ABOUT THE PROGRAM

The Undergraduate Minor in Digital Humanities is offered by the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. It has been designed for students who want to augment their disciplinary studies in the humanities or humanistic social sciences with advanced digital research techniques and in-depth engagement with theoretical, political, and practical questions raised by digital technologies.  Students from outside the humanities are also welcome to enroll in the DH minor, e.g. to add a humanities dimension to a mostly science-and-tech curriculum.

“Digital Humanities” is more of an umbrella term for a diverse range of scholarly practices than a stable, coherent field. The minor in digital humanities reflects that diversity by bringing together coursework from across the university and by allowing for multiple pathways through the program.  It is a very flexible minor that draws on faculty from many departments of the School of Arts and Sciences as well as other schools of the University and encourages students to enroll in courses outside of their major. Students minoring in digital humanities will have the opportunity to learn valuable programing and data management skills, to explore topics such as digital text analysis, digital mapping, 3D modeling, and the use of digital tools for collecting, organizing and studying material culture. Course work will also expose students to debates about the social effects of digital technologies and require them to attend lectures, workshops and other relevant events at Penn and around Philadelphia.

PURPOSE

Once a small corner of the humanities, Digital Humanities has exerted a notable influence on literary studies, history, cultural studies, archaeology and anthropology, and has radically changed the way that many scholars conduct research and share work. As humanities fields evolve to incorporate digital tools and methods, an increasing number of scholars are finding it necessary to expand their digital understanding. While students may be able to learn specific tools and methods on their own or through their coursework, the purpose of the DH minor is to offer them a systematic program of study as well as an official credential to recognize their work and training. Students who successfully complete the requirements of the minor will develop the insight to be both thoughtful users of technology and sophisticated critics of digital work.

STRUCTURE

The Digital Humanities Minor will take 6 courses total and the sequence has been designed to guide students through three tiers of courses that begin very broad and then narrow in focus.

The first tier is the broadest and is intended to make sure students understand the basics of Digital Humanities. There are two required courses in Tier 1: Introduction to Digital Humanities (ENGL 1650) and one qualifying introduction to programming course. The School of Arts and Sciences regularly offers Data Science for the Humanities (ENGL 1670), which has been designed to fulfill the programming requirement. However, students may also count one of the introduction to programming courses offered by Engineering (such as CIS 1100). Skills and context learned in these courses will be used and built upon in subsequent courses.

In the second tier, students will choose at least one but not more than three classes that will help them focus on specific methodologies. The assumption is that students will want to dive a bit deeper into those specific trajectories within digital humanities that are most applicable to their own research interests. Courses in this tier will allow them to gain practical skills in a hands-on, project based environment.

While the first two tiers are focused on skill building, the third tier of courses gives students opportunities to use the skills they have learned to conduct original research. Students will take at least one but no more than three Tier 3 courses. Courses with significant digital content will be pre-approved for the minor. However, students may also work with their instructors to develop alternative digital projects or even independent studies. The goal at this level is for students to practice integrating digital humanities practice into academic work in non-trivial and critical ways.

BENEFITS

The Digital Humanities Minor has been designed to enhance the research profile of participating students and to give them the skills needed to participate more effectively in contemporary disciplinary and interdisciplinary scholarly debates. Furthermore, participation in the minor will help students develop valuable skills that may be utilized in a variety of professional settings both in and out of academia.

COURSES OFFERED SPRING 2025

Tier 1:

Data Science for the Humanities
ENGL 1670, Section 301

Over the last decade, humanists have turned to data and to computational methods of data analysis to seek new understandings of literature, history, and culture. This course will provide you with a practical introduction to data-driven inquiry in the humanities, with a focus on the Python programming language. (No prior knowledge of programming is required or expected.) In addition to learning foundational scripting and data science skills, we will ask questions about the role of data in the humanities. What new research questions in the humanities can we investigate using data-driven methods? How can we use humanities methods to reflect on data-driven research practices? And how can we make our conclusions relevant within the larger frame of humanistic inquiry? Course work will include readings, weekly programming exercises, a writing assignment, and a final project.

