Digital humanities: humanities research in the digital age

This course will introduce you to the growing area of scholarship known as ‘digital humanities’ and explain its relevance to the study of the past and of the present.

You will learn about the opportunities offered by the growing availability of digital data and about the challenges of using it ethically and responsibly. You will become familiar with core concepts of digital research such as digitisation, metadata, ‘big data’, the FAIR principles, data wrangling, qualitative and quantitative analysis and knowledge infrastructures.

While this course will not teach you how to use specific tools or programming languages, it will provide you with a good theoretical foundation upon which you can build more specialised skills in areas that complement your humanities interests. Above all, through this course you will develop your critical thinking skills and apply humanities perspectives to interrogate the digital data, tools and methods you encounter in your life as a researcher, user and creator of digital technology.

This course Digital humanities: humanities Research in the Digital Age was developed by the Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership  thanks to funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UK Research and Innovation.

Course learning outcomes

After studying this course, you should be able to:

• Understand different approaches to digital research
• Find digital resources for research
• Analyse digital sources critically
• Evaluate digital research methods
• Understand how to communicate research digitally.