The Digital Innovation Lab works the the Department of American Studies to design and implement curricula that provide graduate students across the university training and experience in the use of digital technologies for humanities research, engaged scholarship, and undergraduate teaching and learning. We have experimented with a number of approaches, but our focus remains on the practical application of digital technologies to public humanities needs and opportunities.
Graduate courses supported by the DIL require no previous technical experience or knowledge, and we welcome the participation of UNC staff (including faculty!), graduate students from other area universities, non-degree-seeking students, and independent scholars (through the Friday Center).
All graduate level courses supported by the DIL contribute to the graduate certificate in digital humanities.
Current and scheduled course offerings can be found on the Department of American Studies website.
Below are examples of the graduate courses the DIL has supported thus far.
AMST 850: Graduate Practicum in Digital Humanities
Fall 2014
Instructor: Seth Kotch, Assistant Professor of American Studies; Pam Lach, Assoc. Director, DIL
This practicum blends traditional graduate seminar discussions with hands-on training and experience in the digital humanities. Students will work alongside DH practitioners in the Digital Innovation Lab, contributing to an ongoing digital humanities project or projects that emphasize interdisciplinary, trans-domain, collaborative practice. Students will emerge from this practicum with a deeper understanding of digital humanities approaches, practices, and issues, all of which will have been applied to their own project-based work and training.
Enrollment for this course is limited and is by permission of instructor. Please email Professor Kotch with a statement of interest to request permission to enroll. Enrollment is open to MA and PhD students at UNC and (via interinstitutional registration) to graduate students at Duke and NCSU. Disciplinary diversity is valued.
1. Lab Work
Students will contribute 8 hours/week to ongoing project work in the DIL, as assigned and monitored by the instructor in consultation with the DIL Manager. The particular role each student will play within the project team will depend upon his/her skills, background, professional goals, and experience in relation to the needs of the project. The DIL is committed to maintaining an ambitious and diverse project agenda focused on 1) the development of digital humanities tools, platforms, and work processes, 2) the testing of these tools in practical application through collaborative projects with faculty, other university units, cultural heritage organizations, and other universities, 3) project-based work developed through the programmatic expression of the Carolina Digital Humanities Initiative, including the DIL/IAH Faculty Fellowship Program, Postdoctoral Fellows Program, and CDHI-supported faculty. Students may also propose new interdisciplinary, collaborative projects. Approval of these new projects by the instructor is contingent upon their fit with the mission and priorities of the DIL, the capability of the student to undertake the project proposed, technical requirements, and the capacity of the DIL to support them.
Students will work closely with the DIL Manager to develop a set of professional development goals at the beginning of the semester (for instance, learning XML, or gaining experience in project management).
2. Tool Training and Evaluation
Students will be exposed to various open-source tools for the Digital Humanities each week. Students will get hands-on experience exploring a range of tools, from DH Press and Omeka, to Scalar. Students will also learn how to evaluate tools and projects.
3. Weekly Seminars
In addition to working in the Lab, the Practicum will provide a regular opportunity for engaged conversations about the theoretical and conceptual issues and challenges raised by the project upon which they are working. This will provide a theoretical underpinning for the students’ work in the Lab, while exposing students to a broad range of DH practices and issues.
Fall 2013
Instructor: Robert C. Allen, Professor, American Studies, Pam Lach, Associate Director, DIL
The DIL Graduate DH Practicum combines hands-on training in a real-world DH laboratory setting with regular seminar-styled meetings and engagement with a broader Carolina DH community. There are three main components to the DH Practicum:
1. Lab Work
Students will contribute 8 hours/week to ongoing project work in the DIL, as assigned and monitored by the instructor in consultation with the DIL Manager. The particular role each student will play within the project team will depend upon his/her skills, background, professional goals, and experience in relation to the needs of the project. The DIL is committed to maintaining an ambitious and diverse project agenda focused on:
- the development of digital humanities tools, platforms, and work processes,
- the testing of these tools in practical application through collaborative projects with faculty, other university units, cultural heritage organizations, and other universities, and
- project-based work developed through the programmatic expression of the Carolina Digital Humanities Initiative, including the DIL/IAH Faculty Fellowship Program, Postdoctoral Fellows Program, and CDHI-supported faculty.