Tier 2:

The Material Past in a Digital World
ANTH 1303, Section 401
CLST 1303, section 401
ARTH 0127, section 401
HIST 0871, section 401

The material remains of the human past -objects and spaces- provide tangible evidence of past people's lives. Today's information technologies improve our ability to document, study, and present these materials. But what does it mean to deal with material evidence in a virtual context? In this class, students will learn basic digital methods for studying the past while working with objects, including those in the collections of the Penn Museum. This class will teach relational database design and 3D object modeling. As we learn about acquiring and managing data, we will gain valuable experience in the evaluation and use of digital tools. The digital humanities are a platform both for learning the basic digital literacy students need to succeed in today's world and for discussing the human consequences of these new technologies and data. We will discuss information technology's impact on the study and presentation of the past, including topics such as public participation in archaeological projects, educational technologies in museum galleries, and the issues raised by digitizing and disseminating historic texts and objects. Finally, we will touch on technology's role in the preservation of the past in today's turbulent world. No prior technical experience is required, but we hope students will share an enthusiasm for the past.

GIS for the Digital Humanities and Social Sciences
ANTH 1905

This course introduces students to theory and methodology of the geospatial humanities and social sciences, understood broadly as the application of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and spatial analysis techniques to the study of social and cultural patterns in the past and present. By engaging with spatial theory, spatial analysis case studies, and technical methodologies, students will develop an understanding of the questions driving, and tools available for, humanistic and social science research projects that explore change over space and time. We will use ESRI's ArcGIS software to visualize, analyze, and integrate historical, anthropological, and environmental data. Techniques will be introduced through the discussion of case studies and through demonstration of software skills. During supervised laboratory sessions, the various techniques and analyses covered will be applied to sample data and also to data from a region/topic chosen by the student.

Intro to Media Production
CIMS 2550, Section 301

This course is the foundation for many upper-level courses across media production. It will introduce students to the basic skills of camerawork, video editing, sound recording, sound design, and color correction. Students will have the opportunity to work in narrative, experimental, and multimodal (academic) modes of media creation. Assignments will include making short narrative, documentary and other media. After this course, students will be prepared for upper-level courses in cinematography, editing, motion picture production, experimental media and digital humanities.

Medium Matters: How to Make Books, Cuneiform to Kindle
COML 2320, Section 401
ITAL 2320, Section 401
ENGL 0761, Section 401

This course is a hands-on historical and theoretical investigation into diverse media of textual and literary expression from clay tablets to digital texts. Through the direct examination of rare books and various textual oddities from Penn’s Special Collections and Archives and the Penn Museum, we will inquire into the history of the book and the history of writing. We will focus on different textual technologies and modes of composition, circulation, transmission, and reception of texts (from antiquity to the present day). By engaging in such topics as the transition from manuscript to print, from scroll to codex, and from book to Kindle, we will consider the history of literacy and literature in relation to other forms of expression (oral, visual, networked) and analyze different practices of organizing textual materials (from punctuation to annotation). We will examine paratextual elements (titles, forewords, afterwords) and various forms of verbal and visual accretion (from commentaries to illustrations). We will survey shifting notions of authorship, intellectual property, creativity, and originality and explore different systems of storage (libraries, archives, museums). By questioning the multi-faceted, non-deterministic interplay between textual artifacts and the media by which they are formalized and materially formed, we will conduct a critical reflection on the nature of textuality, writing, literature, and media. Readings will set essays in the history of the book and media studies alongside key case studies from various periods and geographical areas. And we will engage with textual materiality through the creation of book-objects of our own.

Podcasting Workshop
ENGL 3610, Section 301

Two decades since the invention of the podcast, we’re confronted with a niche format that also functions as a mass medium. Peruse a contemporary feed (or entrust your perusing to the algorithm) and you’ll find sound-designed narrative miniseries jostling for attention with the celebrity clubhouse, the critical wheelhouse, and all manner of explainers, disquisitions and diversions. In this workshop course, we’ll learn to navigate that complex landscape with expertise and to record and edit our own original podcast material. We’ll consider the cultural and formal evolution of podcasting while we engage with the medium firsthand — in a discussion-forward seminar, with listening and reading assignments designed to spark creative practice. We’ll hear from prominent guest speakers, applying their insights as we hone our own skills as interviewers, editors, and audio producers. A series of writing responses and other exercises will lead us toward the development of our own podcasts. As a final project, each student will submit a pilot episode, refined through workshopping and instructor feedback and recorded using campus resources.

In this creative writing workshop, students will learn how to create their own original podcasts. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.

Tier 3:

Fakes, Forgeries and Forensics in Digital Media
CIMS 2665, Section 401
ENGL 2665, Section 401

Fake images on social media are just one of the latest examples of fabrications and modifications that have taken media into dubious territory throughout history. This course will analyze the history of fakes and forgeries and consider whether they devalue the original or not, or even have value in themselves. Along the way, students will learn how fakes and forgeries have been created, what tools can be used to counter the onslaught of illicit creations, and the arts and humanities debates that have arisen surrounding them. After evaluating the ways various media have been modified over time, this course will show students how to use photo manipulation tools to modify digital media. It will also show students how to perform various detailed analyses of digital media to determine their legitimacy. A final project will bring these tools together, as groups of students create a fake or forgery, consider its implications and evaluate a tool’s ability to detect it.

