Session 1
Welcome · What is DH: a bird’s-eye view
Course team Taught by the course team: Tobias Hodel, Elena Spadini and Francesco Beretta.
In this session
- Welcome, and practical information about the course and the semester
- What is DH: a bird’s-eye view — a first pass over the field: where it came from, what it claims to be, and why nobody agrees
- How the Intro and the DH Lab fit together
- The assignment and what it will ask of you
What is DH? A first orientation
The session sketches the field from above before we go into any of it in detail:
- Origins. Roberto Busa and the Index Thomisticus; “humanities computing” as a service discipline; the shift to “Digital Humanities” and what that renaming did.
- The three-way split. DH as tool use, DH as object of study (the digital as a cultural phenomenon), DH as its own discipline with its own theory. Sahle’s article for next week takes this apart.
- Where it sits institutionally. Centres, infrastructures, journals, funding — and how that shapes what counts as DH.
- What it looks like in Bern. The MA Major and Minor, the projects around the Walter Benjamin Kolleg, and what you can do with them.
Practical information
- Tuesdays 10:15–12:00, Unitobler, Lerchenweg 36, F-112
- Course materials and scans: ILIAS course space
- These pages are the syllabus. They change during the semester; the repository has the history.
Reading for Session 2
Sahle, Patrick. 2015. “Digital Humanities? Gibt’s doch gar nicht!” Zeitschrift für digitale Geisteswissenschaften, Sonderband 1. http://www.zfdg.de/sb001_004
Read it with one question in mind: what does Sahle gain by arguing that DH does not exist? Come with a position, not a summary.
Task
Sign up for Zotero and install the browser connector. We start using it next week.