Digital Humanities Minor

Welcome to the Digital Humanities (DH) Minor!

This ‘road map’ will guide you to successfully completing the minor.

What is Digital Humanities (DH)?

As an increasing proportion of cultural production takes place in the digital sphere, and as more and more cultural objects are digitized (or are born-digital), the confluence between the digital and the humanistic keeps deepening.

Digital Humanities is a new, interdisciplinary academic area that is concerned with the relationship between the humanities on the one hand, and the digital/computational (broadly defined) on the other hand. Digital Humanities as a field has two main areas. One area of Digital Humanities is about digitally aided study of human culture: it consists of utilizing tools and techniques from digital computation with data to help with inquiry in the humanities, such as analysis and interpretation of human cultural phenomena such as literature and the arts. The second area within Digital Humanities is about the humanistic study of digital culture — that is, broadly speaking, of all cultural activity that is carried out digitally.

As data-oriented technologies penetrate deeper into all aspects of human life, engineers, technologists and designers of tomorrow will find themselves designing and building tools, platforms and systems that interact intensely and deeply with the complexity of human culture. Learners in the DH concentration will make use of the big-picture perspective that the field of humanities provides to understand how the digital meshes with the world of the human. They will complement the technological knowledge they acquire as SUTD students with a capacity for critical thought about the nuances of, and limits to, the applicability and effectiveness of that technical knowledge.

The DH Mission

• To educate future technologists, designers and engineers who wish to
  • pursue their interest in humanities to a deeper level
  • understand how:
    • digital methods can be used for producing humanistic knowledge
    • the arts and humanities can help the creative and mindful use of digital technology

Course Requirements

To graduate with the DH minor, students must successfully complete (with a D grade or above) the following courses:

1. “Global Humanities: Literature, Philosophy, and Ethics” (HASS 02.001, formally “World Texts and Interpretations”)
2. The DH core course, “Introduction to Digital Humanities: Principles and Methods” (HASS 02.137DH)
3. Any combination of four courses from the list below. This list will continue to grow as new courses are added.

Students will know which HASS electives count towards the DH minor by a ‘DH’ within the course code. HASS electives with ‘HT’ at the end of the course code can also be counted. For example, 02.132DH, 02.139HT.

Step-by-Step Guidelines

1. Declare DH Minor before the beginning of Term 4. This can be done in the student portal.
2. Term 4 – Enroll in the DH core course.
3. Term 5 through 8 – Enroll in one of the approved DH electives from the table below.

For more information on our application process, please refer to this document.

For students who intend to participate in Global Exchange Programme (GEXP), the overseas HASS courses must be approved for DH mapping. All student’s requests for new course mapping must be submitted with a brief justification on how the class meets the following criteria of the minor.

The largest assessed part of the course must concern either the application or the investigation of the digital (as a piece of technology or as an era we live in) as it relates to the humanities subject matter.

Approved DH Electives

Employment Prospects and Industry Support

A robust immersion into combining technical and humanistic skills, the minor will leave students well placed to apply to cutting-edge jobs in a number of fields, including, data science, geospatial information services, heritage and conservation, social media, and media arts upon graduating from SUTD.

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