The MPhil in Digital Humanities is directed by Cambridge Digital Humanities (CDH), a research centre with links across a wide range of faculties and units at Cambridge. The course is administered by the Faculty of English.
This exciting MPhil explores the ways in which the humanities engage with the processes of digital transformation, digital futures, digital research, and digital cultures, as questions arise around AI, ethics of automation, algorithmic analysis, privacysurveillance, online cultures, data sharing, intelligent agency and creativity, archival justice and digital histories, collections and heritage issues.
The course gives students criticaltheoretical orientations and delivers a structured form of engagement with digital methods, tools, and approaches while enabling flexibility in terms of specialism. Students may come from multiple disciplines and the course caters to different skill levels in DH methods. Students take two broad core courses – Digital Humanities Approaches and Methods, and Critical Technical Practice – and follow two courses from a basket of more specialist options. The course is assessed through shorter essays and a year-long dissertation or portfolio project.
This course aims:
to give students a structured form of engagement with criticaltheoretical orientations and digital methodologies and tools To expand the humanities offering at taught post-graduate level at Cambridge by offering a route for cross-disciplinary engagement and the development of new skills and knowledges for a cohort spanning humanities areas as broadly conceived field. The course responds to the growth of the field of Digital Humanities both as a research area and as a teaching location;
to enable humanitiessocial science trained students to develop the critical literacy and practical skills and knowledges to understand and engage with digital materials and digital methods for the study of matters relevant to the humanities; and
to respond to the need for the humanities to grapple with emerging forms, practices, and social formations shaped in a digital age.
The course responds to the growing recognition that humanities engagement with digital futures is necessary particularly as questions arise around the ethics of automation, algorithmic analysis, privacysurveillance, virtual cultures, data sharing, intelligent agency and creativity, archival justice, digital histories.
The course responds to the pervasive shift to the digital, to the need to train postgraduates with an understanding of the stakes of new forms of mediated communication, cultural production, modes of social being, and epistemic cultures that these produce.
The course responds to the needs of the creative industriesmedia industriesheritage industries for appropriately trained postgraduates able to address the transformations of the digital on their sectors.
