ENGL 504 A: Digital Literary And Textual Studies

Seven years ago, the Chronicle of Higher Education called the digital humanities “the first ‘next big thing’ in a long time.” Today, DH has arrived. Its domain encompasses research institutes, learned journals, Mellon fellowships, and an NEH mandate. Its language permeates the MLA convention program. It arouses messianic expectations and doom-laden condemnations in seemingly equal measure. 

But what is it? The term “digital humanities” applies to a huge range of loosely related enterprises from coding with XML-based TEI standards to the critical study of digital culture and born-digital literature to simply the dissemination of humanistic research in digital form. Rather than following any one path in this seminar, our objective will be to step back and survey the field as it has emerged and in its full institutional complexity. What does a graduate student in the humanities need to know about DH right now? Who are the major thinkers and what are the major debates? How might one situate oneself or one’s project in relation to the digital turn? To answer these questions – and raise new ones – this seminar will meet in a weekly colloquium format with invited experts leading discussion or giving talks on key themes in DH: Rachel Sagner Buurma (Swarthmore) on cultural analytics and data mining, Daniel Shore (Georgetown) on cyberformalism, Jentery Sayers (Victoria) on DH maker movements, and local faculty members on digitization and DH archiving, digital editing, media archaeology, and the future of digital scholarship. Practical issues of project-based scholarship, web publishing, DH funding opportunities, and digital pedagogy will be covered. No prior technical knowledge or experience is assumed.