MSU offers a Minor in Digital Humanities for students from all majors. The Minor 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.
Learning Goals:
In completing this minor, students will do all of the following:
- Explain the ethical ramifications, equity issues, and cultural or historical contexts of digital technologies and how this knowledge can shape real world decisions
- Use digital humanities methods to constructively address questions related to the humanities, ethics, culture, arts, or society
- 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
15 credits total
Required courses:
- DH285 – Intro to Digital Humanities (offered every Fall) (Fall 2020 syllabus) – 3 credits
- DH340 – Digital Humanities Seminar (offered every Spring) – 3 credits
Elective courses:
Students take 2-3 elective courses. Options include courses listed below but may also include courses that significantly incorporate digital humanities and must be approved by the DH advisor.
- Find a regularly updated list of electives for the upcoming academic year
- Any course with DH course code (ex: DH491)
- Digital Scholarly Editions: From Design to Deliverable (Fall 2020)
- Digital Public Humanities (Spring 2020)
- Theories of the Digital (Fall 2019)
- Courses with a digital focus, (including but not limited to):
- ENG 391 Intro to Digital Media Studies
- HST251 Doing Digital History
- WRA210 Intro to Web Authoring
- FLM 460 Seminar in Digital Film and Media
- GSAH 312 Global Digital Cultures (DH285 counts as a prerequisite for GSAH312)
- Technology, Humanities, & the Arts in London and Scotland study abroad program (resuming in summer 2022)
- Find an expanded list of courses approved as DH Minor Electives for Summer 2020, Fall 2020, and Spring 2021 here
Experiential learning:
The experiential learning component of the Minor may be achieved through a for-credit internship or coursework, or it may be achieved through a non-credit internship. The key component is that students gain experience working hands-on in Digital Humanities, inside or outside of a university context. Students work with the Minor advisor to identify an experience best suited to their interests and schedule.
Examples of common Experiential Learning for the DH Minor include:
- Usually an internship, at MSU or outside the university.
- Working at a DH lab, for example:
- Working with a faculty member on a DH project
For further information, contact the Advisor for Digital Humanities, Kate Rendi, rendikat@msu.edu.