Please encourage your graduate students to consider enrolling in RHET:7930 Writing in the Disciplines and CLAS:6290:0001: Interdisciplinary Humanities Seminar: The Digital Archive. These interdisciplinary graduate seminars are designed to meet CLAS strategic priorities in Writing and Communication, Professional Development, and Career Diversification.

RHET:7930 Writing in the Disciplines.
Mondays from 3:30PM - 6:15PM (3 s.h., pass/fail option available).
Instructor: Megan Knight
Are there graduate students who might be interested in a professional development program opportunity that assists them in honing their writing skills? If so, we invite them to enroll in Writing in the Disciplines (RHET:7930), a course designed to help emerging scholars across the disciplines, at any stage of their studies, to become better writers.

This course, which has been popular with graduate students from across the University, prepares emerging scholars for the tasks of writing in their home disciplines, whether they are in the humanities, the social sciences, or STEM fields. In the class, students have opportunities to work on their existing writing projects; they develop the habit of writing regularly; and they learn strategies for writing with clarity, precision, and style. We consider a range of writing genres and occasions (manuscripts, journal articles, conference papers, job application materials, and the like). The course helps new graduate students develop as writers, helps dissertating graduate students make progress on their theses, and helps students at every stage in between to sharpen their skills.

Please contact Megan Knight with any questions.

CLAS:6290:0001: Interdisciplinary Humanities Seminar: The Digital Archive
Mondays, Wednesdays from 3:30PM - 4:45PM (1015A LIB)
Instructor: Paul Dilley
Are there graduate students in your program who will be working with written archival documents, in special collections, museums, or other institutions, for their research and/or dissertations? Are some of these available in digital form, or is it possible to obtain digital images of them? This course will introduce students to the theory and practice of using historical archives in the digital age, and familiarize them with a basic toolkit for working with digitized archival images in a way that saves time, such as Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR), and which makes them accessible to a broader audience, such as image annotation.

This course will introduce humanities students to methods and theories for using digitized written sources, especially those available online, in their research. The focus is on manuscripts, but print texts will also be considered; similarly, both literary and documentary sources are covered. Topics include the imaging process and the relationship of the digital surrogate to the material object; software applications/virtual research environments (VREs) for viewing, transcribing, and marking up digitized texts; optical character recognition (OCR) and handwritten text recognition (HTR), and their value for studying unedited corpora; digital and computational paleography; enhanced manuscript imaging for recovering damaged texts; copyright, creative commons and other open source licenses, and how they shape the potential use of digitized images in print and digital publications; and the role of digitization in ongoing discussions about the ethics of cultural heritage management.. Although digital tools will be used in the seminar, no knowledge of coding is assumed. Moreover, the course is language-agnostic: students can use whatever sources are appropriate to their research in the course, and will be evaluated on their employment and analysis of the methodologies and tools.

Please contact Paul Dilley with any questions.