Undergraduate Certificate

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.

Academic performance (Grade Point Average) is the primary criterion for admission; a personal statement about interest in the program and degree progress (i.e. where the student is in their degree) are additional factors.

1. Complete the DH Certificate application for admission to the certificate.

2. With your advisor, complete the Minor/Certificate application in order to make the credential available to attach to the degree profile. 

Please send questions to tclement[at]utexas.edu.

New courses are offered each year that can satisfy the requirements. At the same time, only a few of the courses in the list of approved courses and the list of suggested courses are regularly reoccurring. Given the broad selection of qualifying courses that has been available at UT Austin for years, this academic vibrancy is ultimately a strength of this Certificate. If you are taking a course that you believe *should* count for the DH requirements, please fill submit a new course.

To earn the Certificate, students must take 18 credit hours:

(I) An introduction to Digital Studies (3 credit hours).

A survey course that is an introduction to Digital Humanities. Please note that these courses are not offered every semester.

(II) Methods and Topics-based courses (12 credit hours). 

• (a) At least one methods-based course (3 credit hours).The second requirement can be fulfilled by taking a range of courses within and beyond the student’s fields of specialization. Courses might emphasize the acquisition of methods in digitization techniques (XML, OCR, image scanning and processing, GIS), archive building, computer programming, visualization for various applications such as textual data set mining and statistical analysis, data organization, working with new media, or the creation of software applications. 
• (b) At least one course in digital humanities and cultures topics (3 credit hours). This requirement includes courses that are more topics-based and may or may not include hands-on application of technologies. These courses are often about digital cultures and phenomena (e.g., social media, AI, the gig economy, electronic literature or archives).
• (a or b) Two digital humanities *or* cultures topics course (6 credit hours). This requirement can be chosen from the above two lists.

(III) A capstone course involving project-based Digital Humanities work (3 credit hours). The three-credit capstone course must feature project-based work, and will be approved by the DH Certificate Program Director for each student completing the Certificate. Independent studies, honors theses, or and research apprenticeships grounded in Digital Humanities work that constitute a DH project may satisfy this requirement. See more information in the "capstone" tab above.

Requirements:

1. At least twelve hours of course credit towards the certificate must be completed before the capstone course can be counted towards the certificate.
2. The capstone proposal form is due in the semester before the capstone project is to take place.  Available in both Word and PDF format.  Send to certificate director tclement (at) utexas.edu.
3. The capstone evaluation form is due at the end of the semester in which the capstone project was completed. 

A short list of capstone courses are listed on the approved courses list, but there are many other courses that can count towards this requirement as long as at least 60% of the course grade is dedicated to the student's project. The certificate director will consider the capstone course submitted on the proposal form in the semester before the capstone takes place. What counts will vary based on the student's home department but some examples might include departmental Honors Program Honors Tutorial Courses as listed on the College of Liberal Arts undergraduate Academic Policies and Procedures website at http://catalog.utexas.edu/undergraduate/liberal-arts/academic-policies-and-procedures/ Please note that most capstone courses also have their own proposal process. 

Proposals from instructors and from students to include courses in the DH certificate are welcome at any time. Please note that the form will ask proposers for the course number and title, to make a case for which requirement the proposed course fulfills, and to upload a syllabus for the course that sufficiently demonstrates the course's components including readings, assignments, and other activities. The certificate faculty advisor will respond to your request as soon as possible.