Digital Tools and Methods (ARTS20001)

This subject introduces students to various tools and methods that enable humanities and social science students to learn from, work with and communicate digital data and to undertake data analysis. Students will gain a general knowledge of different tools and the rationales for digital methods, including text mining, analysing large text corpora, digital annotation, network analysis and data visualisation. They will be introduced to the range of digitised sources, the history and current practice of digitisation and intelligent information retrieval from the web and databases and will move from thinking about consuming digital products to learning about making them. This involves consideration of what counts as data in humanities and social science digital research. Students will be given intensive training in at least one digital tool, which they will then deploy in a structured research and data communication project, supervised in tutorial-sized groups. The focus of this subject is practical learning and doing, informed by reading in the critical scholarship on digital tools and methods in humanities and social science.