I’ve been studying Digital Humanities at King’s College London for about four months now, and I must say that it has been a good experience so far. The professors are nice and knowledgeable people, and the readings as part of classes are generally very interesting. In addition, to prepare for a Phd / MA in philosophy, I have also been taking a 40-credit (little over 20% of the yearly credits) course in Ethics at King’s philosophy department. A course that is fascinating and well-taught as well.
A question I often get, though, is: “What the (kleene star) is Digital Humanities?”. My usual response is that it is doing humanities research using IT-technology: Such as data-mining philosophical texts, modeling philosophical arguments, making 3D models of historical sites, or building tools and resources for philosophers (or other humanists). And that has appeared to be about right, though in practice there is a bit of a bias towards building digital editions of canonical texts, because that is what is best at attracting funding. But anyway, here is an alternative explanation of what Digital Humanities is to classical Humanities on Youtube (don’t fully agree with it, but is a funny watch anyway).
There is a rule at King’s, or more likely, in the British educational system, that one is not allowed to write an assessed essay on the same topic/resource twice. Therefore I haven’t been writing much about LogiLogi so far, as I want to save it for my thesis.
In the last few months I have written four essays. The first two were for a course called Digital Publishing in the Humanities: Three Digital Publications: Carrying the Printer Home (about modes of reading and the suitability of digital resources for them, and the need for annotation possibilities to enable academic reading), The Letters by Vincent van Gogh: Silently Painting Letters Across Screens (about The Letters website, and how websites are quite limited compared to a more portable format for digital texts).
And the last two, which I have also published LogiLogi as they directly relate to philosophy, were for the Ethics course, resp the Methods and Techniques course: Three Essential Resources for Philosophy: Stanford Encyclopedia, Google Scholar and PhilPapers (pdf) (about digital resources for philosophy, and how they are, and became to be essential), and Everyone receives relevant reasons for moral action: and why valid amoral reasons are indeed amoral (pdf) (the one for ethics, about whether we all have reasons to behave morally, and what such reasons would be).
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