Course info

• Course Number: LIB400M/DSCI 400M
• Instructor: Kate Thornhill
• Day and Time: Mondays & Wednesdays 10am-11:50 am
• Location: 240B MCK
• CRN: 26155, 26154
• Download the flyer or a past syllabus

Who should take this course?

While required for Digital Humanities minors and the Data Science: Cultural Analytics concentration, this is an excellent course for any undergraduate student who wants to gain hands-on experience creating thematic digital research collections and develop technology skills that are portable to a wide range of academic and career fields. It is especially relevant for students who someday hope to become cultural heritage memory workers or see themselves working with digital media and data in any industry. All enrolled students will be foundationally prepared for a job that requires data organizing, sorting, describing, analyzing, documenting, archiving, and publishing. These professional job types include but are not limited to Data Analysts, Data Coordinators or Managers, Digital Assets Managers or Digital Content Managers, Digital Archivists or Librarians, Museum Curators, or Researchers. Skills learned are also portable to other professions.

What will be covered?

This course provides students with theoretical and practical experience in collecting, processing, archiving, and publishing humanities data (images, video, sound, text, maps, etc.) gathered from galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAMs). With the goal of building thematic digital collections as researchers, students will learn digital methodologies focusing on the technical, legal, ethical, and social aspects of working with humanities research data throughout its curation lifecycle. This includes hands-on experience finding, assessing, organizing, and reformatting data; creating and remediating descriptive metadata; evaluating and determining copyright and licensing; writing a data management plan using the standards set by the National Endowment for the Humanities; and sharing thematic research digital collections using GitHub and the open-source platform CollectionBuilder.