Fall 2025 | Princeton University
What are Digital Humanities? What does the library of the future look like? Will the single-author peer-reviewed article survive the DH storm that is coming? How will the DH impact the ways we do historical research? And what ethical and legal problems arise from the use of DH methods? In this course, we will familiarize ourselves and experiment with a variety of Digital Humanities tools, such as network analysis, geospatial mapping, text mining, and crowdsourcing, interrogating how the DH reshape the ways we approach textual and material culture, ask research questions, process data, publish, and store academic scholarship.
General
Readings
Week 1: What Are Digital Humanities? (Tuesday, September 2, 2025)
Assignments:
Answer one of the following questions (around 400 words):
After reading and clicking through the materials for this week, think about possible applications of DH tools in your field of interest. How would the DH project you suggest diverge from “traditional” approaches to your field? What kinds of research questions would it help answer?
Based on your reading, what are the Digital Humanities? What are they not?
Required Readings
[\a] (Read closely) Svensson, Patrik. “Introducing the Digital Humanities,” in Big Digital Humanities: Imagining a Meeting Place for the Humanities and the Digital. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016, pp. 1–35.
[\o] (Read closely) Cordell, Ryan. “How Not to Teach Digital Humanities.” In Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, 459–474. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016.
[\o] Alternatively, you can watch the lecture here.
[\a] (Read closely) Muhanna, Elias. “Islamic and Middle East Studies and the Digital Turn.” In The Digital Humanities and Islamic and Middle East Studies, edited by Elias Muhanna, 1–9. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016.
[\o] (Skim) Burdick, Anne, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, and Jeffrey Schnapp. “Emerging Methods and Genres.” In Digital_Humanities, 29–60. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.
Browse through the following DH projects, and for each, try to (1) briefly summarize the broad question(s) they are trying to answer, (2) how they answer them, and (3) what results they offer. We will complete this exercise in class, but please browse through these projects ahead of class.
[\o] The Imperiia Project
[\o] The KITAB Project
[\o] Looking Beneath the Surface (Harvard Project on van Gogh’s paintings)
Optional Reading
[\o] Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. “What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?” ADE Bulletin 150 (2010): 55–61.
Week 2: Tools of DH (I): Network Analysis and Georeferencing (Tuesday, September 9, 2025)
Assignments (both to be completed by all students):
[\o] Download and install Gephi and complete the LesMiserables sample dataset (follow the steps in the tutorial). Send your graph as a JPG or PDF in the course portal once you have completed the sample dataset.
[\o] After reading the tutorial on georeferencing, try it out yourself by using the online tool Mapwarper (you need to create an account). Select a historical map of your choice (make sure it’s a jpeg file and in high quality) and start georeferencing. You should post your warped map in the course portal and explain what problems you encountered georeferencing your map. Which research questions would your warped map help answer? How exactly does it answer those?
Required Readings
Network Analysis
[\c] (Read closely) Cherven, Ken. “Fundamentals of Complex Networks and Gephi” and “A Network Graph Framework.” In Mastering Gephi Network Visualization, 7–68. Birmingham: Packt Publishing, 2015.
Georeferencing (“map warping”)
[\a] (Read closely) Gregory, Ian, Christopher Donaldson, Patricia Murrieta-Flores, and Paul Rayson. “Geoparsing, GIS, and Textual Analysis: Current Developments in Spatial Humanities Research.” International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing 9, no. 1 (2015): 1–14.
[\o] (Read closely) Ma, Jilian, Akın Sefer, and M. Erdem Kabadayı. “Geolocating Ottoman Settlements: The Use of Historical Maps for Digital Humanities.” Proceedings of the International Cartographic Association 3 (2021): 1–8.
[\o] Read the tutorial “How to Make Images (or Old Maps) Useful for Mapping: Georeferencing” on the SFU website to familiarize yourself with georeferencing.
Familiarize yourself with:
Optional Readings
[\a] Unangst, Matthew. “(De)Colonial Historical Geography and Historical GIS.” Journal of Historical Geography 79 (2023): 76–86.
