Doel vak

- The student has an overview of key theoretical positions within an
interdisciplinary field that is currently at stake in humanities
research.
- The student is aware of the added value of interdisciplinary research
in approaching complex societal questions
- The student is able to explain concepts, perspectives, and theories
from their own discipline of study to facilitate interdisciplinary
cooperation.
The student is able to analyze key questions in an interdisciplinary
field with the help of integrated perspectives, methods, or concepts
from two or more disciplines.
The students can formulate hypotheses, translate these to measurable
observations, apply various data analyses using computational tools and
test their hypothesis to critically reflect on the hypothesis, the data
and the techniques.

Inhoud vak

In our globalizing and increasingly digital world of big data, urge is
growing for scholars who are trained in comparing complex and long-term
sets of quantitative and qualitative data. The sources and objects
studied in history, media, literature, and linguistics are also
increasingly becoming available digitally. Digital Humanities is a
relatively new research field which incorporates the digitization and
meta data of humanities data, the development and application of digital
tools, and the visualization of digital research results, as well as
critical reflection on these new research developments. In this part of
the course we will introduce this cross-disciplinary research field, by
exploring subfields e.g. Digital Hermeneutics, Geographical Information
Systems, Text and Sentiment Analysis, RDF and SPARQL. What is Digital
Humanities, what are the main debates, the most dominant subfields and
techniques used? You will be introduced to data collections and
computational tools and methods used in the field, and try out some
techniques. Students from different disciplines will collaborate on a
digital micro project, which will result in a final paper.

The case study for this track is: urban lives & crimes. Starting point
will be the project London Lives (https://www.londonlives.org &
https://www.oldbaileyonline.org//): a digital humanities project which
combines various datasets about crime, poverty and social policy in
London 1670-1913. We will explore this project and its datasets from
various angles (hermeutics, geodata, text to structured data). Students
will work closely together with supervisors and with students from other
disciplines on a digital project.

Onderwijsvorm

The course consists of a theoretical class and a practical class. During
the theoretical class, we discuss a selection of papers, the data, data
formats and tooling. During the practical class, the students are
trained to process the data, apply the analysis and work on their
project in interdisciplinary groups, supervised by the staff. The
students present their project to each each other and the staff during
the course.

Toetsvorm

A final group paper on their project.