Digital Humanities

This course is part of the programme
Bachelor's study programme Slovene Studies (1st Level)

Objectives and competences

Students get to know the methods of digitization of literary texts and other artistic genres and cultural phenomena. They learn about the current production and reception of digital art, as well as its online curation and archiving. They understand the various possibilities of computer analysis of literary texts and learn about the most important research in the field of computer stylometry and they can critically analyze these methods. They discuss ethical topics that are connected to the digital turn of society and culture.

Prerequisites

Ni prerequisits.

Content

Digitization is ubiquitous in modern life and it is increasingly gaining ground in the humanities as well. Digital humanities approaches information technology from the point of view of humanities, but on the other hand it tries to find answers to traditional humanistic questions with new technological tools. The course presents several areas of contemporary digital humanities:
- digital archives and online databases,
- critical editions of material,
- digitization of tangible cultural heritage,
- critical digital studies,
- culturomics as the study of culture and trends;
- data mining for research into cultural phenomena;
- different computer reading methods;
- stylometry;
- different types of data visualization (maps, grids, graphs, trees);
- the fluid textuality of multimedia projects;
- expanded and paradigm-shifted contexts and potentials of (hyper)textuality;
- e-literature as new media art and discourse.

The course sheds light on the relationship between modern information technologies and literature from the point of view of textual analysis through distant reading. It presents new methods of computer processing of texts and stylometry, which enable the analysis of the used vocabulary, themes, emotional coloring of the texts etc. either in an individual literary work or in a larger literary corpus. The focus is on the ethical aspects of digital humanities, for example on online activism ("hashtag activism"), the critical analysis of new-media and e-literature phenomena, which at the same time derives from and is set within new forms and potentials of textuality, offered (or even dictated) by new technologies.

Intended learning outcomes

Knowledge and understanding:
The student:
- gets to know various interdisciplinary areas of digital humanities;
- gets to know the leading methods of researching socio-cultural phenomena with modern technological tools;
- learns about online repositories in the field of culture and art and the processes of their creation;
- gets acquainted with computer methods of researching literary works, both individual texts and larger corpora;
- learns about the various forms of literary creativity in modern digital media;
- understands how different types of digital visualizations of large amounts of data bring new information about the subject of research.

Skills:
The student:
- develops skills for searching online repositories with cultural and artistic content;
- develops the ability to create his or her own corpora of literary texts and devises individual research solutions using digital methodology;
- is able to interpret the results of computer research based on a broader knowledge of literature and culture;
- is able to present the results of his research on digital media;
- learns to map cultural and literary-historical knowledge in a multimedia environment;
- develops the ability to apply stylometric tools to Slovenian and foreign literary texts;
- is able to critically assess modern phenomena such as social media and open access to data online;
- is able to look at modern information technologies from the point of view of their social and cultural role.

Readings

  • Ramsay, Stephen (2011). Reading Machines: Toward an Algorithmic Criticism. Illinois: University of Illinois Press. Catalogue E-version
  • Martin Paul Eve (2021). The Digital Humanities and Literary Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Catalogue
  • Jockers, Matthew L. Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History. Illinois: University of Illinois Press. Catalogue
  • Moretti, Franco (2011). Grafi, zemljevidi, drevesa in drugi spisi o svetovni literaturi. Ljubljana: Studia humanitatis. Catalogue
  • Maciej Eder, Rybicki, Jan in Kestemont, Mike (2016). Stylometry with R: A Package for Computational Text Analysis. The R Journal 8 (1): 107-121. E-version
  • Electronic Literature Organization (2021) E-version
  • Electronic Literature Collection E-version
  • Electronic Literature Directory E-version

Assessment

Exam. 100 %

Lecturer's references

Prof. dr. Katja Mihurko Poniž explores representations of femininity and masculinity in the field of literature and literary studies with an emphasis on Slovene literature. She has published articles on the women’s movement before the Second World War and has integrated digital humanities approaches into literary research.

