DIGTLHUM01 Digital Humanities

Students will study common core units taught by the Faculties of Arts, Information Technology and Art, Design and Architecture, and then follow a particular stream through their choice of electives in:

• Digital media stream
• Digital scholarship stream
• Digital cultural heritage stream

Digital media stream

Students undertaking the units in the digital media theme can study how digital technology and media are assembled, used, and experienced in society, and also (through Creative computing studio 1 and 2) how to build things; namely apps, websites, and visualisations. The fields of new media studies and game studies are increasingly becoming part of the new digital humanities landscape. The digital media theme offers students the chance to explore video games industry and culture - an intrinsic part of a convergent media culture in postmodern societies - and the opportunity to design and create interactive virtual worlds (in Foundations of 3D and Immersive environments).

Digital scholarship stream

Applying computational techniques to existing and new data sources have changed scholarship in the humanities in recent decades. These techniques include the statistical analysis of literary texts, analysis of networks of people and ideas, and using visualisation and mapping as tools to understand large-scale patterns. This theme in digital humanities looks at how these new modes of analysis and presentation are changing humanistic scholarship and leading to a re-evaluation of the nature of evidence and argument in the humanities.

Digital cultural heritage stream

Galleries, libraries, archives and museums are time-honoured institutions that we entrust to collect, care for and communicate our cultural history. The use of emerging digital technologies to activate, engage, and transform this cultural legacy runs parallel with transformations happening in the way these institutions are safeguarding our collective past through digital formats. Broadly speaking, digital cultural heritage is concerned with the curation, critique and evaluation of museums and heritage at this pivotal moment when the relationships between cultural material, knowledge, society and technology are radically changing. Moreover, it entails the creative and critical application of digital technologies -including but not limited to augmented and virtual reality, 3D object, architectural and environmental modelling, digital imaging and data visualisation- towards the investigation, interrogation and imaginative exploration of the relationships found within cultural complexes.

Availability

Digital humanities is listed in A2000 Bachelor of Arts at Caulfield and Clayton as a major and a minor and in A0502 Diploma of Liberal Arts at Caulfield and Clayton as a major.