How to Complete the Digital Humanities Minor

The Minor in Digital Humanities provides a solid foundation and credential for communicating both digital skills and a critical eye on technology.

In this minor, students will develop knowledge, skills, and experiences that will help them make change in a world that is entangled with the digital in complex and layered ways. This learning empowers students to act as effective global and local citizens, and helps them to demonstrate the flexibility, critical thinking, and other skills needed by professionals in the 21st century.

To join the minor, please fill out the Declaration Form below. The minor is open to students from any major in any college at MSU, and students may declare the minor at any point in their time at MSU.

Explore Digital Humanities
Declare the Minor

Learning Goals:

In completing this minor, students will do all of the following:

  1. Explain the ethical ramifications, equity issues, and cultural or historical contexts of digital technologies and how this knowledge can shape real world decisions
  2. Use digital humanities methods to constructively address questions related to the humanities, ethics, culture, arts, or society
  3. Demonstrate skills related to four or more of the following:
    • Collaborate effectively on a digital project on an interdisciplinary team
    • Demonstrate project management skills, such as organization, maintaining a timetable, resource management, documentation, proactive troubleshooting, comfort with experimentation
    • Engage in work that makes a digital project more inclusive or equitable, in its processes or products, and/or make decisions that reflect humanistic knowledge about ethical considerations in digital practices
    • Collect, prepare, and analyze data or metadata 
    • Use computer programming to engage with humanities inquiry
    • Adeptly selecting the technology and tools to suit the work at hand
    • Create multimodal, multimedia work 

Requirements and Courses

15 credits total

Required courses (6 credits):

  • DH285 – Intro to Digital Humanities (offered every Fall) (Fall 2022 syllabus) – 3 credits
  • DH340 – Digital Humanities Seminar (offered every Spring) – 3 credits

Elective courses:

Students generally take 2 elective courses. All courses with a DH course code other than DH285 and DH340 count as electives for the Minor, as do all courses listed below, regardless of their course code.

Occasionally, courses not on the list may be approved for the Minor, at the discretion of the DH Advisor. For example, if a student completes a Digital Humanities project as part of a course that otherwise isn’t DH in nature, that course may count toward the Minor.

Examples of courses with DH course code:

  • DH491 – Data Ethics (Fall 2022)
  • DH491/FLM460 – Mobile Media: Cellphones and Mass Culture (Spring 2023)
  • DH491 – Media Archives in the Digital Age (Fall 2021)
  • DH491 – Digital Scholarly Editions: From Design to Deliverable (Fall 2020)
  • DH491 – Culture: Digital and Physical (part of the Technology, Humanities, and the Arts study abroad program)

Courses without the DH course code that count toward the Minor:

  • HST251 – Doing Digital History
  • WRA210 – Introduction to Web Authoring
  • GSAH312 – Global Digital Cultures (DH285 counts as a prerequisite for GSAH312)
  • HST/HA418 – History and Art Through Technology
  • ANP412 – Method and Practice in Digital Heritage
  • IAH241E – The Creative Process, when taught as part of the Technology, Humanities, and the Arts study abroad program
  • ANP 465 – Field Methods in Digital Heritage (Field School)

Additionally, courses listed in this document of upcoming classes during the next academic year are eligible toward the DH Minor.

Capstone experience:

The capstone component of the Minor may be achieved through the capstone course, a credit-bearing internship, a study abroad program, or through a non-credit internship. Students are strongly encouraged to enroll in the capstone course to complete this requirement. The capstone course will be offered for the first time in Spring 2023 as DH491 and will get its own course code shortly.

The capstone course will be offered each Spring (beginning in Spring 2023) as a hybrid course, and it will be offered each Fall (beginning in Fall 2023) as an online course. It will focus on bringing students in the minor into the digital humanities community on campus and beyond. There will also be a focus on professionalization, with students creating (or building on) a portfolio website and creating portfolio pieces for use on the job market or in preparation for graduate school.

Alternative options for completing the Capstone experience for the DH Minor include:

Declare the Minor

For further information, contact the Digital Humanities Advisor Patricia Walters (walter31@msu.edu), and/or the Assistant Director of Digital Humanities, Kristen Mapes (kmapes@msu.edu or schedule an appointment directly).

This Post Has One Comment

Comments are closed.