Courses / Module

The early 21st century is seeing societal transformations as profound as the shift in the ancient world from a primarily oral culture to a written one, or the early modern revolution from the manuscript to print. The digital affects virtually every aspect of our lives: from the ways we communicate, to modalities of education, to the ways in which we make sense of the past and have glimpses into the future.

This stream will explore the transformation from the analogue to the digital in the study of our past providing innovative means to approach traditional fields of expertise. It will also focus on the diverse ways that new tools, methods, and technologies, and the vast amount of information available to us, from the World Wide Web to social media, augment our understandings of the present.

Students registering for this stream will delve into a number of technologies and methods that transform our engagement with primary data, including 2D and 3D visualisation, crowdsourcing, augmented and virtual reality, text encoding, serious games, and web archiving.

In addition to lectures, there will be hands-on labs and supervised practical exercises in which students will have the opportunity to learn by doing. Classes will encourage active learning through discussion, group work, and critical thinking exercises. The learning outcomes of the module will be assessed via continuous assessment that will provide feedback at various stages of the stream and will help students to identify the areas that require improvement.

The focus of the second part of the stream is on literary and historical texts from the early 19th and early 20th centuries, specifically Mansfield Park (1814) by Jane Austen and letters from around the time of the Easter Rising from the Letters 1916 online project. The digital changes how we engage with the written word: we no longer have to read texts word by word, page by page. The digital allows us to read texts outside their semantic contexts to more richly explore themes, networks, and use of language. This module will provide an opportunity to study traditional concepts of text, author and reader and how they are being challenged and extended in the digital era. Students will read texts both traditionally as well as through a variety of online tools and environments which provide a lens through which a more nuanced understanding can be garnered.