Digital Humanities Minor

Bring your passion into the digital age

Combine your interest in the arts and human culture with the power of computing. You can gain experience with digital technology and data analysis by earning a Digital Humanities minor.

Offered jointly by the IU School of Liberal Arts, the Herron School of Art and Design, and the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering in Indianapolis, this minor guides students in employing visual communication and informatics in the arts, social sciences, and humanities.

Expand your opportunities

You’ll learn to understand technology not as a thing apart, but as a part of our creative culture. Through this minor, students have the opportunity to view the technologies they use as objects of humanistic and artistic design, laden with historical and cultural perspectives that interact with political and economic systems.

This experience with digital technologies and humanistic thinking expands your opportunities in today’s highly interconnected global environment, as you learn to work with large data sets and perform data analysis on texts.

Be aware of the potential in tech and humanities

You can sustain your passion for the arts and humanities by broadening your skills. This minor offers the opportunity to transition into applied data science, information science, media arts and liberal arts graduate programs by taking the necessary prerequisites.

Learning how to conduct digital humanities projects provides a bridge for informatics, computer science, or computer information technology majors to apply their technical skills within the arts and humanities at the graduate level.

Explore careers in computing and beyond

The minor in digital humanities provides a boost for students seeking to work in:

Administration
Business
Community organizations
Diplomacy
Education
Government
Journalism
Law

Local and government service agencies
Museums
Nongovernmental and nonprofit organizations
Politics
Public policy
Businesses that leverage digital technologies in their work environment

The American Association of State and Local History lists member organizations seeking employees with digital humanities skills.

Time travel

In museums and archives, the humanities and emerging technologies are combining to preserve and explore the past through positions such as:

Digital preservationist

Learn how to capture, clean, and catalog historically rich documents and artifacts with digital imaging, restoration, and display technologies.

Immersive media historian

Recreate spaces and artifacts long forgotten with 3-D, virtual, and augmented reality technologies.

Careers

Possible jobs for students with a minor in digital humanities include:

Plan of Study (16 cr.)

Required Courses (10 cr.)

HIST-H 195 Introduction to Digital Humanities (3 cr.)
HER-F 130 Studio Art and Technology (3 cr.)
INFO-I 101 Introduction to Informatics (4 cr.)

HIST-H 195 is approved for the Arts and Humanities component of the General Education core. INFO-I 101 is approved for the Analytical Reasoning, List B, component of the General Education core.

Elective Courses (6 cr.)

Select two courses from outside your major:

Humanities

AMST-A 303 American Cyber Identity (3 cr.)
COMM-M 150 Mass Media and Society (3 cr.)
COMM-M 215 Media Literacy (3 cr.)
ENG-W 315 Writing for the Web (3 cr.)
ENG-W 318 Finding Your E-Voice (3 cr.)
ENG-W 412 Literacy and Technology (3 cr.)
GEOG-G 337 Cartography and Graphics (3 cr.)
GEOG-G 439 Seminar in Geographic Information Science (3 cr.)

Informatics and Information Science

INFO-I 210 Information Infrastructure (4 cr.)
INFO-I 223 Data Fluency (3 cr.)
INFO-I 270 Introduction to Human-Computer Interaction: Principles and Practices (3 cr.)
INFO-I 421 Applications of Data Mining (3 cr.)
LIS-S 223 Genealogy and Local History Resources (3 cr.)
LIS-S 282 Digital Preservation (3 cr.)
LIS-S 303 Organization and Representation of Knowledge and Information (3 cr.)
LIS-S 321 Humanities Information (3 cr.)
LIS-S 352 Digital Libraries (3 cr.)

Media Arts

NEWM-N 115 Introduction to Multi-Device Web Development (3 cr.)
NEWM-N 202 Digital Storytelling (3 cr.)
NEWM-N 253 Introduction to Digital Video (3 cr.)
NEWM-N 243 Introduction to 3D (3 cr.)
NEWM-N 343 Hard Surface 3D Modeling (3 cr.)
NEWM-N 449 3D Prototyping for Visualization and Abstraction (3 cr.)

Students must earn a C- or higher in each course and maintain a 2.0 GPA to graduate with the Digital Humanities minor.

Admissions and Advising

The Digital Humanities minor is open to IUPUI students in any major. To declare the minor, complete the declaration form at the School of Liberal Arts website. For academic advising, contact the History advisor in the School of Liberal Arts or an Informatics advisor.

Learning Outcomes

Demonstrate understanding of the special topic of digital humanities as an interdisciplinary field of study encompassing humanities, arts, social sciences, informatics, and computing.
Explain major issues and debates in the areas of digital humanities including digitization, copyright and permissions, preservation and sustainability, and audience.
Analyze insights from one another as well as the instructor and their readings to critique digital humanities as a set of methods, debates, and disciplines.
Apply their broad base of knowledge of the “digital.”
Show substantial knowledge and understanding of the main characteristics of digitality.
Analyze and evaluate the history of digitally-inflected art and design practices.
Create and evaluate presentations on contemporary digital work.
Apply, analyze and create new knowledge around problems of digital art and design.
Identify the basic hardware and software components of an IT system, and explain their role and interactions.
To solve a problem, design, implement, test, and debug programs using variables, expressions, assignments, input/output, control constructs, functions, and parameter passing.
Create well-formed static and dynamic Web pages using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Produce database queries using SQL.
Organize, display, and analyze data using graphs and descriptive statistics and use them to make decisions.