Online Master's Degree in Digital Humanities

Digital Humanities by Design: This is where your digital humanities overview will begin. Start to use digital artifacts to research and explore current and ongoing conversations in the field, including the archiving and digitizing of artifacts. A variety of digital tools will be used to effectively communicate and explore ethical, religious, political, historical, and cultural topics.

Creating and Using Digital Tools: Hone your abilities to create digital art, media, and scholarship using current software and other digital tools. Here's where you'll be introduced to programming concepts such as algorithms and data structures.

Textual Criticism and Rhetoric: This course is an introduction to important textual theories in the field of the digital humanities. Students will hone their close reading skills, applying rhetorical theories developed by ancient and contemporary rhetoricians to analyze and create social media and digital art.

Geospatial Humanities: This course will familiarize students with geographic information system (GIS) mapping and other visual-spatial analysis tools. Students will work with open-source software in order to familiarize themselves with data acquisition, geoprocessing, data visualization, and web mapping.

Research in the Digital Humanities: Students will begin to explore, discuss, design, and conduct ethnographic qualitative, quantitative, and mixed method-based research about ethical, literary, religious, political, and historical topics. Other topics covered include ethical and fair use policies and Institutional Review Board (IRB) policies. Students will also learn how to present their research findings through a variety of digital platforms.

Archival Research: Building off Research in the Digital Humanities course, students will learn best practices for locating, organizing, and disseminating archives to a variety of audiences. Students will also learn how to use current archival software systems. 

Topics in the Digital Humanities: This course will focus on special topics in the digital humanities. It may be repeated, provided the topics are different. 

Students have their choice of a graduate thesis or practicum to prepare for graduation from our digital humanities program.

Practicum: The practicum consists of supervised work in a variety of areas such as digital archiving, digital pedagogy, web research and design, art curator, library studies, etc. The topic of the internship is determined in conjunction with the responsible faculty, the on-site supervisor, and the student. Students are responsible for completing weekly analyses in which they connect their practicums to relevant course content and creating a final research project due at the end of the eight-week session. They are also required to document 75 hours of supervised work in order to meet the course requirements.

Thesis Part I-Proposal and Literature Review: This course is the first in a two-course sequence for students who wish to write a thesis. Students will prepare a proposal for their thesis. Once the proposal is approved by the advisor, students will write the literature review in a traditional paper or digital format. This course is a pre-requisite for Thesis Part II.

Thesis Part II-Writing and Defense: This course is the second part in a two-course sequence required for students who wish to write a thesis. Students will develop the remaining sections of their thesis based on the proposal and literature review created in Thesis Part I. In addition, students are required to present their work (paper or multimodal composition) before the end of the semester in which Thesis Part II is taken. Depending on a students’ geographical location, the defense may be presented in person or via an online modality.