M.Phil in Digital Humanities and Culture
Option Descriptions 2012-2013

Core modules:

• Theory and Practice of Digital Humanities (Michaelmas Term)
• Web Technologies (Michaelmas Term)
• Internship at cultural heritage institution, library, or project (Hilary Term)
• Final Dissertation (Trinity Term)

Optional modules:

• Cyberculture/Popular Culture (Michaelmas Term)
• War and Society in Seventeenth-Century Ireland (Michaelmas Term)
• Digital Scholarly Editing (Hilary Term)
• Corpus Linguistics (Hilary Term)
• Computational Theories of Grammar and Meaning (Hilary Term)
• From Metadata to Linked Data (Hilary Term)
• Programming for Digital Media (Full year module)
• Contextual Media (Full year module)
• Visualising the Past (Hilary Term)

Core Module: Theory and Practice of Digital Humanities (EN7073)

Teaching Staff: Susan Schreibman and guest lecturers

Duration: Michaelmas; two hour seminar per week

Aims: This module will survey the field of digital humanities – how computational methods are being used to further humanities research and teaching. It will explore how advanced and experimental computational techniques are being used to challenge and change the very nature of humanities research as well as its system of academic rewards. Areas to be covered include the history of the field, thematic research collections, 3D recreations and the use of virtual worlds; text encoding; digital preservation; how e-lit and e-art are breaking down traditional barriers between disciplines; and how the technologies of datamining and visualization may provide us with more effective ways of sifting through hundreds, even thousands of pieces of information than the methods we currently employ.

Specific thememes to be addressed include:

• What is humanities computing and what it is not
• Digital curation and preservation
• Thematic Research Collections
• Text Encoding and Text Analysis
• Virtual Worlds
• Distant Reading Practices
• Metadata and Data Modelling
• Electronic Literature

Core Module: Web Technologies (CS7062)

Teaching Staff: Owen Conlan, Séamus Lawless

Duration: Michaelmas; one hour lecture per week; 16 hours of lab

Aims: The aim of this module will be to explore the foundations of the Worldwide Web. The module will examine the history of the web and the emergence of hypertext and web technologies such as SGML, HTML and XML. Web-based database systems will be covered in addition to web scripting languages such as PHP and programming languages such as Python. This module is deigned to provide Digital Humanities students with an overview of the evolution of the web and hands-on experience of current web technologies. The course will be of interest to those who are interested in the impact of the web on all aspects of society, with a particular focus on the humanities.

Specific thememes to be addressed include:

• Hypertext to HTML
• SGML to XML
• XML Schema
• Intro to XSLT/XQuery
• XSLT/XPath
• MySQL / PHP
• MySQL / PHP
• MySQL / PHP
• Data Analysis
• Web 2.0 - Social Web
• Data Visualisation

Core Module: Digital Humanities Internships and Project Management (EN7084)

Teaching Staff: Susan Schreibman and Jennifer Edmond

Duration: Hilary; 3 two-hour seminars: one at the beginning of term one mid-term, one at the end; in addition to 4 hours a week of project internship activity throughout the semester

Aims: The aim of this module is to introduce students to practical work experience on digital projects in cultural heritage organizations, libraries, and on TCD-based digital humanities projects. Student will learn the basics of project management and good project planning through the taught elements of the module which will give them the project management skills to carry out their internship projects. Students will be set specific tasks appropriate to the institutions in which they are working agreed upon by the module coordinator and the staff liaison at the Institution during the previous semester.

These projects may range, for example, from writing a scoping document for a specific digital humanities project, to creating a digital exhibition on a specific theme or topic, to writing a best practice whitepaper on a particular technology, digital preservation method, or new digital project idea. This project will be supervised by the module coordinator while each student will be assisted by a local specialist from the project or institution to which the student is attached.

Specific themes to be addressed include:

• Scoping a digital humanities project
• Project management for the digital humanities
• Avoiding mission creep
• Evaluating tools and technologies appropriate to the project objectives, outcomes, and budget
• What to do when things go wrong
• Project management tools

Core Module: Dissertation (EN7085)

Teaching Staff: Susan Schreibman and others

Duration: 500 hours

Aims: Students will begin discussing topics for their dissertations early in Hilary semester and supervisors will be assigned then. Students are expected to complete preliminary bibliographies and dissertation outlines before the end of Hilary term. Dissertations of between 15,000 and 20,000 words in length are due for submission on or before 31 August in a given year. Students will be expected to submit 2 copies of the dissertation which should be typed and bound in accordance with the University guidelines as laid down in the University of Dublin Trinity College Calendar part 2 for Graduate Studies and Higher Degrees section 1.34 for a given academic year.