[\c] Grallert, Till. “Mapping Ottoman Damascus through News Reports: A Practical Approach.” In The Digital Humanities and Islamic and Middle East Studies, edited by Elias Muhanna, 175–198. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016.
[\a] Gregory, Ian N., and Richard G. Healey. “Historical GIS: Structuring, Mapping and Analysing Geographies of the Past.” Progress in Human Geography 31, no. 5 (2007): 638–653.
[\o] Grandjean, Martin. “A Social Network Analysis of Twitter: Mapping the Digital Humanities Community.” Cogent Arts & Humanities 3, no. 1 (2016): 1–14.
Week 3: Tools of DH (II): Text Mining, TEI, and Concept Search (Tuesday, September 16, 2025)
Assignments:
Respond to two of the following questions (ca. 300 words each):
How does concept search differ from single word or single string search? Think of an example of using concept search on a corpus of texts in your field. How would you train the machine to reflect the concept you’re looking for most accurately? (Tip: Look at the implementation of concept search in Osadetz’s “Open Books: Concept Search Project.”)
What does Katherine Hayles argue about reading practices in the context of computerized analyses? Do you agree or disagree with her arguments?
Focusing on the article of Franco Moretti or Lange et al, explain how their projects use text mining and/or distant reading. What assumptions or limitations do you find problematic (if any)?
Required Readings
Text Mining and TEI:
[\c] (Read closely) Hayles, N. Katherine. “How We Read.” In How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis, 1–21. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
[\o] (Read closely) Cummings, James. “The Present and Future of Encoding Text(s).” In The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Digital Humanities, 147–157. London: Bloomsbury, 2023.
Depending on your interests, choose one of the following:
[\o] (Read closely) Moretti, Franco. “Style, Inc.: Reflections on Seven Thousand Titles (British Novels, 1740–1850).” Critical Inquiry 36, no. 1 (2009): 134–158.
[\a] (Read closely) Lange, Christian, Maksim Abdul Latif, Yusuf Çelik, et al. “Text Mining Islamic Law.” Islamic Law and Society 28, no. 3 (2021): 234–281.
Concept Search:
[\o] (Read closely) Osadetz, Stephen, Kyle Courtney, and Claire DeMarco. “Searching for Concepts in Large Text Corpora: The Case of Principles in the Enlightenment.” In Digital Humanities 2018 Puentes-Bridges, 254–256. Mexico City, 2018.
Check out these projects and think about how they employ text processing approaches to analyze and visualize data:
[\o] eScriptorium
[\o] ShariaSource at Harvard Law School
[\o] or if you read Arabic: المكتبة الشاملة
Optional Readings
[\o] Earhart, Amy E. “Data and the Fragmented Text: Tools, Visualization, and Datamining or Is Bigger Better?” In Traces of the Old, Uses of the New, 90–116. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015.
[\a] Manovich, Lev. “Metadata and Features.” In Cultural Analytics, 121–143. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020.
[\a] Manovich, Lev. “The Forms.” In The Language of New Media, 213–285. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002.
Week 4: Tools of DH (III): Crowdsourcing and Peer Review (Tuesday, September 23, 2025)
Assignment (complete both):
[\o] First, familiarize yourself with different crowdsourcing projects on Zooniverse. Now, think deeply about the potential for crowdsourcing in your own field of interest. Which textual or material corpus would you crowdsource? Why would crowdsourcing as a method benefit the project you conceive of better than alternative methods? Come up with a crowdsourcing project idea (ca. 400 words).
Compare the traditional pre-publication peer review process with the post-publication peer review of born-digital artifacts such as databases and collaborative interfaces. What challenges and opportunities does each of these forms of review face? (ca. 400 words).
Required Readings
[\a] (Read closely) Terras, Melissa. “Crowdsourcing in the Digital Humanities.” In A New Companion to Digital Humanities, 420–438. Malden, MA: Wiley, 2016.
[\c] (Read closely) Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. “Peer Review.” In A New Companion to Digital Humanities, 439–448. Malden, MA: Wiley, 2016.
