Digital Humanities KU Leuven

Overview

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The Master of Science in Digital Humanities helps graduates from Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences programmes to develop digital competencies that will allow them to add digital dimensions to their own domain expertise. It aims to explicitly link these competencies to research questions, case studies and applications related to the domain expertise of the students.

Graduates of this programme will be able to bring their own domain expertise to a significantly higher level of functionality, using digital tools and techniques. Building both on the expertise they obtained from the programme and their prior expertise in Humanities, Social or Behavioral Sciences, graduates will be well placed to open many new digital applications to a much wider community. Moreover, those who wish to move to a professional profile involving more advanced digital competencies, are well prepared to do so.

Structure

The programme is organized around a number of clusters of course units. The central clusters are the Application Domains cluster and the Tools for the Digital World cluster. Supporting clusters are the Introductory Digitization Components cluster, the Advanced Digitization Components cluster and the Management Component. The heart of the research activities is situated in the Master’s thesis.

International and multidisciplinary

The master’s programme is conceived as a one year, international and multidisciplinary advanced master programme (master-after-master). The programme is unique in Flanders and one of only a few in Europe. The programme is firmly framed in an explicit collaboration between the Faculty of Arts, the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, the Faculty of Social Sciences and the Faculty of Sciences - Department of Computer Science. As such, it is supported by experts in Digital Humanities applications, who supply research expertise for the programme, as well as by experts in digital techniques and tools, who provide a sound technical basis for the students.

Career perspectives

Academically, researchers in the Humanities, Social or Behavioral Science are confronted with the need to apply digital tools to facilitate and enhance their research. The program enables graduates to enhance their research in the Humanities, Social or Behavioral Sciences through non-trivial uses of digital tools and techniques. This may include modeling and querying databases, accessing data, interconnecting and querying web resources, extending tools with scripts to provide extra functionality, text-encoding and e-publishing, mining repositories, data visualization, analyzing social networks, adopting, adapting and enhancing e-learning environments, improving usability of human-computer interaction. As such, graduates are very well placed to take on the challenges that novel research positions require.

Professionally, graduates of the Humanities, Social of Behavioral Sciences enter professional environments where connecting the company’s business with digital tools and techniques has become standard. In this case as well, the programme enables its graduates to put to use non-trivial digital techniques in their professional occupations, including e-media, publishing, arts, history, culture, music, libraries, e-education or interactions for end-user applications. Thus, graduates who want to pursue a career in the usual sectors for graduates of the Humanities, Social or Behavioral Sciences will be much better prepared to cope with the digital techniques that are currently applied there.

More generally, graduates of this programme provide society with professionals and researchers who are able to bring their own domain expertise to a higher level of functionality, using digital tools and techniques. Building both on the expertise they obtained from the programme and their prior expertise in Humanities, Social or Behavioral Sciences, they are well placed to take part in opening the digital world to a larger community.