What is the Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities?
The Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities is a 12-credit certificate program designed to equip graduate students with the skills and knowledge necessary to employ various digital technologies for analysis and interpretation in the humanities fields. This program has 31 enrolled students from 9 departments and three schools across UVA. It teaches students to use computational methods to enhance their teaching and research, to increase public access to humanistic resources such as cultural heritage content, and to bring the interpretive and critical skills of the humanities to the study of the relationship between technology and society.
Why study the digital humanities at the University of Virginia?
Graduate students have been important members of the digital humanities community at the University of Virginia since the field’s inception in the 1990s. As a global leader in the digital humanities, UVA's extensive resources enable our students to pursue innovative humanities research and teaching. Our unique curricular framework encourages DH Certificate students in humanities and related departments to unite humanistic approaches with insight into the practical workings of the digital age. We welcome students from all schools and departments of the University.
As of fall 2022, the DH Certificate Program is celebrating its move to the School of Data Science, UVA’s “school without walls.” This new location will offer opportunities for collaboration, synergy and shared resources between data science and the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Careers: UVA's certificate prepares students to find places in a broad array of rewarding fields, including work in academia as faculty and staff; in the tech and media sectors; and in nonprofit sectors such as libraries, museums, K-12 education, and public service.
Requirements: DH Certificate requirements are designed to be flexible so that students can complete their graduate degrees within departmental guidelines and timeframes. The twelve credits include two required courses and two electives. Introduction to DH (DH 8991) is offered each spring; the Practicum course (DH 8000) is offered every semester. Students can choose to take officially designated electives from our <course offering directory> or to customize another course, such as a course in their department or an independent study, in order to meet elective requirements
Methods: DH methods can enhance scholarly research, teaching, and public humanities projects. Although they are often hybridized in practice, the technical methodologies can be categorized by the type of material under examination. When humanists bring digital methods to bear on their subject matter, it tends to fall into one of the seven following loose categories of object: (1) texts, (2) images, (3) time-based media (such as video and audio), (4) geospatial information, (5) XR (augmented and virtual reality), (6) telemetry along with 3D prototyping and printing, and (7) structured data in its various forms, such as spreadsheets, relational databases, and metadata.
Associated DH methodologies span the world of digital tools, both open-source and proprietary. DH projects allow for a wide range of technical competencies, from complex machine learning techniques that require sophisticated programming knowledge to basic website creation.
Who enrolls in the Digital Humanities Certificate?
