This research seminar course will examine leading digital history works of scholarship, explore theories of narrative in hypertext, and develop models of digital scholarship. Students will be expected to conduct research around selected topics in history, focus their work on the creation of a digital project, and participate in class discussion on methods and theories of digital media.

This is an intensive course in programming and software design for the humanities. We will study the Ruby programming language in detail and use it to explore the algorithms, data structures, and design patterns relevant to the advanced use of computers for computational linguistics, digital library creation, and text analysis. We will also survey some of the more important scholarly work in digital humanities and theory of new media.

This course is designed to help graduate students develop expertise in the theories and tools of digital historical scholarship. It intends to promote collaborative learning processes and develop your skills as both thinkers and writers regardless of your field of study.

This research seminar course will examine leading digital history works of scholarship, explore theories of narrative in hypertext, and develop models of digital scholarship. Students will be expected to conduct research around selected topics in history, focus their work on the creation of a digital project, and participate in class discussion on methods and theories of digital media. Projects may take many forms, including but not limited to: web site hypertext, xml/xsl markup of texts, geographic information systems data sets, database development, web programming, animation and simulation, and visualization technologies. The emphasis in this course, however, will be to develop in students an acute awareness of the consequences of writing for the digital medium. Students will explore the possibilities for scholarly communication in the digital medium and their theoretical implications at every stage of their work. Students will gain instruction from the Library's Center for Digital Research in the Humanities staff on technical issues and concentrate their work on the forms of narrative available in the digital medium. The final research project will feature the completion of a digital work of scholarship equivalent in scope to a standard research seminar paper. Readings include among other articles, Cohen and Rosenzweig, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web, and Jerome McGann, Radiant Textuality.