with the public face of libraries, including the Twitter feed and blog posts from the Folger Library and the New York Public Library. Many of our readings will come from blog discussions about the profession (e.g., the hotly-debated blog posts and comments on Archives Next [www.archivesnext.com/]). In addition to using open access journals, we will rely on an anthology that is freely available online as well as available for purchase in print; please choose whichever format best suits your learning style.
A Preview of some of the governing ideas for our semester together:
"If it's on the screen, I can't take it into the tub!" This is the main cry of bibliophiles everywhere against literature's digitization. Should we hoard all of our paperbacks, even those that fell into the tub?
Will the Internet, Web, hypertexts and born-digital overtake and render obsolete our treasured and well-marked books? Will blogging, emailing, wiki-ing, even Facebooking destroy the English language with its abbreviated syntax and visual culture? And, what of all the world?s literary treasures? Will Google possess them in their archives and render the material object obsolete? Or, can projects such as the Hathi Trust and Internet Archive save our treasures from corporatization? Even now, we need to question what's missing from any of those archives, what perspective, what voice? The evolution of language, the dissemination of print materials, the creation of a larger community has always been part of the human condition. Now, we call it social networking, an atmosphere in which readers become users as well as authors and a time when we can respond to each other virtually but in real time. So, what does this mean for libraries and literacy?
Required texts:
- A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/
Paperback (2008): ISBN: 978-1-4051-6806-9 ($54.95)
EBook (2008): 978-0-470-99986-8 ($179.95) - Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew K. Gold. Minnesota UP, 2011. ($34.95) ISBN: 9780816677955
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