Introduction to Digital Humanities

This course illustrates skills in digital research and visualization techniques across subjects and fields within the humanities. It is offered by Harvard University through edX, an online learning platform.

The course elaborates on the new tools and standards adopted by museums, libraries, archives and other institutions to digitize collections and artifacts. This includes turning digitized material into machine-readable data and the use of technologies such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). Through this course, participants will learn about common digital tools used across disciplines within the humanities, alongside examples of projects that integrate them.

 Some of the course contents are:

• Identifying different data formats and how they fit into a research workflow
• Evaluating existing digital platforms based on features that can be used for data analysis within different fields such as literature, history, art, and music
• Acquiring, cleaning, and creating data
• Understanding how command line functions work
• Creating data from multiple text files using Voyant