PATRAŞ, Roxana, ODEBRECHT, Carolin, GALLERON, Ioana, ARIAS, Rosario, BERENIKE HERRMANN, J., KRSTEV, Cvetana, MIHURKO PONIŽ, Katja, YESYPENKO, Dmytro. Thresholds to the "Great Unread" : titling practices in eleven ELTeC collections. Interférences littéraires. 2021, vol. 25, str. 163-187, ilustr. ISSN 2031-2970. http://interferenceslitteraires.be/index.php/illi/article/view/1102/958.
POLLAK, Senja, MARTINC, Matej, MIHURKO PONIŽ, Katja. Natural language processing for literary text analysis : word-embeddings-based analysis of Zofka Kvederʼs Work. V: JOSÉ FINATTO, Maria (ur.), POLLAK, Senja (ur.). Proceedings of the Workshop on Digital Humanities and Natural Language Processing (DHandNLP 2020), co-located with International Conference on the Computational Processing of Portuguese (PROPOR 2020), Évora, Portugal, March 2nd, 2020. [S. l.]: CEUR-WS, cop. 2020. Str. 1-9. CEUR workshop proceedings, Vol. 2607. ISSN 1613-0073. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2607/paper4.pdf.
MIHURKO PONIŽ, Katja. Digitalizacija literarne ustvarjalnosti : študija primera Zofke Kveder = Digitalisation of the literary creativity : a case study of Zofka Kveder. V: VRANEŠ, Aleksandra (ur.). Digital humanities and Slavic cultural heritage : international scientific conference, Belgrade, 6-7 May 2019 : [the book of summaries] = Digitalna humanistika i slovensko kulturno nasleće : međunarodna naučna konferencija, Beograd, 6.-7. maj 2019 : [zbornik sažetaka]. Beograd: University of Belgrade, Faculty of Philology: = Univerzitet u Beogradu, Filološki fakultet, 2019. Str. 27-28. ISBN 978-86-6153-581-9.
MIHURKO PONIŽ, Katja, BOVCON, Narvika, NEDREGOTTEN SØRBØ, Marie, PARENTE-ČAPKOVÁ, Viola, SANZ, Amelia, VAN DIJK, Suzan, VAUPOTIČ, Aleš. Teaching women writers with NEWW Virtual Research Environment. V: FIŠER, Darja (ur.), PANČUR, Andrej (ur.). Zbornik konference Jezikovne tehnologije in digitalna humanistika, 20. september - 21. september 2018, Ljubljana, Slovenija = Proceedings of the Conference on Language Technologies & Digital Humanities, September 20th - 21st 2018, Ljubljana, Slovenia. 1st ed. Ljubljana: Znanstvena založba Filozofske fakultete: = Ljubljana University Press, Faculty of Arts, 2018. Str. 254-255. ISBN 978-961-06-0111-1.
MIHURKO PONIŽ, Katja, BOVCON, Narvika, TRAJANOV, Aneta, SMREKAR, Tina. Digitalizacija kulturne dediščine v dveh projektih programa Študentski inovativni projekti za družbeno korist. V: FIŠER, Darja (ur.), ERJAVEC, Tomaž (ur.). Jezikovne tehnologije in digitalna humanistika : zbornik konference : 24.- 25. september 2020, Ljubljana, Slovenija = Proceedings of the Conference on Language Technologies and Digital Humanities : September 24th - 25th 2020, Ljubljana, Slovenia. 1st ed. Ljubljana: Inštitut za novejšo zgodovino: = Institute of Contemporary History, 2020. Str. 66-73, ilustr. ISBN 978-961-7104-01-1.
MIHURKO PONIŽ, Katja, GOJKOVIĆ, Maksim, TRAJANOV, Aneta. Pisma = Letters. V Novi Gorici: Univerza, 2022. 1 spletni vir. https://pisma-rch.ung.si/. [COBISS.SI-ID 102983939]
financer: ARRS, ciljni raziskovalni programi, P6-0347, Historične interpretacije 20. stoletja
ERJAVEC, Tomaž, HLADNIK, Miran, JUVAN, Marko, MIHURKO PONIŽ, Katja. COST-ELTeC/ELTeC-slv : release with 94 novels in level 1 encoding. [CERN: Genève], 2019. 1 spletni vir. https://zenodo.org/record/3518109#.XuHpuudS-Ul, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3518109.
BOVCON, Narvika, KERŠEVAN, Gregor, KOČEVAR, Matej, MIHURKO PONIŽ, Katja. Aleksandrinke. [S. l.: s. n.], 2018. http://green.fri.uni-lj.si:1869/.