Events of the Canadian gay liberation movement, 1964. Image courtesy of Michelle Schwartz, Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada.
New program connects humanist research with mapping, encoding, and publishing
Starting in January 2013, Dr. Constance Crompton, an assistant professor in the Department of Critical Studies, will teach ENGL 212: Studies in Children’s Literature and ENGL 355: Digital Humanities in Critical Literary Studies.
Digital Humanities in Critical Literary Studies lets students construct arguments using a variety of Digital Humanities modes including visualizing, mapping, encoding, and publishing.
The class is open to all students who are curious about critical making for the digital world – no experience is necessary. Those who have enough digital savvy to send email have all the technical skills that they need to dive into ENGL 355.
Digital Humanities in Theory
The Digital Humanities is scholarship that takes place at the methodological intersection between computation and the humanities. The field grew out of textual studies, starting with attempts in the 1940s to engineer machine-produced indices and concordances.
Most digital humanists are engaged in digitizing and augmenting historical material or building digital tools to facilitate humanist research.
Digital Humanities is often project-based, relying on large teams to build digital objects, editions, and tools that preserve “core humanities concepts — subjectivity, ambiguity, contingency, [and] observer-dependent variables in the production of knowledge” (Digital_Humanities, 104).
Digital Humanities in Practice
Digitization
- Mapping the Republic of Letters
- The Women Writers Project (available through the UBC Library’s Indexes and Databases)
- The Walt Whitman Archive
- The Rossetti Archive
Tools
- The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media
- Bamboo Digital Research Tools
- The Text Analysis Portal for Research