[\a] (Read closely) Abubaker, Hanin, Khaled Salah, Hassan Al-Muhairi, and Ahmed Bentiba. “Arabic reCAPTCHA Service for Enhancing Digitization of Arabic Manuscripts.” Arabian Journal for Science and Engineering 42, no. 8 (2017): 3391–3408.
[\a] (Read closely) Kırmızıaltın, Süphan, Fatma Aladağ, and Elif Derin Can. “Crowdsourcing Ottoman Cultural Heritage: OTurC and Participatory Digital Corpora Creation.” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 9, no. 2 (2022): 37–42.
Familiarize yourself with the following DH projects. Think about how these projects each leverage crowdsourcing and for what purposes:
[\o] What America Ate
[\o] Transcribe Bentham
[\o] Old Weather
[\o] Remember Me?
Week 5: Tools of DH (IV): Image Processing, 3D Scanning, and the Visual Turn (Tuesday, September 30, 2025)
Assignments (complete both):
[\o] Go to the Digital Giza website and consider how image processing, manipulation, and 3D scanning impact and build on traditional forms of archeological research. Has the availability and use of these tools changed the nature of the research questions focused on? What is the relationship between the born-digital artifacts in these visualizations and their physical counterparts? (ca. 400 words).
What are neural networks, and what opportunities do they open up for image processing? (at least 250 words).
Required Readings
[\a] (Read closely) Terras, Melissa. “Image Processing in the Digital Humanities.” In Digital Humanities in Practice, 71–90. London: Facet Publishing, 2012.
[\o] (Read closely) Wevers, Melvin, and Thomas Smits. “The Visual Digital Turn: Using Neural Networks to Study Historical Images.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 35, no. 1 (2020): 194–207.
[\o] (Read closely) Arnold, Taylor, and Lauren Tilton. “Analyzing Audio/Visual Data in the Digital Humanities.” In The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Digital Humanities, 179–187. London: Bloomsbury, 2023.
[\c] (Read closely) Champion, Erik, and Anna Foka. “Art History, Heritage Games, and Virtual Reality.” In The Routledge Companion to Digital Humanities and Art History, 238–253. London: Routledge, 2020.
Choose your own journey (pick one only):
[\a] (Read closely) Sykora, Toon, Roberto de Lima, Marleen de Meyer, Maarten Vergauwen, and Harco Willems. “Puzzling Tombs: Virtual Reconstruction of the Middle Kingdom Elite Necropolis at Dayr al-Barsha (Middle Egypt).” In Ancient Egypt, New Technology, 532–550. Leiden: Brill, 2023.
[\o] (Read closely) Reggiani, Nicola. “Virtual Papyrology.” In Digital Papyrology I, 137–161. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017.
Familiarize yourself with these imaging tools and projects:
[\o] Digital Giza
[\o] Shadow Plays
[\o] Scan the World
[\o] Mirador Viewer
[\o] Omeka
Optional Readings
[\o] Malik, Umair Shafqat, Liselore N. M. Tissen, and Arnold P. O. S. Vermeeren. “3D Reproductions of Cultural Heritage Artefacts: Evaluation of Significance and Experience.” Studies in Digital Heritage 5, no. 1 (2021): 1–29.
[\a] Robson, Stuart, Sally MacDonald, Graeme Were, and Mona Hess. “3D Recording and Museums.” In Digital Humanities in Practice, 91–115. London: Facet Publishing, 2012.
[\o] Mudge, Mark, and Carla Schroer. “Digital Representations of Cultural Heritage: Enabling the Quality to Speak for Itself.” In 3D Research Challenges in Cultural Heritage V, 52–62. Cham: Springer, 2025.
[\o] Krebs, Victor J. “Digital Animism: Towards a New Materialism.” Religions 14, no. 2 (2023).
Week 6: Manuscript Studies (I): The Rise of Digital Surrogates (Tuesday, October 7, 2025)
Assignments:
Respond to two of the prompts below in the form of a short video (3-5 minutes) or a post of at least 400 words.
How does the “digital surrogate” of a manuscript differ from its original? Do researchers and the public engage with digital surrogates in different ways? If so, how?
