Undergraduate

The Digital Humanities represent the area of study where humanities disciplines and studies in information engage digital tools, archives, artifacts, and information technologies. This certificate is designed to introduce students to the ideas, materials, and computational tools that underlie this field. It is open to students of all majors. Those who plan to pursue the certificate should apply to the certificate director for admission no later than the end of their sophomore year.

Students take 18 credit hours from a selection of courses taught in different departments and colleges at The University of Texas at Austin and must earn a letter grade of C- or better in all courses required for certification. Some courses required by the certificate may also fulfill degree requirements established by a student's major department.

Scholarship in Digital Humanities interprets the cultural and social impact of information technologies as well as creates and applies these technologies to answer cultural, social, historical, and philological questions. Digital Humanities scholarship is necessarily collaborative and interdisciplinary. It emphasizes design, multimediality, and experiential learning and research by creatively expanding the networks of participation, the modes of access, and the tools for the creation and dissemination of scholarship. Digital Humanities practices are not limited to conventional humanities departments, but are emerging in every humanistic field at UT Austin, within the College of Liberal Arts and beyond, in arts and architecture, information studies, film and media studies, archaeology, geography, ethnic studies, and the social sciences. At the same time, Digital Humanities is a natural outgrowth and expansion of the traditional scope of the Humanities and Information Studies, not a replacement or rejection of traditional humanistic inquiry. In fact, the role of the humanist is critical at this historic moment, as our cultural legacy is migrated to digital formats and our relation to knowledge, cultural material, technology, and society is radically re-conceptualized.

Because Digital Humanities demands interdisciplinary education, it offers a compelling model for transformative scholarship and pedagogy at the undergraduate level. Digital Humanities facilitates the necessary critical thinking, analytic skills, and creativity that have long been at the heart of the undergraduate educational experience and thus impacts all fields that use new technologies to undertake research. As more and more courses utilize digital technologies for instruction, new information platforms are emerging, which encourage collaboration, creativity, and interdisciplinarity. Yet, the existing, funded projects at UT Austin do not offer enough opportunities for project-based work for a wide range of students. At the same time, the collections at the heart of humanities research and UT Austin’s world-class libraries and archives are often inaccessible for digital analysis by scholars even when they have been digitized. Pairing students with project-based work in these collections offers a unique opportunity to train students in much-needed information skills and to showcase these and community collections in research that engages staff, undergraduates, graduates, and faculty. The DH Certificate will harness students’ engagement with and excitement about digital technologies and media and put that energy to use in a flexible curriculum that requires both skills acquisition and critical inquiry.