Art, Design and Digital Culture
DSGN 0010

This course is an introduction to the fundamental perception, representation, aesthetics, and design that shape today's visual culture. It addresses the way artists and designers create images; design with analog and digital tools; communicate, exchange, and express meaning over a broad range of media; and find their voices within the fabric of contemporary art, design, and visual culture. Emphasis is placed on building an extended form of visual literacy by studying and making images using a variety of representation techniques; learning to organize and structure two-dimenstional and three-dimensional space, and designing with time-based and procedural media. Students learn to develop an individual style of idea-generation, experimentation, iteration, and critique as part of their creative and critical responses to visual culture. If you need assistance registering for a closed section, please email the department at fnarug@design.upenn.edu

Design 21: Design After the Digital
DSGN 0020

Last century, the digital revolution transformed every aspect of our lives. It shaped every design discipline and defined the ways we imagine and fabricate anything from images to everyday products to clothing, cars, buildings and and megacities. Today, design is going through other technical and conceptual revolutions. We design with biotechnologies, fall in love in Virtual Reality with AI bots, rent our cognitive labor through cryptocurriencies. Our creative capabilities, on the other hand, are bounded by a polluted, over-crowded, and resource-constrained planet that is suffering major income and educational inequality. Design After the Digital interrogates the role of design for this century. The seminar survyes the conceptual and technical developments in the past decade to develop an interdisciplinary understanding of design, science and technology. We will study how new design and fabrication methods shape what we eat, what we wear, how we form opinions and express ourselves. The goal will be to develop new literacies of design that will help us acclimate better to the realities of the century as creative and critical citizens who can shape its products and values.

Cultures of Surveillance
ANTH 3766, Section
STSC 3766, section 401

Developments in digital technology have generated urgent political discussions about the pervasive role of surveillance in our everyday life, from the mundane to the exceptional. But surveillance has a much longer history. In this course, students will learn to think and write critically about the historical, socio-cultural, and political dynamics that define surveillance today. This course asks: how can we historicize what we call surveillance to understand its political and social implications beyond what appears in the document caches of the NSA or on a Black Mirror episode? What role does identity and identification play in surveillance? How do surveillance and computational technologies produce racializing effects? Students will apply course concepts to technologies of daily use, such as self-tracking devices like fit bits or identity documents, and reflect on debates surrounding race, policing, imperialism, and privacy. Through primary source materials, films, podcasts, and key texts, we will engage in a cross-cultural exploration of the multi-faceted phenomena of surveillance technology. Through regular writing assignments, such as surveillance diaries, students will analyze and articulate how they understand surveillance to operate in various domains of everyday life. In this course, students will: (1) Apply course concepts to their lived experience, from securitized architecture to search engines, in order to understand how surveillance operates in everyday life; (2) Analyze how historical context has shaped the current configuration of securitization and surveillance on a global scale; (3) Use ethnographic approaches to study the interaction between individuals, their social relations, and technologies of surveillance.

Paris during the German Occupation and its Places of [Non-]Memory
FREN 2250, Section 301

In this course, we will explore the dark years that characterized the Occupation of France by Nazi Germany and the Collaboration between the two countries supported by the Vichy Regime.A course to explore a past that none of us has directly lived. And not just any past. A repressed, masked, disguised past. A past inhabited by shadows. A past that is whispered. A holed memory. The myth of Marianne Resistance fascinates only for a while before the reality of the camps and the Collaboration looms up with a grimace and provokes fright in us.How to talk about what happened? With what words to recount the story of the disappeared? This was the challenge for the post-Auschwitz society. This is the challenge of this course. Paris will be our anchor point. Capital witness, capital executioner, capital victim. Its streets and walls will whisper to us the stories that were confined between two brackets at the Liberation. It is these stories that we will try to catch on the fly to give them back shape and voice while we bend to the difficult exercise of remembrance. It goes without saying that the objective will not be to judge but to try to understand a past, a past that does not pass ... Assignments include weekly creative writings, translation of survivors' testimonies into English, research in the Archives de Paris and the French press of the time as well as digital mapping and the creation of a digital timeline (no previous skills in digital tools needed). The course is conducted entirely in French. Open to students with a solid advanced level.