The Advanced Certificate in Digital Humanities trains students across the boundary between digital tools and critical insights, seeking to foster research skills that fuse computational methods and critical theory. Students learn the fundamentals of programming alongside the history and theory of digital technologies, as well as techniques for the analysis and structuring of data, and of publishing on the modern web. Students learn to advance academic knowledge in their own disciplines, and to build transferrable skills for carrying that knowledge into their future careers.

Courses

Students pursuing the Advanced Certificate must complete Introduction to Programming as well as two of the three core courses. Two electives in the student's home department or elsewhere should then be approved by the Director of Digital Humanities, for a total of 20 points. A maximum of 12 points may be shared with the points required for the PhD.

Application

Students not already enrolled at NYU may apply to the Advanced Certificate program through the Graduate School of Arts and Science. GRE results and a writing sample are not required.

Students enrolled in MA and PhD programs in GSAS may enroll in the program at any point by submitting the application to dhss@nyu.edu.

Dual Degree Programs

Dual programs currently exist with the following departments:

  • Comparative Literature PhD
  • East Asian Studies PhD
  • English MA and PhD
  • European and Mediterranean Studies MA
  • XE: Experimental Humanities and Social Engagement MA
  • French Studies MA and PhD
  • Hebrew and Judaic Studies PhD
  • History PhD
  • Interdisciplinary Studies/XE MA
  • Irish and Irish American Studies MA
  • Latin American and Caribbean Studies MA
  • Linguistics PhD
  • Museum Studies MA
  • Music PhD
  • Near Eastern Studies MA
  • Philosophy PhD
  • Sociology PhD
  • Spanish and Portuguese PhD

In general, dual degree students may cross-count 12 credits with their primary degree, but will need to take two additional courses to earn the certificate. Students funded through the MacCracken program pay no additional tuition or fees for the additional courseload.

Featured course to be offered in spring 2024

Digital Media Theory

GERM-GA2610 | DHSS-GA1124 | COLIT-GA2610 | MCC-GE2126 | CEH-GA2916
W 11:00a - 1:45p

Professor Leif Weatherby

This course introduces the history and concept of the digital. Digital systems are representation systems, and so engage a wide variety of philosophical sources, literary theory, and media theory. Digital technologies developed from a dense multidiscplinary discourse that included mathematics, language philosophy, logic, and philosophy, reposing the classical metaphysical question of the relationship of representation to reality. The course focuses on three concepts that emerged from this rich overlap: information, computation, and the network. These concepts are associated with Claude Shannon, Alan Turing, and Warren McCulloch, and rely on frameworks from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, and the trajectory from Gottlob Frege and Charles Sanders Peirce through the Vienna School's logical positivism, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and beyond. The philosophical origins of digital technologies form a dialogue with media-theoretical assessments of those same technologies, and the course will give particular weight to the works of Friedrich Kittler, N. Katherine Hayles, Wendy Chun, and, Luciana Parisi, Ramon Amaro, and Sianne Ngai, with a focus on bridging the gap between the origins of digital technologies and their extensive aesthetic and political-economic consequences in the present. This course fulfills a core requirement for the Digital Humanities Certificate.