Doctoral Certificate in Digital Humanities

The graduate certificate is designed to provide students with a rigorous training in digital humanities and one that is also tailored to their particular research interests and areas of specialization. The learning outcomes expected for those students who complete the certificate include: a depth and breadth of knowledge about computational approaches to humanities scholarship; the ability to clearly articulate their own methodological approaches to digital projects they complete; an ability to intervene in and discuss the larger theoretical debates that have and continue to shape digital humanities scholarship; knowledge in multiple digital methods, digital tools, and project management skills that students may employ to answer research questions; and experience with working in cross-disciplinary collaborative research teams.

Program Overview 

The Certificate in Digital Humanities is an interdisciplinary graduate certificate drawing on courses from the English, History, and Modern Languages and Literatures departments.  Students pursuing the graduate certificate will take a minimum of three digital humanities-focused and/or digital methods courses (9 credit hours). All students pursuing the certificate will be required to take the DH practicum course (MLL 774).  Students may fulfill the additional 6 credits required for the certificate by choosing two other digital humanities or digital methods courses from a list of approved courses offerings.  Students may also petition to use courses outside of the approved course list to fulfill program requirements on an ad-hoc basis. The final requirement is the creation and approval of an online portfolio showcasing projects and research utilizing digital humanist methodologies.

Goals

Graduate students working on the certificate already enroll in seminars and courses with faculty in other departments, gaining valuable skills and perspectives on their own fields of study. In providing a more formal structure for this interdisciplinary pedagogy, the Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities will:

• Enhance the ability of participating departments to recruit strong Ph.D. students working in digital humanities;
• Enable participating departments to better prepare DH-focused graduate students as both scholars and teachers;
• Make participating students more competitive on both the academic and “alt-ac” job markets.

Curriculum Requirements

The requirements set out below for the Ph.D. in Literary, Cultural, and Linguistic Studies are minimum requirements. The Graduate Studies Committee, Director of Graduate Studies, and individual advisors may set additional requirements.

Students pursuing the Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities must take as part of their required course credit hours a minimum of 3 (three)  DH-focused courses (9 credit hours) from the DH course offering below.

*  All students must take and pass MLL 774 as part of these 9 hours of credit.

Strengths in Digital Humanities

The University of Miami is recognized internationally for the Cuban Theater Digital Archive, an ongoing digital humanities project. The archive has been awarded three grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and is utilized by scholars, teachers, and students in Performance Studies, Cultural Studies, and History. Headed by Lillian Manzor in MLL, it has already proven to attract graduate students and researchers from around the globe to UM. Our digital collections in the University of Miami Libraries are also internationally known and provide rich sites for digital humanities projects.

The Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, the English Department, and the University of Miami libraries have all made recent hires in the digital humanities, expanding the possibilities for DH work at the University. Furthermore, our faculty, with a particular interest in transcultural and transnational connections across the hemisphere and the Atlantic world, fills a gap in digital humanities scholarship at large by utilizing digital methodologies to approach literature, culture, and history from across the Americas and beyond.

Department of Modern Languages and Literatures

Alongside Lillian Manzor's ongoing work on the Cuban Theater Digital Archive and her expertise in digital humanities scholarship, two recent tenure-track hires in the department have brought additional pedagogical and research training in digital humanities to UM.

Susanna Alles-Torrent specializes in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, translation studies, textual scholarship and philology, and she has expertise in several aspects of digital humanities, especially, scholarly digital editions, electronic text analysis, and digital lexicography. She has already collaborated with several DH certificate programs in Digital Editing, at the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia and at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. She has participated in multiple DH projects and secured two grants from the European Association for Digital Humanities, and, conjointly with prof. Thomas, has recently organized a Pedadogy Workshop on GIS in the classroom, supported by the College of Arts & Sciences at UM.

Allison Schifani has worked on developing curriculum in the digital humanities both here at UM and at her previous post as the Postdoctoral Scholar in the Digital Humanities at the BakerNord Center for the Humanities at Case Western Reserve University. She has incorporated GIS and StoryMaps projects specific to Miami in her undergraduate courses and has taught both digital humanities and media studies at the graduate level during her tenure here. Dr. Schifani also works in a collaborative she co-founded with architects and visual artists, SPEC, which is devoted to urban studies, and through which she employs several digital methods. She is a literature and media studies scholar and has published on digital literature as well.

