Stanford launches digital humanities minor

By combining scientific and computational methods with interpretative and critical thinking skills, the field of digital humanities opens unprecedented doors to what scholars can achieve.

This burgeoning field is attracting Stanford undergrads.

In addition to taking courses in which they use digital tools, growing numbers of students are also working closely with faculty members on digital humanities projects outside of the classroom, where they apply computational criticism to the study of literature, combine historical and digital analysis to investigate Chinese grave relocations, and develop social annotation tools to be used in teaching online courses, to mention a few.

Many of these projects are conducted in labs at the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) and in the Stanford libraries.

But until now, there has been no formalized way of acknowledging digital humanities as part of the undergraduate curriculum.

Administered by the English department, the Digital Humanities minor program officially launched in September to fill that need.

“The timing is right for a Digital Humanities minor at Stanford,” said Zephyr Frank, CESTA’s director and one of the four originators of the minor.

Frank pointed to the duality of a growing number of humanities faculty experimenting with digital tools and the unprecedented access students have to technical capacity.

Read the entire Stanford Report story here.