This course is an introduction into the theory, ethics, and practice of the digital humanities and social sciences. Technology has transformed society at every level, and we’ll explore how digital tools offer us new ways of interrogating sources, evaluating evidence, and sharing our research with broad audiences. We’ll also look critically at technology itself, using humanities and social science methods to evaluate how it shapes our lives for the better and for the worse. We’ll explore DHSS scholarship and gain practical experience in using digital methods, including data visualization, text analysis, mapping, and digital storytelling. This class will explore aspects of technology that are difficult, unethical, and unjust. But we’ll also look at how digital spaces can be joyful, funny, scholarly, and liberatory, and how they can help us imagine and craft new worlds.
As we learn about digital tools and methods, we’ll work with content and projects that touch on local history and culture, from the Native American settlements at Cahokia beginning over a millennium ago to contemporary figures whose work reflects and remakes metro St. Louis. The region has a rich history of movement, exchange, and cultural production. Its history is also fraught with historical and contemporary injustices that have resulted in stark inequalities and sharp lines of economic and racial segregation. We’ll look at how these histories are told, adapted, and/or silenced in digital projects and through digital media.
This website is the home for the blog posts, labs, and projects you create over the course of the semester.
Building on Lisa Spiro’s proposed values for the digital humanities, we’ve adopted these values as our shared norms for this semester:
- Access – creating an atmosphere of openness and collaboration that also acknowledges the diversity of ways people engage with our materials
- Ethics – a commitment to engaging with ethical questions around the technology and sources we use
- Intentionality – approaching our digital projects with purpose, care, and an awareness of our own biases
- Embracing failure – an acknowledgement that things won’t always go as expected and providing room to reflect on failure
- Adaptability – an awareness that technology and humanity are changing rapidly and that we need to be flexible and responsive to those changes
- Diversity – an attention to our own diversity of background, as well as to diversity in the content we represent and attention to the diversity of our audiences