ENROLL

Susannah Ottaway, Austin Mason

This course will explore the history of England from the time of the Tudors through the Industrial Revolution, with a particular focus on the history of poverty and social welfare. We will use new technologies to develop innovative ways to teach and learn about the past. Using a specially designed digital archive, students will construct life stories of paupers, politicians and intellectuals. One day per week, the class will work in a computer lab constructing 3-Dimensional, virtual institutions and designing computer game scenarios that utilize their research to recreate the lived experience of the poor.

Austin Mason

The digital world is infiltrating the academy and profoundly disrupting the humanities, posing fundamental challenges to traditional models of university education, scholarly research, and academic publication. This course introduces the key concepts, debates and technologies that are shaping the Digital Humanities (DH) revolution, including text encoding, digital mapping (GIS), network analysis, data visualization, and the basic programming languages that power them all. Students in this class will learn to hack the humanities by making a collaborative, publishable DH project, while acquiring the skills and confidence necessary to actively participate in the digital world, both at the university and beyond.