Introduction to Digital Humanities

Online Course for Graduate Students

9-15 October 2020

Description: As primary sources of information are more frequently digitized and available online than ever before, how can we use those sources to ask new questions? How geographic distribution of mosques correlates with location of old urban centers in Kazakhstan? What influences informed the creation and evolution of the Abay poetry? How is the Russian colonization in the 18-early 20th c. connected to construction of the Orthodox cathedrals? How can I understand or interpret all pieces of Kazakh literature all at once? The answers to these questions can be explored using a wide variety of digital tools, methods, and sources.
As museums, libraries, archives and other institutions have digitized collections and artifacts, new tools and standards have been developed that turn those materials into machine-readable data. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), for example, have enabled humanities researchers to process vast amounts of textual data. However, these advances are not limited just to text. Sound, images, and video have all been subject to these new forms of research.
This course will show you how to manage the many aspects of digital humanities research and scholarship. Whether you are a student or researcher, teacher or public activist — or just plain curious — this course will help you bring your area of study or interest to new life using digital tools.