Take a crash course in digital humanities with McGill professor Stefan Sinclair.
In the burgeoning academic discipline of digital humanities, creating software tools is as important as getting published in a journal. To better understand what this means, take a peek at the pedagogical playbook of Stefan Sinclair, associate professor of digital humanities in McGill University’s Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures. Sinclair is a new kind of lit professor (as is this guy) who's bringing a humanist’s sensibility to computing--and leveraging Big Data methods to ask new kinds of questions about literature. At the same time, he’s equipping a new generation of humanities students with the eclectic skill set and entrepreneurial spirit to take on a 21st century job market. They're going to need it.
FAST COMPANY: What is “digital humanities,” exactly?
STEFAN SINCLAIR: There’s a natural tendency to assume it’s a new field, but it’s actually been around for quite a long time. The first research combining computers and the humanities was in the 1940s, and a journal called Computers and Humanities started publishing in the 1960s. But there has been a lot of attention and momentum in the past 3 or 4 years that hasn’t been there before. The core of digital humanities is the critical exploration of how computers and technology can enhance but also influence our modes of research in traditional humanities. My own work has been focused on facilitating the exploration and analysis of digital texts. Part of that is to provide tools to allow people fairly easily to ask questions about things like the frequency of terms or clusters of terms in a document or body of work, how those terms are distributed, and which terms and themes are most distinctive to individual documents in a larger body of work.
I'm also interested in how to design and implement tools such that the computer can suggest some possibly interesting trajectories to follow. In other words, the user/reader...
[Source: Fast Company]
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