Department of English

Lindsay Thomas publishes and teaches on contemporary US literature, cultural and media studies, and the digital humanities. She is a co-director of the WhatEvery1Says project, a digital humanities project that uses methods in machine learning to discover large-scale trends in contemporary public discourse about the humanities. WhatEvery1Says has received a 3-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation for $1.1 million (2017-2020) and is currently employing five graduate student research assistants from the Departments of English and History.

John Funchion is currently working on two digital humanities projects: [alt]periodicals, an online archive of 19th -century radical publications; and "CONNECT: Countering Online Networked Extremist Conspiracy Theories," a project funded through the U-Link program, which currently has an English PhD student serving as a full-time research fellow.

Beyond the Departments of English, History, and Modern Languages and Literatures, students pursuing the graduate certificate will be able to take graduate courses in other departments that may be relevant to their research (see appendix B). The School of Communication has many courses in digital methods, design, programming, and data visualization that are relevant to practitioners of digital humanities, while the Department of Geography has courses in Geographic Information Systems relevant to students interested in geospatial humanities.

UM Libraries Resources in Digital Humanities

University of Miami Libraries have established a Digital Scholarship Unit consisting of Elizabeth Gushee (Associate Dean of Digital Strategies), Abe Parrish (GIS Librarian), and Dr. Cameron Riopelle (Data Services Librarian). Members of this unit work both individually and collaboratively to support students and faculty engaging with digital humanities research.

The UM Libraries are active participants in several ongoing national projects that support digital humanities research. They are active contributors to the Digital Public Library of America through the Sunshine State Digital Network and are part of the Hathi Trust Partnership. UM Libraries faculty members collaborate with the Department of Communications and the Center for Computational Science to host the Digital Humanities + Data Journalism Symposium each year. In spring of 2017, the Libraries released the La Gaceta dataset in conjunction with the Institute of Museum and Library Services-supported Collections as Data project.

Other Resources in Digtial Humanities at UM and in Greater Miami

Beyond the strengths of these CAS departments and the UM Libraries in Digital Humanities, other university resources plus our location in Miami make UM an ideal site for this graduate certificate. Graduate students will have the opportunity to take part in the work of the Florida Digital Humanities Consortium, which includes faculty and library staff from the University of Florida, Florida International University, and eight other institutions of higher education across the state, including UM.

Graduate students participating in the graduate certificate program will also have the chance to take part in lectures, workshops, symposia, and conferences sponsored by the Center for the Humanities and its Interdisciplinary Research Group in Digital Humanities.

The annual Digital Humanities and Data Journalism conference, hosted at the University of Miami, is an additional resource to students pursuing the graduate certificate and interested in digital scholarship. It brings leading thinkers and practitioners in both fields to UM under the direction of Alberto Cairo, the Knight Chair in Visual Journalism at the university's School of Communication.

The Center for Computational Science is also a resource which students and faculty may take advantage of as they engage in digital humanities scholarship, broadening possibilities for collaboration across not only humanities departments, but across the sciences as well. Through the College of Arts and Sciences’ UGrow (Graduate Opportunities at Work) Program graduate students have the opportunity to apply for nine-month placements in non-teaching units at the university or in off-campus organizations, in place of their regular teaching assistantship assignments. These placements provide training and experience in fields that will appeal to future employers both inside and outside academia, including librarianship and archive management; museum curation and collection development; and data analysis. Since 2015, students have worked on Digital Humanities projects in the University of Miami Libraries, through the Center for Computational Science, and in the History Miami Museum.

UM is also a partner institution with the Digital Library of the Caribbean, allowing students great access to digital materials specific to the Caribbean. Given our graduate students’ and faculty investment in the region, these collections and digital humanist approaches to them will prove fruitful resources and scholarship. UM will be hosting a UGrow fellowship at the Digital Library of the Caribbean in 2019-2020.
In addition, graduate students have the chance to take advantage of the rich permanent collections
of the Lowe Art Museum.

Our graduate students are also eligible to take courses at FIU — extending the digital humanities focused offerings available to them — and to take advantage of FIU’s rich library resources. There is also a long history of UM faculty and graduate student collaboration with institutions in greater Miami such as the Black Archives History & Research Foundation, HistoryMiami Museum, Little Haiti Cultural Center, Pérez Art Museum Miami, and the Wolfsonian-FIU. Students pursuing the graduate certificate will find that their opportunities for study and research extend well beyond campus borders, particularly as they will gain new skills and methodological approaches to a broad range of cultural texts.