ARTH240

Introduces students to the practices of a field that is only about twenty years old: the Digital Humanities. We will explore how humanities scholars can reexamine their materials, configuring them as "data" that can be gathered and visualized in order to ask new questions about the past. Using traditional humanities source materials from this different perspective, students will produce entirely new data; using new digital platforms, they will create visualizations of that data; and using humanistic methods, they will interpret those visualizations. Focusing on the original Humanists from the Renaissance period, this course will teach students to engage closely with the most traditional materials of the humanities - primary texts produced in an historical period - and with the newest tools to work with humanities data. Students will complete two major projects by collecting data on the same humanist figures: mapping their travels, and tracing their networks. We will also consider how texts can be treated as data.