How did the adoption of paper transform the Middle East and other parts of the world? Why was paper adopted in the first place? Do you consider digital publishing forms as revolutionary as paper adoption in late antiquity?
Select at least two of the manuscript websites listed below and reflect on what digital tools they make available to users to study manuscripts. What specific possibilities do these tools offer for researchers, and how does the interface determine what results can be extracted?
Required Readings
[\c] (Read closely) Déroche, François. “Introduction.” In Islamic Codicology, 11–24. London: Al-Furqān Islamic Heritage Foundation, 2005.
[\a] (Read closely) Gacek, Adam. Read the entries on “Colophon,” “Inks and Inkwell (Inkpot),” “Paper, Papyrus, Parchment,” “Quire (Gathering),” “Scribes and Copyists,” “Sewing of Quires,” and “Watermarks.” In Arabic Manuscripts: A Vademecum for Readers, 71–76, 132–135, 186–196, 210–213, 238–240, 247–248, and 290–292. Leiden: Brill, 2009.
[\a] (Read closely) Rustow, Marina. “Paper.” In The Lost Archive, 113–137. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020.
[\a] (Read closely) Shatzmiller, Maya. “The Adoption of Paper in the Middle East, 700–1300 AD.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 61, no. 3 (2018): 461–490.
[\a] (Read closely) van Lit, L. W. Cornelis. “The Digital Materiality of Digitized Manuscripts.” In Among Digitized Manuscripts, 51–72. Leiden: Brill, 2020.
Familiarize yourself with some of the most important databases for Middle Eastern manuscripts:
[\o] The Austrian National Library’s Papyrus and Manuscripts Collection
[\o] The Yale Beinecke Near and Middle Eastern Books and Manuscripts Collection
[\o] The “Sinai Manuscripts Digital Library,” an online platform offering access to hundreds of Arabic, Greek, Syriac, and Coptic manuscripts housed at the oldest surviving monastery of St. Catherine’s in Sinai, Egypt.
[\o] The University of Utah’s Arabic Papyrus, Parchment & Paper Collection
[\o] The Middle East Collections
[\o] “The Arabic Papyrology Database (APD),” a database compiling the editions and translations of hundreds of Arabic papyri.
[\o] “Manuscripts of the Islamic World” at Princeton
[\o] Spreadsheet of all Islamic manuscripts at Princeton, derived from the Princeton University Library electronic catalog of the Garrett and other collections.
Optional Readings
[\o] Zaman, Muntasir. A Beginner’s Companion to Arabic Manuscripts. Qalam.
[\a] Miller, Peter N. History and Its Objects. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017.
[\a] Quiring-Zoche, Rosemarie. “The Colophon in Arabic Manuscripts: A Phenomenon without a Name.” Journal of Islamic Manuscripts 4, no. 1 (2013): 49–81.
Week 7: Manuscript Studies (II): Doing Codicology, Digitally (Tuesday, October 21, 2025)
Assignment for this week (to be completed by all students):
[\o] From the Princeton Library website, select an Islamicate manuscript in a language of your choosing. During our visit, you should be prepared to complete a codicological analysis of the manuscript you selected.
[\o] Use this template to quickly jot down the information you need. You do not need to read any text or know the language of the manuscript you selected! Focus on visual clues (the paper quality, inks used, registration marks, signatures, quiring, etc.).
[\o] You can find a sample of a complete analysis here. The codicological information you collect should help you reconstruct the history of the manuscript, how it was used, who used it, and how it may have traveled.
Codicological and manuscript-related tools that may be useful to you:
[\o] UMichigan “Resources for the Study of Watermarks”
Recommended Reading
[\c] Whearty, Bridget. Digital Codicology: Medieval Books and Modern Labor. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023.
Week 8: Entering the Age of Machines: Artificial and Intelligent? (Tuesday, October 28, 2025)
Assignment:
Suppose it is the year 2028, and you are the spokesperson for a multi-billion dollar firm in Silicon Valley (Apple, Microsoft, Tesla, etc.).
