As some of our more loyal readers of this blog has noticed, much hasn’t happened on this blog for a couple of months. The current pandemic, the blogadministrators student situation as well as other projects have simply gotten in the way of working on this blog for the Masterprogram in Digital Humanities.
But the program is still going on and the students are studying for their courses or working at their internships, despite the weight of a second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic on Europe.
More information will come out soon about the new improved DH Humanities blog, as the program starts a new phase. From a brand new masters program to one that adapts to the changes in the field and the feedback from its students.
Next week a new academic year for the Masters program in Digital Humanities starts. The first year students at the program start their first course Introduction to Digital Humanities. During the course they will be welcomed by Olle Sköld, who is coordinator for the program.
The first year students will take part in education in a online environment .Image by Bonnie Taylor from Pixabay
The programs first year will initially be held in a digital environment using digital tools, as a way to adapt to the current conditions during the ongoing covid-19-pandemic. This will mean new challenges for learning for both students and teachers, as we can really try to see the potential in a Zoom-based learning environment.
During the first course the 1st year students will learn the foundation of what Digital Humanities are. The course also introduces the digital tools used in humanistic research and the historical development of digital humanities. The contemporary position and characteristics of digital humanities will be studied through significant projects, research and research praxis in the field.
To learn more about the upcoming courses on the program, you can search through the posts on this blog or be on the lookout for new posts over the coming months.
Choices, internships and information science
For the second year students, many whom have been previously introduced on this blog, their third semester offers many opportunities to customize their program after their own interest. Some students have chosen their own elective courses during the spring. With subjects ranging from machine learning to linguistics to english literature, the students have the opportunity to choose their own direction within the masters program in Digital Humanities based on the courses found at Uppsala University.
Others have take a different route and instead chosen to deepen their knowledge in Library- and Information science through courses offered at the Department of ALM. These students will next week start the course Information Management and Information Structures. The purpose of that course is to study information systems and information structures with a point of departure in various theoretical perspectives.
Students will study how knowledge-intensive organisations manage various types of analogue and digital documents and how they manage their internal and external communication. The course will be headed by guest researcher Nadzeya Charapan and researcher Lisa Börjesson.
The students will attend an internship during some point during the third semester of the program. Image by StockSnap from Pixabay
During the third semester the second year students will also do an internship at a work place of their choosing. More information about this will hopefully be published on this blog in the future, when the students are able to share their experience. The ongoing covid-19 pandemic poses new challenges for work places, but we hope our students get a satisfying internship experience under safe conditions.
Like all countries in Europe and the World, Sweden has been deeply affected by the outbreak of Covid-19. This has of course also affected higher edudation in Sweden, that has now been recommended by the Swedish government to switch over to online education tools.
For the students at the Master program in Digital Humanities this means seminars and lectures through the Video-conference tool Zoom. So even thought the world is changing and adapting around the students, their courses keep on going. This brings us to the topic of this blog post: this week a new course starts called Information Mediation and User Perspectives in the Digital Era . The courses is headed by Phd-student Ina-Maria Jansson as some of our long-time readers might recognize as the first editor of this blog.
The purpose of the course is to provide a better understanding of information-mediating digital platforms and infrastructure that contain material of relevance to the digital humanities. It provides a historical perspective on the central role occupied by users in modern digital environments.
The course also discusses the importance of network ecology in connection to functionality and algorithms as well as provide relevant knowledge about participatory culture and practices.
