About

Students learn to

• generate open-ended questions,
• seek solutions grounded in evidence,
• challenge assumptions and received wisdom,
• break problems down into their constituent parts,
• take risks, to fail productively, and solve problems as they arise,
• be resilient and comfortable with ambiguity,
• apply computational/algorithmic thinking to these processes,
• identify and apply digital tools to humanistic problem solving
• transfer such skills to new problems and contexts

Students learn to critically analyze

• the contributions of digital technologies to the development and maintenance of power structures (class, gender, racial, and other hierarchies)
• the complexities of freedom, security, surveillance, and control made possible by digital technologies
• the new identities and notions of self as well as the new kinds of relationships made possible by digital technologies
• the collection and manipulation of data via digital technologies

Students will

• present data in new ways that leads to original thinking and research
• understand that they are contributing to an ongoing conversation of research in a given humanities field
• engage in collaborative creation that can expand beyond the local
• enable others to produce knowledge

Students learn to

exhibit and curate data and research digitally in ways that allow public interaction with and access to knowledge (such as web pages, online publishing, digital collections, collaborative exhibitions)

write and speak with clarity and concision for a variety of audiences and genres (such as research papers, blogs, online content, podcasts, video, etc.)

communicate ideas and research findings using appropriate multimedia visualization tools (such as textual analysis visualization, interactive mapping, graphic data representation, etc.)

Students learn to

• identify and apply digital tools
• secure their data
• manage personal privacy and digital footprint
• develop a healthy skepticism and critical valuation of digital data, technologies, and arguments to assess credibility
• transfer learning to adopt new digital tools based on previous experience
• navigate the opportunities and challenges presented by the incessant growth of digital culture and the rapidly-shifting technologies that comprise it

The Digital Humanities Program seeks to bridge the human and the digital to provide students new, exciting pathways through their Denison career and beyond. The minor serves to empower students to develop technological capabilities and humanistic problem-solving skills by creating Digital Humanities projects. The emphasis is on the making, doing, and presenting of Digital Humanities knowledge.

DH students can use digital tools to create new objects of study for the humanities. For example, social networking algorithms can help humanists understand the complex relationships between historical actors and/or events; or characters within a book/movie. Examples include these visualizations of the intellectual network of Sir Francis Bacon [Six Degrees of Francis Bacon] or characters from the Star Wars Universe [Star Wars Social Networks]

DH students use digital tools to analyze humanistic data in different ways. For example, textual analysis algorithms allow humanists to “read” large bodies of texts and synthesize the information in those texts differently to make compelling arguments. Examples include a discussion of a study on Gender Bias in Economics (by an undergraduate) or gender bias in the Harry Potter novels.

DH students can use digital tools to create new narratives out of data. For example, mapping technology enables humanists to locate spatial relationships in an effort to understand social, political, cultural, and historical relationships in different ways. The maps created by mapping technologies are new narratives, new texts, new objects of study, and they offer non-linear methods of analysis to emerge. For example, this Interactive map of eighteenth-century Jamaican Slave Revolts.