Unemployment in the US is at an unprecedented high as more than 30% of jobs in the public and private sectors have been cut over the last year due to a sharp decline in the demand for human labor, which has largely been outsourced to machines. Amongst the increasingly dissatisfied public, Kate Crawford’s Atlas of AI is steadily gaining popularity. Meanwhile, a group of lobbyists, politicians, and academics advocating for the protection of labor rights, environmental resources, and individual privacy is about to launch a major campaign promoting a bill in Congress that seeks to regulate the use of AI tightly and to end its exploitative practices. You have been subpoenaed to testify before Congress on behalf of Silicon Valley. Your job is to convince senators and representatives that the public benefits of AI outweigh its harms and that any regulation would delay innovation and progress. Record a 10-minute video of yourself speaking to Congress, in which you address and refute Kate Crawford’s arguments. The future of Silicon Valley is in your hands.
Required Reading
[\a] Crawford, Kate. Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021.
Optional Readings
[\o] Huq, Aziz. “The Unexpected Robustness of American AI Regulation.” KU Leuven, July 23, 2024.
Read about the recent California measure on Frontier AI:
[\o] California State Senate. California Senate Bill on Frontier Artificial Intelligence. Sacramento: State of California.
[\o] Roy, Saumya. “California’s Landmark Frontier AI Law to Bring Transparency.” Al Jazeera, October 10, 2025.
[\o] “OpenAI’s Sam Altman Talks ChatGPT, AI Agents and Superintelligence — Live at TED2025.” YouTube video.
[\o] I’m Not a Robot. Short film.
[\c] Rogers, Adam. “Forget Sam Altman. America’s Greatest AI Visionary Is... an English Professor in Illinois.” Business Insider, December 6, 2023.
[\c] Narayanan, Arvind, and Sayash Kapoor. AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2024.
Week 9: Visualizing, Publishing, and Open Access (Tuesday, November 4, 2025)
Assignments (complete both):
Choose one of the visualization tools below and create your own mini-visualization project.
What might be the downsides of open access and open software? How do paywall outlets respond to open access initiatives and what potential problems do you perceive? Your response should be based on the readings and make a cogent argument. (400 words)
Required Readings
[\o] (Read closely) Arbuckle, Alyssa, and Ray Siemens. “Digital Humanities Futures, Open Social Scholarship, and Engaged Publics.” In The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Digital Humanities, 397–407. London: Bloomsbury, 2023.
[\o] (Read closely) Schlicht, Helene. “Open Access, Open Data, Open Software? Proprietary Tools and Their Restrictions.” In Digital Methods in the Humanities, 25–57. Bielefeld: Bielefeld University Press, 2021.
(Read closely) Read the three short essays/blog posts by Stephen Ramsay, Geoffrey Rockwell, and Mark Sample.
[\c] (Read closely) Manovich, Lev. “Information Visualization” and “Methods of Media Visualization.” In Cultural Analytics, 187–206 and 223–244. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020.
[\o] Watch the Elsevier lecture on open access licenses.
Familiarize yourself with the following tools for visualizing data:
[\o] Tableau Public
[\o] Timeline JS
[\o] Datawrapper
[\o] VisualEyes 5
[\o] RAWGraphs
[\o] StoryMap
Week 10: From the Medieval to the Digital Library: Old Problems in a New Age? (Tuesday, November 11, 2025)
Assignments (complete both):
Record a 10-minute video explaining the challenges of modern-day/digital libraries and how they attempt to solve them. Do you see commonalities between the digital library and Hirschler’s portrait of the medieval Arabic library?
Required Readings
[\c] (Read closely) Hirschler, Konrad. “Local Endowed Libraries and their Readers.” In The Written Word in the Medieval Arabic Lands, 124–163. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012.
[\a] (Read closely) Smiley, Bobby L. “From Humanities to Scholarship: Librarians, Labor, and the Digital.” In Debates in the Digital Humanities, 413–419. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019.
[\c] (Read closely) Banerjee, Kyle, and Terry Reese Jr. “Choosing a Repository Architecture” and “Preservation Planning.” In Building Digital Libraries, 13–26 and 49–63. Chicago: ALA Editions, 2019.