Optional Module: Cyberculture/Popular Culture (EN7022)

Teaching Staff: Brenda Silver

Duration: Michaelmas: two hours a week seminar

Aims: This course will use a wide range of print and electronic texts to interrogate the intersections of cyberculture, popular culture, and postmodern critique. Taking as our starting point the question how or whether the new media have changed our understanding of popular culture, we will look at genres such as cyberpunk, hyperfiction, fan fiction, computer games and their narrative off-shoots (graphic novels; machinima), as well as novels and films that illustrate the process of remediation: the cycling of different media through one another. Topics we will consider include the representations and cultural meanings of the cyborg, the prevalence of techno-orientalism, the creative potential of transformative play and transformative works, and the role of the internet in the creation of a new form of 'folk' culture.

Specific themes to be addressed include:

• Introduction: Mapping the Terrain
• Cyberpunk_1: Gibson; Cadigan; Sterling
• Cyberpunk_2: Neuromancer
• Cyborgs: Acker; Tiptree; Haraway; Jackson
• Blade Runner
• Ghost in the Shell: manga and film
• Snow Crash
• Cyber Fandom
• Computer Games: Story and/or Play
• Remediation_Games, Fiction, Film: Grossman; Run Lola Run
• Digital Fictions: Breaking the Boundaries

Optional Module: War and Society in Seventeenth-Century Ireland (HI7012)

Teaching Staff: Jane Ohlmeyer

Duration: Hilary: two hours a week seminar

Aims: This course takes its impetus from the thesis that Early Modern Europe experienced a military revolution. It examines the impact of war on Irish society with particular reference to the manner in which the general public and specific elites were affected, addressed and depicted in the course of this revolution. Students will make extensive use of the ‘1641 Depositions’ and will be introduced to a number of online resources: most importantly, Early English Books Online.

Specific themes to be addressed include:

• The Military Revolution debate and the Thirty Years War
• Introduction to 1641 Depositions Project
• The 1641 Depositions, War and Atrocity
• Colonial Ireland
• Outbreak of rebellion and the massacres
• War of the Three Kingdoms
• Civil War in Ireland
• Depositions and print culture – led by Eamon Darcy
• The Depositions Project: the next phase
• Class presentation of essays

Optional Module: Digital Scholarly Editing (EN7878)

Teaching Staff: Susan Schreibman

Duration: Hilary: 2 one hour lectures per week; 16 hours of labs

Aims: The aim of this module is to introduce students to practical work experience on digital projects in cultural heritage organizations, libraries, and on TCD-based digital humanities projects. Student will learn the basics of project management and good project planning through the taught elements of the module which will give them the project management skills to carry out their internship projects. Students will be set specific tasks appropriate to the institutions in which they are working agreed upon by the module coordinator and the staff liaison at the Institution during the previous semester.

These projects may range, for example, from writing a scoping document for a specific digital humanities project, to creating a digital exhibition on a specific theme or topic, to writing a best practice whitepaper on a particular technology, digital preservation method, or new digital project idea. This project will be supervised by the module coordinator while each student will be assisted by a local specialist from the project or institution to which the student is attached.

Specific themes to be addressed include:

• Introduction to Text Encoding and the TEI
• Introduction to Metadata
• Thematic Research Collections
• Scholarly Editing
• Digital Scholarly Editing
• Interface, Design, and Visual Aesthetics
• Searching and Browsing and the metadata that supports it
• User-centred design

Optional Module: Corpus Linguistics (LI7864)

Teaching Staff: Elaine Uí Dhonnchadha

Duration: Hilary: two hour seminar per week (1/2 lecture and 1/2 hands-on practice in computer lab)

Aims: Corpus Linguistics is a methodology which touches on all aspects linguistics, both theoretical and applied. A corpus consists of a large body of language samples which is held electronically in text, audio or video form. Corpora can be used to provide evidence for linguistic research (in syntax, morphology, stylistics, pragmatics etc.), they can be used to generate authentic language teaching materials and language testing materials, and they are widely used in the generation and testing of natural language processing tools. This course will introduce students to the principles of corpus design and annotation. Students will gain experience of using a variety of existing corpora as well as having the opportunity to create and automatically annotate their own corpus.

Specific themes to be addressed include:

• Corpus design, and collection and preparation of corpus materials
• Various types of linguistic annotation, e.g. part-of-speech tags, phrase structure, phonetic, prosodic, gesture etc.
• Manual and automatic methods of annotation, and the evaluation of annotations
• Practical work on various corpora using various corpus query tools

Optional Module: Computational Theories of Grammar and Meaning (LI7873)

Teaching Staff: Carl Vogel

Duration: Hilary: two hour seminar per week (3/4 lecture and 1/4 hands-on practice with the formal tools)

Aims: The course expands on an earlier module which provides mathematical foundations for linguistic theory, particularly computational linguistics: formal syntax, formal semantics, computational morphology. The course aims to (i) extend participants' abilities to describe natural language phenomena as computationally oriented grammars that model natural language parsing, generation, and construction of semantic representation in a deductive logical setting; (ii) apply the tools of formal language theory to analysing the syntactic complexity of human languages in its syntax and morphology with reference to ramifications for human language processing; (iii) develop skill in grammar development for extensive fragments of natural language encompassing important syntactic domains: complex noun phrase structure, relative clauses, arguments and adjuncts, embedding verbs, topic focus constructions and questions.

