M.Sc Digital Humanities at IIT Jodhpur Offline Course

Master of Science (M.Sc.) in Digital Humanities at IIT Jodhpur is designed to address developments, implications, and inflections of digital technologies on historical and contemporary culture, and society. To contextualize, disciplinary evolutions of the natural sciences, social sciences, the arts and humanities and allied technologies have converged and diverged over the centuries. The digital scholarship in the social sciences, the arts and humanities are only emerging. One reason for the growth of digitization in the social sciences, the arts and humanities is not an emulation of the natural sciences, rather, discovering meaning in the application of information technology as an aid to fulfil the disciplines’ basic tasks of preserving, reconstructing, transmitting, and interpreting the human record historically and contemporaneously.

Given the above, the primary objective of this program is to orient students in the ways in which the study of the humanities, social sciences, and similar areas have been transformed by the influence of digital technologies and economic compulsions. This confluence of disciplines has redefined the contours of the subject of “humanities”. In the present context, a critical interrogation into the history of digital approaches to the humanities, modes of implementation of digital tools & platforms, issues related to the utilization of big data (through database construction, text markup, informatics, statistical analysis to name a few) are imperatives in contemporary research in Humanities. This interdisciplinary M.Sc program has been tailored to provide such critical insights into the key parameters that are continually influencing and impacting the amalgamation of diverse disciplines, especially digital technologies with humanities that will re-engineer emerging societal structures and behavior. 

The M.Sc. DH program offers unique opportunities to redraw conventional disciplinary boundaries among the humanities, the social sciences, the arts, technology and engineering, and the natural sciences. Primary objectives of the program include (but are not limited to)

• Exploring contested definitions of the digital humanities
• Exploring debates about the digital humanities within the emerging field
• Beginning to consider why the digital humanities matter beyond the academic field itself
• Through hands-on experimentation, trying out various types of digital humanities analysis using heterogeneous datasets, tools, and methods