Choose your own journey (pick one only):
[\c] (Read closely) Carlin, Marie, Arnaud Laborderie, and Antoine Silvestre de Sacy. “Digital Humanities at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France,” in The Routledge Companion to Libraries, Archives, and the Digital Humanities (Routledge, 2025), 453–466.
[\c] (Read closely) Siew, Tsafra. “A Nation and Its Research: The National Library of Israel in Two Worlds,” in The Routledge Companion to Libraries, Archives, and the Digital Humanities (Routledge, 2025), 467–478.
[\c] (Read closely) Ridge, Mia et al. “Embedding Digital Humanities in the British Library: The Digital Research Team at Ten,” in The Routledge Companion to Libraries, Archives, and the Digital Humanities (Routledge, 2025), 493–508.
Familiarize yourself with these Digital Library Projects and reflect on what they are trying to achieve:
[\o] Library of Congress
[\o] HathiTrust
[\o] Digital PUL
Optional Readings
[\a] Bernardoni, Andrea, and Stefano Casati. “Leonardo’s Library: A Digital Library for Studying Leonardo da Vinci,” International Information & Library Review 54/2 (2022), 182–187.
[\o] Wertheimer, Andrew, and Noriko Asato. “The Rise and Fall of the Wonder Okinawa Digital Archive: Comparing Japanese and American Conceptualizations of Digital Archives,” in Digital Libraries (Springer, 2016), 63–76.
Week 11: Critical Digital Humanities: Digital Objects, Antiquities, and the Academy (Tuesday, November 18, 2025)
Assignment (complete both):
How is the illicit trade of antiquities related to the digital humanities and academic scholarship? What does Palombo argue, and do you agree with her assessment? (About 300 words).
[\o] Go to ebay.com and search for “Arabic manuscript” or “Islamic manuscript.” Browse through the search results and try to figure out where these manuscripts come from. Are they licitly sourced (about 200 words). [If you want to be adventurous, consider contacting the sellers and asking for information about the provenance of the MSS.]
Required Readings
[\o] (Read closely) Leonardi, Paul M. “Digital Materiality? How Artifacts Without Matter, Matter.” First Monday 15, no. 6 (2010).
[\a] (Read closely) Edwards, A. S. G. “Back to the Real? Digitization and Conservation.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5749, June 7, 2013.
[\o] (Read closely) Sharpe, Emily. “Online Antiquities Smugglers Are Taking Advantage of the Coronavirus Crisis.” The Art Newspaper, 2020.
[\o] (Read closely) Palombo, Cecilia, and Donna Yates. “Digital Transit Ports for the Illicit Trade in Antiquities: The Case of the ‘Afghan Genizah.’” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 38, no. 1 (2023): 257–276.
[\a] (Read closely) Dobson, James E. “Digital Historicism and the Historicity of Digital Texts.” In Critical Digital Humanities, 66–100. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019.
Optional Readings
[\o] Berry, David M. “Critical Digital Humanities,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Digital Humanities (Bloomsbury, 2023), 125–135.
[\a] Risam, Roopika. “Colonial Violence and the Postcolonial Digital Archive,” in New Digital Worlds (Northwestern University Press, 2019), 47–64.
[\o] Boyd, Jason and Ruberg, Bo. “Queer Digital Humanities,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Digital Humanities (Bloomsbury, 2023), 63–73.
[\o] Thylstrup, Nanna Bonde; Agostinho, Daniela; Dirckinck-Holmfeld, Katrine; Veel, Kristin. “Infrapolitics, Archival Infrastructures, and Digital Reparative Practices,” in Feminist Digital Humanities, 159–178.
Week 12: A Look into the Future (Tuesday, December 2, 2025)
Assignment (to be completed by all students):
A big-picture exercise: An editor invites you to submit a chapter entitled “The Role of DH and the Future of the Humanities” to a volume covering methodologies in the Humanities. Your piece should not merely summarize available tools of DH but make a persuasive argument on how exactly you think DH will or will not transform the Humanities. You may use specific examples from your field. You can complete this assignment either in written form (about three pages) or by creating a video or audio recording of about 12 minutes.
