Digital
Humanities.
The travel from encountering a field to acting within it — from the scriptorium to the server.
diśā (दिशा) means direction. This course is choreographed around DISHA — Discovery, Integration, Skill & Society, Human Flourishing, and Agency & Action. You meet the model twice over: as a weekly habit, and as a semester-long journey.
Encounter
Meet the field, and hold its questions loosely.
Weeks 1–2Connect
Place DH inside five centuries of scholarship.
Weeks 3–4Practise
Hands-on method — and its politics.
Weeks 5–8Weigh
From what we can do to what we should.
Weeks 9–11Build
Make something of your own, and take it further.
Weeks 11–12How this course works
This course runs differently from most you have taken. The learning happens before class, not during it. It will feel strange for two weeks — trust the rhythm.
Learn before class
Each week you read, watch a short video or two, and try a tool on your own — about four to five hours. You arrive already having met the material and formed a question.
The session is not a lecture
It is where we compare what we found, argue about it, and build skills together. If you have not done the self-study, there is no lecture to fall back on.
Keep one text all term
In Week 1 you choose a text or cultural object you care about — a poem, a song, letters, an inscription, a manuscript. Everything you learn to do, you do on your own text.
Reflect every week
A short reflection (150–200 words) is due weekly. It is not a summary — it is you thinking about what you now think, and why it changed. This is where the learning settles.
Use AI honestly
Digital and AI tools are welcome — they are the subject. Use them to explore, learn a tool, help you build. The one rule is disclosure: a one-line note saying what you used.
It gets less strange
Driving your own learning is a skill, and like any skill it is awkward at first. By the midpoint most students say they would not go back.
Encounter it alone
Read, watch, and play with a tool — ~4–5 hours. Arrive with a question.
Compare & practise
Two hours to stage disagreements and build skills together, not to be lectured at.
Make something
Produce a reflection, a chart, a record — a piece of your own term-long work.
The DISHA arc
The course as a whole arcs through DISHA once, module by module — Discovery and Integration in Module 1, Skill & Society in Module 2, and Human Flourishing rising into Agency & Action in Module 3. The colours below run down the spine of the twelve weeks.
Why the machine met the humanities
What are the humanities for, and what changes when a computer enters the room? You meet the field as a contested label and ask whether an algorithm can read.
From the scriptorium to the server
Is DH a rupture with five centuries of scholarship, or its newest chapter? You learn to ask what counts as method and what counts as evidence.
Reading at scale
Hands-on text mining, distant reading, and honest visualisation — and the social question a method never escapes: whose texts get digitised, and whose don't?
Big data, real people
When human lives become data points, what do we owe the people behind the numbers? Ethics, the politics of the archive, and preservation as a human act.
What will you build?
The course does not end at the exam. You finish a small original project on the text you chose in Week 1 — and leave with a next step.
Week by week
Each week gives a driving question, the self-study to do before class, what happens in the session, and the action step after. Tap a week to open it. Use the legend to trace one DISHA stage down the spine.
Readings & companion
Twelve weekly readings and four reference works. Each entry tells you why the reading is on the list, what to read for, and which sections to read — trimmed to a 15–30 page assignment. Read humanities scholarship for its argument: introduction and conclusion first, hunt the thesis, and bring one question to class.
Four reference works — dip in when a topic grabs you
Assessment
Five components, each mapped to a DISHA stage. Reflections are the running Human-Flourishing thread; participation rewards Integration; practicals are the Skill & Society deliverables; the project is pure Agency & Action.
The three practicals
- Week 5 · Mining note
- Two pages: three findings from Voyant, each with a screenshot, and a paragraph on what the tool could not see.
- Week 7 · Honest chart
- One finding turned into a single truthful chart, revised after the clinic, with a 150-word defence of every design choice.
- Week 10 · Metadata record
- A proper description record for your text — and a note on one thing standard schemes cannot capture.
- Weeks 8–12 · The project
- Launched Wk 8, ethics added Wk 9, finalised Wk 11, presented Wk 12. Assessed on the thinking, never the tool alone.
AI explains & surfaces
Use AI to explain, summarise, and raise questions — but reflections must be in your own voice. The thinking cannot be outsourced.
AI as a lab partner
Encouraged — for help with Voyant, RAWGraphs, or a line of code. Here, fluency with tools is the point.
AI may assist the build
But the ethical judgement, the interpretation, and the final argument must be demonstrably yours.
Resources
Mostly free, mostly browser-based. The course should never feel like an import — the Indian anchors are living examples you can inspect, several on your own campus.
Hands-on tools
- Voyant ToolsWord clouds, Trends, Contexts · Weeks 2, 5, 6 · runs in a browser
- Google Books Ngram ViewerWord frequency over time · Weeks 1, 6
- RAWGraphs & PalladioNo-code visualisation, network & mapping · Weeks 7, 8
- The Programming HistorianPeer-reviewed, step-by-step lessons · the best on-ramp to Python or R
- GephiNetwork visualisation for the ambitious · Week 8 · desktop install
Video creators & talks
- Miriam PosnerAccessible DH intros & "how did they make that?" · Weeks 1, 8
- Franco Moretti / Stanford Literary LabDistant reading talks, paired with a critical response · Week 6
- Ted Underwood — "The Stone and the Shell"Evidence-first computational literary study · Weeks 6, 8
- DARIAH-EU / DARIAH-TeachShort, reusable teaching videos across DH methods
Indian DH anchors
- BichitraThe online variorum of Rabindranath Tagore · Weeks 3, 10
- BORI critical edition of the MahābhārataDecades of manuscript collation — "big data" before computers · Weeks 2, 3
- GRETIL · SARIT · MuktabodhaRepositories of digitised Indic texts · Weeks 3, 11
- TSLAS's own workVālmīki Rāmāyaṇa study, the Sanskrit Learning Engine, the Kaithi-script OCR pipeline — proof you can build DH here · Weeks 5, 8, 11
A working note on links: the tools and repositories above are real and well established, but DH tools move and some Indian repositories change hosts. Confirm current links and access at the start of the semester, and treat named videos as "search for this creator / this topic" rather than fixed URLs.
Glossary
Learn these and the readings will start to speak to one another.