HIST 100: Commonwealth (Fall 2025)

Digital Humanities (DH) is an interdisciplinary academic field that applies the computational tools and skills of data science and related fields to humanities and arts disciplines. It also applies critical thinking from the arts and humanities to the digital world that we live in today. DH is largely concerned with pedagogy and scholarship and inspires innovation in teaching, learning, and research. 

Due to its innovative and evolving nature, DH definitions vary. Here is a project that has over 800 different definitions of DH that change every time you refresh the page.

For a fun exmaple, below is a data vizualization using Google Ngram that charts the frequency of each of our selected paranormal creature terms (demon, witch, fairy, vampire, zombie, elf, werewolf) in literature in Google's courpus from our selcted time period (1800-2018).

From a research perspective you might ask the following questions about the vizualization:

• What is causing the spikes and dips in the chart based on our previous knowledge of paranormal literature?
• What changing social and religous events and periods coincide with the fluctuations in the chart?
• What would this chart look like with alternative spellings and other languages?
• How could we look at this from another perspective (sentiment, location, etc)?

I have a very slow Digital Humanities Project based on texts in the Arthurian canon that feature Lancelot du Lac. Why Lancelot? He was the focus of my BA thesis, and I love a good complex character.

The following timeline examples--using different tools--are all for this project.