COL 375: “Advanced Research in Digital History“ is a course taught by Professor Torgerson in Fall 2025. The course is cross-listed as QAC 375 and HIST 293. It serves as a gateway to work on the Traveler’s Lab and other humanities labs on campus.
Course Description:
“The digital age has changed everything and nothing about the practice of historical research. After being equipped with core concepts, terminology, and practices of historical research, students will engage and explore various applications: across moth-eaten archives, curated library collections, optical scans, and digital-born objects. We will then immediately apply this work to collectively setting up an archival relational database through the digital tool Nodegoat. Students will finish the semester by curating their own historical archive and codifying it as a relational database. Depending on the specific project and student abilities, students will also connect this work to utilizing and/or learning skills in translation, GIS, database creation, database management, and digital visualization. Successful students will be connected to the Travelers’ Lab international network: an opportunity to connect, receive feedback from, and collaborate with professors at higher education institutions in the United States and around the world. Depending on the year students may also be offered conference presentation and publication opportunities.”
Professor Shaw taught “Digital History” as part of Wesleyan’s “Digital and Computational Knowledge Initiative” in the Fall of 2015.
Course Description:
“This course offers an introduction to the emerging field of digital history, part of the broader digital humanities (DH), the application of computing techniques and new media to humanities disciplines. DH has important implications for teaching, research, and the presentation of cultural artifacts to the scholarly and general public. Digital humanists employ a wide-ranging set of techniques, from text- and data-mining to network analysis, topic modeling, GIS, and visualizations. DH also offers opportunities for cross-disciplinary collaborations among humanists, computer scientists, media specialists, and others. As a result, this course seeks to bring together students with a variety of skills and backgrounds (history, writing, programming, web and graphic design, sound and video, etc.) who share an interest in historical communication and making things.
Through readings, conversations, and hands-on work with DH tools and historical resources, we will examine questions pertinent to historical scholarship and consider how they may be reconfigured by new media and new applications of computing power. How does DH allow us to ask new questions as historians, and what perils do digital techniques pose for the discipline of history? Together, we will cultivate our skills as practitioners of history in the digital age.
A central component of the course will be collaborative DH projects of our own devising. Much of the course will have the character of a digital history research lab as we take real problems and relevant sources to advance historical knowledge as well as our skills. This might involve projects in which we conceive, design, build, publicize, and launch a tool, website, or other contribution to digital history. Students should be prepared to collaborate in and out of class, to teach and learn from each other, and to cope with a dynamic and flexible syllabus and group of tasks.”