Designing a Digital Humanities Graduate Certificate

Posted on April 18, 2012 by Rachel Guberman

Over the past year, I’ve talked a lot with grad students in my own department (History) and elsewhere at Penn about digital humanities and how we can incorporate these tools and methods into our work as scholars and teachers. People are very excited, but one thing I’ve heard consistently is that it’s very hard to get any kind of training in the many varieties of tools that are out there. Instituting a Digital Humanities Graduate Certificate, along the lines of other grad certificates already offered at Penn, would appeal to many in the grad student community. I’d like to take the opportunity of THATCamp Penn to discuss the possibilities for developing such a certificate program: what would be the objective, how would it be structured, who would run it?

Categories: Digital Literacy, Session Proposals |

About Rachel Guberman

Before becoming a grad student in the history department at the University of Pennsylvania, I was a radio producer at NPR. My research focuses on contemporary and late-20th century political culture and metropolitan history. I'm very interested in incorporating digital collecting, GIS, blogging, audio, and other media into both my teaching and my own work.

4 Responses to Designing a Digital Humanities Graduate Certificate

  1. Louise Krasniewicz says:
    April 24, 2012 at 5:51 pm

    It’s not hard to learn all the tools you need (website design, database construction, image processing, digital video, presentation software, ebook publishing, etc) in one or two semesters. It makes sense to me to have a teaching group (faculty/staff) that could be shared across the disciplines in the humanities and social sciences so that everyone isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel. Also, each program/department would have to commit to requiring and/or offering their students the training otherwise, if only a few students chose it, the training would not be cost effective.

  2. Tim Powell says:
    April 24, 2012 at 10:09 pm

    I am very supportive of trying to start a digital humanities program at Penn. I am very actively nationally in the digital humanities, but do not know of anyone else here at Penn working in the field. So even getting people together to talk would be a welcome start. I would be willing to teach a course in the digital humanities through Religious Studies, where I am on the faculty

  3. Rachel Guberman says:
    April 25, 2012 at 12:23 am

    I’m excited to have this conversation in person tomorrow! In addition to trying to come up with what we see as, sort of, the necessary components of a digital humanities program, I think it’d be worth taking a look at some of the existing graduate certificates that Penn offers to get a sense of the kinds of programs that have worked for others. Here I’m thinking in particular about the Urban Studies Graduate Certificate and the Teaching Certificate from CTL. Are there other certificate programs at Penn (or elsewhere) that could offer models?

  4. Jim English says:
    April 25, 2012 at 1:02 pm

    I am all for this, and am interested in considering whether we have the faculty resources to make it work at present, or need to fold this into a cluster-hire initiative.

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