EUS4011 – Digital Humanities: How to Read a Million Books?
Course content
Increasingly, cultural text material is being captured and stored in electronic form. From literature and fiction, diaries, historical documents, public speeches and governmental documents, to emails, text messages, and social media, researchers from the humanities now have access to much larger amounts of text than ever before.
In this master course, students from European language, literature and culture as well as history will be introduced to the field of digital humanities, its core methods, history and emerging trends and learn how to describe, analyze, and interpret digitized text and explore research questions fundamental to literary, cultural and historical studies with cutting edge technology.
The goal is to encourage students to think about novel and creative ways they can apply these techniques to their own material and research questions, and to provide the skills necessary to apply the methods in their own research. Students will be encouraged to work in teams and help one another.
We will use open source, free web applications, a seminar weblog and a demonstration corpus of texts from various literatures and history.
The use of a personal laptop during the course is recommended.
Learning outcome
After completing this course, you:
- will have a thorough understanding of the disciplinary history and place of digital humanities, especially regarding literary studies
- are able to describe, analyse, and interpret digital texts
- are familiar with digital text collections in your field
- will have a working knowledge of computer aided textual analysis
- will be able to use state of the art computational applications on a broad variety of text and for your own research
Admission
Students who are admitted to study programmes at UiO must each semester register which courses and exams they wish to sign up for in Studentweb.
Students enrolled in other Master's Degree Programmes can, on application, be admitted to the course if this is cleared by their own study programme.
If you are not already enrolled as a student at UiO, please see our information about admission requirements and procedures.
The examination in this course is not available for external candidates. Only students admitted to the course may sit for the examination.
Teaching
Seminar, two hours per week for ten weeks, 20 hours in all.
Attendance is obligatory at least 8 out of 10 seminars. Additional absences must be justified by documentation given to the exam coordinator.
You must also submit three short papers (blog posts) of 300–500 words each which must be approved by the teacher in order to qualify for the exam.
All obligatory attendance and assignments are only valid the semester you attend the course.
Examination
The assessment of the course is based on a term paper of approximately ten pages (4000 words). This does not include references and bibliography.
The topic for the term paper will be decided by the teacher and the student together. You will be given an opportunity to submit a draft of the term paper and receive individual feedback on both the form and content of the draft in the form of peer assessment.
Submit assignments in Inspera
You submit your assignment in the digital examination system Inspera. Read about how to submit assignments in Inspera.
Use of sources and citation
You should familiarize yourself with the rules that apply to the use of sources and citations. If you violate the rules, you may be suspected of cheating/attempted cheating.
Language of examination
The examination text is given in English, and you submit your response in English.
Grading scale
Grades are awarded on a scale from A to F, where A is the best grade and F is a fail. Read more about the grading system.
Explanations and appeals
Resit an examination
Special examination arrangements
Application form, deadline and requirements for special examination arrangements.
Evaluation
The course is subject to continuous evaluation. At regular intervals we also ask students to participate in a more comprehensive evaluation.