Digital Humanities Portal (List View)

Blend technology and the humanities in a personalized tutorial designed for the digital age. Whether you’re exploring how digital tools can support literary research, learning data visualization or coding for scholarly projects, or analyzing media forms like film, podcasts, and games, this tutorial adapts to your goals. Engage with fields such as digital text analysis, online publishing, digital archives, adaptation studies, or interactive storytelling. These tutorials are ideal for students building digital portfolios, launching public humanities projects, or investigating how media and meaning converge in modern scholarship. [show less]

This module will introduce the markup of literary and historical texts electronically. It will begin with a tour of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) and then the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). There will plenty of hands-on activities to markup your out-of-copyright texts of choice but please note that these activities will require a computer (not just a phone or tablet). [show less]

C.S. Lewis is one of the most prolific and influential writers of the 20th century. And yet, in his early career as an Oxford don, he viewed himself as a failed poet. Moreover, his most canonical and transformational writing happened during the most stress-filled periods of his life. This short course allows students to peek into the writing life of C.S. Lewis. Our goal is to see through the lines of printed text by visiting the letters and archival remains of Lewis in a virtual setting. Most of C.S. Lewis's papers remain undigitized and unpublished, available only locally at archives in North America and England. As Professor Brenton Dickieson has visited these archives, he is able to invite students to appreciate C.S. Lewis's writing life by looking at the way that he consciously and unconsciously built his literary career. This course is for writers who are developing their own habits and literary life-prints, as well as folks who are curious about C.S. Lewis's life beyond the biographies and bestselling books. We are not doing text close readings, but looking at the “paratextual” information available to us: writing drafts, letters, diary entries, manuscripts and typescripts, title, and the like. Week 1: Lewis: Pen, Ink, Paper • C.S. Lewis’s Single-jointed Self-Conception as a Writer • What Lewis Says about his Writing Habits • Legendary Bonfires, Stuffed Dolls, and American Suckers: A Story of Lewis’s Papers and Manuscripts • The Screwtape MS. Story: Part 1 Week 2: Leaves, Bombs, Stains • The Screwtape MS. Story: Part 2 • “Villainous Handwriting”: Charlie Starr’s Lewis Handwriting and Rough Draft vs. Fair Draft • Reconsidering the Lindskoog Affair with Manuscript Evidence of “The Dark Tower” Week 3: Joy, Theft, Death • “The Quest of Bleheris”: Lewis’s Teenage Novel Week 4: • Is it True that Lewis Wrote in a Single Draft? • A Grief Observed • Tumbling Through the Wardrobe: The Discovery of Narnia • Arthurian Torso • A New Sketch of Lewis’s Writing Process(es) Note: This course includes a significant amount of visual material on the screen. Please contact the SPACE team if you have visual accessibility requirements and we will do everything we can to accommodate. [show less]

This module introduces you to the grammatical structure of a programming language. It's designed to give you the mental framework to learn any programming language more easily; though the syntax of programming languages can differ, the basic principles are the same. You'll learn about building blocks like variables, objects, and functions, and common patterns like if statements, switches, and for loops. And you'll put it all together and write your first simple program. Note: Two class sessions will be considered lab sections, one in the middle of the month and one at the end. They will give you dedicated time to ask questions about your own projects, and explore topics we may not have covered in class. [show less]

What is fan fiction? Where did it come from? Why do people read and write it? This module will explore fan fiction as a platform, independent of any particular universe (although we will touch on several, based on student input), including its origins, conventions and techniques, purposes, and the opinions of a variety of different stake holders: authors, show creators, and legal experts among them. Students will complete this course with a high-level understanding of fan fiction as genre, community, and as a transformative response to the source material. [show less]

This module dives into K-Pop Demon Hunters as both a pop culture phenomenon and rich site of critical inquiry. Blending fandom, performance, media industries, K-Pop culture, aesthetics, and myth, the course asks: what does it mean when idol culture meets demon lore? How do K-pop’s global circuits of production and fandom intersect with anime conventions, East Asian mythologies, and transnational media flows? Students will study the series as text, brand, and cultural event—moving beyond hype to examine the structures, production practices, and myths that make it compelling. The module combines accessible theory and film analysis with lively discussion, close reading, and collaborative analysis. Guest scholars in East Asian Studies and Anime Studies will offer focused perspectives on mythology, media mix strategies, and cross-cultural adaptation. This class is rigorous but playful—an experiment in taking fun seriously, and there's no need for any experience in any of these areas to take this course. *Note: Please make sure you watch the film before this module starts. [show less]

How do films tell stories — not just through dialogue and plot, but through images, sound, and structure? This short course introduces students to the language of cinema, exploring how film techniques such as framing, editing, mise-en-scène, sound design, and performance work together to create meaning. Through close analysis of carefully selected clips, students will develop the tools to “read” a film, learning about the choices that shape interpretation and audience response. Taught by Maggie Parke, whose work engages deeply with adaptation and visual storytelling, the course will draw on popular examples including The Fellowship of the Ring as our central case study piece, other well-known adaptations, and also original screen stories. We will examine how cinematic language transforms narrative across mediums. This class is designed for students from any background, and it is a viewing and discussion-based course offering an accessible yet rigorous introduction to film analysis, sharpening both critical insight and appreciation for the craft of storytelling on screen. *Note: Since this module is about visual interpretation of a scene, parts of it may not be accessible for visual/sight or hearing impaired. [show less]

Video games are an exciting new medium for storytelling because they give players agency within the story world. In this class, we’ll look at recent examples of games that use interactivity to tell stories not possible in any other medium. We’ll see how games encourage players to identify with characters’ emotions through gameplay; incorporate world-building into the setting; and handle the branching pathways of player choice. The games we’ll play are relatively short and are accessible to students who have never played video games before. [show less]

Inviting students to share their delight in, and deepen their appreciation of, video games, we will discuss examples of the art, music, gameplay, and story from a range of influential titles. We will introduce and experiment with some of the theoretical frameworks that have been applied to video games as media objects and cultural artifacts. But mostly, we will enjoy learning more about the medium and the games we already love. Aside from links and selections shared throughout the module, Gabrielle Zevin's novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. will be the only required reading. [show less]