Students may also propose new interdisciplinary, collaborative projects. Approval of these new projects by the instructor is contingent upon their fit with the mission and priorities of the DIL, the capability of the student to undertake the project proposed, technical requirements, and the capacity of the DIL to support them.
Students will work closely with the DIL Manager to develop a set of professional development goals at the beginning of the semester (for instance, learning XML, or gaining experience in project management). They will draft a roadmap to achieving these goals by setting milestones which will help them stay on track and reassess their progress as necessary. They will blog regularly (minimum once/week), reflecting on their experience and their progress towards meeting their goals.
Students will submit a final reflection blog post (approx. 3000 words) at the end of the semester.
2. Biweekly Seminars
In addition to working in the Lab, the Practicum will provide a regular opportunity for engaged conversations about the theoretical and conceptual issues and challenges raised by the project upon which they are working. The purpose of these seminars (alternate Tuesdays, 431 Greenlaw) is to offer a theoretical underpinning for the students’ work in the Lab, while exposing students to a broad range of DH practices and issues. A portion of the seminar may be devoted to discussing Lab work.
3. Triangle DH Network Seminars
On alternate Tuesdays, course participants will meet jointly with DH courses being taught at Duke (Data Visualization, Mark Olson) and NCSU (Spatial History, Matthew Booker) at the National Humanities Center in the Research Triangle Park (6-8:50 pm). These sessions will typically begin with a presentation/Q&A by an area DH theorist/practitioner, open to fellows at the National Humanities Center, followed by a joint seminar-style meeting of all three classes.
AMST 840: Digital Humanities/Digital American Studies
Spring 2015
Instructor: Julie Davis, CDHI Postdoctoral Fellow
This course focuses on the application of interdisciplinary digital humanities approaches within site-based, community-oriented, public history projects. We’ll explore how to incorporate a physical and emotional sense of place into digital spaces. We’ll also consider how to use digital technologies to interpret historic sites in ways that engage broad publics and foster local community. Students will analyze/discuss readings on digital humanities and public history theory, review case studies, and critique examples of digital public projects. They also will analyze ongoing work in the Digital Innovation Lab (DIL), including the Loray Mill project.
Students also will gain hands-on, practical experience in applying digital tools & methods to a public history project. They will contribute work to one or more DIL projects in ways that could be translated into individual portfolios. No prior DH training is necessary, but a willingness to experiment and make small contributions to a long-term, collaborative effort is essential.
Spring 2013
Instructors: Robert Allen, Professor, American Studies; Pam Lach, DIL Associate Director
In this interdisciplinary graduate course, we will explore the implications of the application of digital technologies to the materials, questions, practices, and potential of humanities scholarship, particularly as they grow out of and relate to enduring topics in American Studies scholarship and community engagement: place, memory, identity, mobility, and the transformation/preservation of cultural practices and value. This is a convergence point for scholars and practitioners in a number of historically inflected fields in the humanities and social sciences (public history, Southern Studies, geography, folklore, American Indian Studies, African-American Studies, among them) as well as in library/information science, archives, historic preservation, and museum studies.
The course is organized around semester-long participation in collaborative, interdisciplinary public digital humanities projects with organizational partners within and beyond the university, leading to the launch of 3-4 completed digital projects by the end of term. The projects will make use of and test a new digital public humanities platform: DH Press, currently in development through a collaboration between the Digital Innovation Lab and RENCI. Participants will learn how to mount digital humanities projects using this WordPress-based platform, and how to work collaboratively with colleagues and cultural heritage and educational organizations to produce digital projects for multiple audiences and uses. We will also discuss the implications for historians and other humanities scholars, libraries, archives, and museum of the digitization, organization, and circulation of a massive amount of cultural heritage materials over the past twenty years, as well as the ongoing development of digital tools for analyzing, managing, representing, and interacting with these data. MA and Ph.D. students from all disciplines are welcome. No prior experience/technical knowledge required.
Read more about our projects.