Specific themes to be addressed include:

• Basics of definite clause grammars applied to recognizing natural language
• DCGs with parsing and semantic construction
• DCGs and complement subcategorization frames
• Formal language theory and the complexity of natural language syntax
• Unbounded dependency constructions
• Parsing, interpreting and answering questions
• Formal language theory

Optional Module: From Metadata to Linked Data (CS7063)

Teaching Staff: Owen Conlan, Séamus Lawless, Carl Vogel, and Susan Schreibman, Postdoctoral teaching assistants from the School of Computer Science and Statistics

Duration: Hilary: 2 one hour lectures per week; 16 hours of labs

Aims: The aim of this module will be to explore the theories, methods, and tools to create a technology-enabled, 'distant' approach to reading. Distant reading, a term coined by the Stanford-based Literary critic, Franco Moretti, relies on computational methods to generate abstract models to 'read' large textual corpora. In his2006 article entitled 'What do you do with a Million Books', Greg Crane gave the digital humanities community a shorthand for reading in the modern age. His article points toward a number of exciting possibilities for a paradigm shift in humanities scholarship but realising this ambition has proven more difficult than theorising it. The methods explored in this module offer the potential to interconnect the knowledge in large textual corpora by relating people, places, events and themes. This technology offers unprecedented power to investigate textual material to begin to realise the vision of distant reading.

Specific themes to be addressed include:

• Introduction to Markup and Metadata
• Introduction to The Text Encoding Initiative
• Introduction to Geospatial Markup and Spatial Data
• Introduction to Temporal Markup and Time-Based Data
• Introduction to the Semantic Web
• RDF and Linked Data
• Data Modelling
• Ontologies
• Linked Data in Use

Optional Module: Programming for Digital Media (CS7025)

Teaching Staff: Glenn Strong, Merial Huggard

Duration: Full year module spanning both Michaelmas and HilaryTerms
Michaelmas: 11 one-hour lectures, 22 hours lab, 20 hours assignments
Hilary: 11 one-hour lectures, 11 two-hour lectures, 22 hours lab, 20 hours assignments

Aims: Michaelmas: Students with no programming background will be given the knowledge and confidence to tackle small-scale programming projects using the JavaScript language. The emphasis on browser-based programming examples means that students will also be familiar with many typical techniques for producing interactive effects in web-based applications. Students will also be aware that the core programming techniques can be applied to other programming languages, and are therefore prepared for technologies introduced on later courses on the degree programme.

Hilary: Students will understand the five-layer model used to structure network software, and will understand the issues at each level of the stack. Students will be sufficiently proficient in an industry standard server-side School of Computer Science and statistics ECTS Module Descriptor programming language (e.g.PHP), building on their experience in the first part of the course. Students will also be able to use SQL to build and query simple database systems. Students will understand issues around data validation and security in networked applications.

Optional Module: Contextual Media (CS7027)

Teaching Staff: Neil Leyden, Eithne McManus, Sorcha O'Brien, Mark O'Halloran, Mads Haahr

Duration: Full year module spanning both Michaelmas and HilaryTerms
Michaelmas: 33 one-hour lectures, 20 hours assignments, 10 hours assignments --workshop and seminar-- 15 hours
Hilary: 11 one-hour lectures, 11 two-;hour lectures, 20 hours assignments --workshop and seminar --15 hours

Aims: This module is composed of five interlocking areas of interest: Interactive Narrative, Games Theory andDevelopment, Cultural and Critical Theory, Legal issues for Digital Publishing, and Digital Media Enterprises.

This course is based on reading about technology from areas such as art and design history, computing history, critical theory, material culture, sociology and anthropology, both from lists of recommended reading and the students' own reading. Students are also introduced the emergingfield of game studies, including the analysis of computer and video games as cultural artefacts on a par with film, literature and drama. Students also learn about formal and applied approaches to game design and produce a detailed design document as part of the course work. This part of the course is heavily project-driven.

Optional Module: Visualing the Past

Teaching Staff: Hugh Denard

Duration: Hilary: 2 hour seminar

Aims: This module will explore how computer-generated images, digital models, and virtual worlds are being used to change and augment both research questions, processes and publications in humanities disciplines — including archaeology, architectural history, classics, history and theatre studies — and the representation of the past in museums, games and screen media — from historical documentaries to Hollywood films. Each week we will choose one specific subject area or sector, examining case studies to identify and understand their digital visualisation methods, and probing their economic, ethical, epistemological, methodological, professional, technical and wider social and cultural implications. We will use an international guideline — the London Charter for the Computer-based Visualisation of Cultural Heritage — as a framework for both planning and evaluating visualisation projects. The module will include a number of practical labs, in which students will be introduced to freely-available visualisation tools.

Case studies and readings in areas including:

• Archaeology and Architectural History
• History
• Theatre Studies
• Museums and Virtual Museums
• Games and Screen Media
• Data Acquisition and 3D Modelling
• Virtual Worlds
• Documentation and the London Charter
• Project Planning and Management

No prior knowledge of digital visualisation tools or methods required.