Required Readings
[\o] (Read closely) Prescott, Andrew. “The Future and the Digital Humanities.” Digital Riffs (2015).
[\o] (Read closely) van Lit, L. W. Cornelis, James H. Morris, and Deniz Cevik. “A Digital Revival of Oriental Studies.” Revue de l’Institut des langues et cultures d’Europe, Amérique, Afrique, Asie et Australie 39 (2020): 1–14.
[\a] (Read closely) Zadeh, Travis. “Uncertainty and the Archive.” In The Digital Humanities and Islamic and Middle East Studies, 11–64. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016.
[\o] (Read closely) Malazita, James W., Ezra J. Teboul, and Hined Rafeh. “Digital Humanities as Epistemic Cultures: How DH Labs Make Knowledge, Objects, and Subjects.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 14, no. 3 (2020).
[\o] (Read closely) Mueller, Andreas. “Digital Humanities in 2040: Four Scenarios.” Met-Hodos. (Re)considering the Road of Research and Analysis.
Further Reading and Research
[\c] Brown, Kathryn, ed. The Routledge Companion to Digital Humanities and Art History. London: Routledge, 2020.
[\o] Burdick, Anne, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, and Jeffrey Schnapp. Digital_Humanities. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.
[\c] Cherven, Ken. Mastering Gephi Network Visualization. Birmingham: Packt Publishing, 2015.
[\a] Earhart, Amy E. Traces of the Old, Uses of the New: The Emergence of Digital Literary Studies. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015.
[\c] Gold, Matthew K., and Lauren F. Klein, eds. Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019.
[\a] Gregory, Ian N., and Alistair Geddes, eds. Toward Spatial Humanities: Historical GIS and Spatial History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014.
[\c] Grimmer, Justin, Margaret E. Roberts, and Brandon M. Stewart. Text as Data: A New Framework for Machine Learning and the Social Sciences. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022.
[\c] Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
[\o] Manovich, Lev. Cultural Analytics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020.
[\c] Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.
[\a] Muhanna, Elias, ed. The Digital Humanities and Islamic and Middle East Studies. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016.
[\c] O’Sullivan, James, ed. The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Digital Humanities. London: Bloomsbury, 2023.
[\o] Reggiani, Nicola, ed. Digital Papyrology I–III. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017–2024.
[\c] Rhody, Lisa Marie, ed. Feminist Digital Humanities: Intersections in Practice. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2025.
[\c] Risam, Roopika. New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2019.
[\c] Russell, Isabel G., and Glen Layne-Worthey, eds. The Routledge Companion to Libraries, Archives, and the Digital Humanities. London: Routledge, 2025.
[\c] Schreibman, Susan, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth, eds. A New Companion to Digital Humanities. Malden, MA: Wiley, 2016.
[\c] Schwandt, Silke, ed. Digital Methods in the Humanities: Challenges, Ideas, Perspectives. Bielefeld: Bielefeld University Press, 2020.
[\c] Sutherland, Tonia. Resurrecting the Black Body: Race and the Digital Afterlife. Oakland: University of California Press, 2023.
[\a] Svensson, Patrik. Big Digital Humanities: Imagining a Meeting Place for the Humanities and the Digital. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016.
[\c] Terras, Melissa, Julianne Nyhan, and Edward Vanhoutte, eds. Defining Digital Humanities: A Reader. London: Routledge, 2016.
[\o] van Lit, L. W. Cornelis. Among Digitized Manuscripts: Philology, Codicology, Paleography in a Digital World. Leiden: Brill, 2020.
[\c] Warren, Michelle R. Holy Digital Grail: A Medieval Book on the Internet. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022.
[\c] Warwick, Claire, Melissa Terras, and Julianne Nyhan, eds. Digital Humanities in Practice. London: Facet Publishing, 2012.
[\c] Whearty, Bridget. Digital Codicology: Medieval Books and Modern Labor. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023.