A student interacts with a projected 3d model on a screen

Digital Arts and Humanities places students at the crossroads of computing, humanities, and creative production. As one might think, this evolving field applies technology to the humanities. But it also questions the use of technology with traditional humanistic means. Students in the minor collaborate across disciplines to experiment with digital creation and interpretation. In this process they develop a nuanced understanding of digital fluency in the twenty-first century, and why it matters.

A student interacts with a projected 3d model on a screen

About Digital Arts and Humanities

The Digital Arts and Humanities (DGAH) interdisciplinary minor provides students with a framework for studying, understanding, and actively participating in the integration of new digital methods, arts & humanities academic research and creative production. The evolving field of Digital Humanities uses digital tools and computational methods to enhance arts and humanities research and production, while also using traditional humanistic approaches to interrogate the impact of digital technologies. Bridging traditional divides between the humanities, arts, and computational sciences, the minor in Digital Arts and Humanities emphasizes multidisciplinary collaboration and experimentation while encouraging students to both practice and critically reflect on digital creation and interpretation. Students in the DGAH minor will learn to critically evaluate and creatively employ digital media, engage with emergent research questions related to digital culture and practices, and develop the skills that constitute digital fluency in the twenty-first century.

Learning Goals: Students who pursue a DGAH minor will:

  1. Demonstrate proficiency in several disparate digital arts and humanities competencies (e.g., digital communication; data management, analysis and presentation; critical making, design and development)
  2. Learn to reflect critically on the intersection between digital media and methodologies and non-digital materials and texts
  3. Demonstrate an understanding of the social, cultural, political and ethical implications of digital technologies, scholarship, and artistic production
  4. Gain hands-on experience with collaborative, creative, and interdisciplinary digital projects and demonstrate an ability to work both individually and in group settings

Requirements for the Digital Arts and Humanities Minor

Minor Requirements – 44 Total Credits

Students must complete at least 44 credits to complete the minor, including an introductory theory and methods course (6 credits) and capstone Digital Arts and Humanities ePortfolio seminar (2 credits).

The remaining 36 credits are drawn from a range of courses that foster digital skills, critical reflection on digital scholarship, and collaborative practices transferable across disciplines. At least 6 credits must be taken from each elective category, and at least 12 credits must be at the 200 level or above. Students are strongly encouraged to explore different disciplines and the connections among them in the course of their study; at least three subjects (e.g., ARCN, CAMS, STAT,…) must be represented (for at least six elective credits each) and at least 12 elective credits must come from courses designated Arts Practice, Humanistic Inquiry or Literary/Artistic Analysis. No more than 18 elective credits may come from any one department and no more than 18 credits may count toward both the student’s major and the DGAH minor.

Core Courses – Required 6 credits

The core courses introduce students to a broad range of digital methodologies and promote critical reflection on their digital project work in a collaborative setting.

  • DGAH 110: Hacking the Humanities
    Offered annually, this course features a general introduction to the methods and implications of digital scholarship, as well as hands-on collaborative project work.
  • DGAH 120: Interactive Digital Narratives: Theory and Practice (not offered 2025-26)
  • DGAH 220: Creative Coding and Generative AI (not offered 2025-26)

Skill Building in Digital Media and Methodologies – Required Min 6 credits

These courses teach fundamental skills of digital production or analysis including hardware, software, and methods that are widely transferable across the arts and humanities.

  • ARCN 246: Archaeological Methods & Lab
  • CAMS 111: Intro to Cinema and Media Production
  • CAMS 165: Sound Design (not offered 2025-26)
  • CS 111: Introduction to Computer Science
  • DGAH 210: Spatial Humanities (not offered 2025-26)
  • ENTS 120: Introduction to Geospatial Analysis & Lab
  • HIST 200: Historians for Hire (not offered 2025-26)
  • MUSC 108: Introduction to Music Technologies
  • STAT 120: Introduction to Statistics
  • STAT 220: Introduction to Data Science
  • STAT 250: Introduction to Statistical Inference

Other Skill Building Options

  • CS 201: Data Structures can count for students that have placed out of CS 111: Introduction to Computer Science
  • PSYC 200/201 can count for STAT 120: Introduction to Statistics 

Critical and Ethical Reflection on Digital Scholarship – Required Min 6 credits

Courses that directly engage with the implications of digital technologies and teach students to be critical consumers and producers of digital media.

  • ARTH 250: The Coded Gaze: AI and Art History (not offered 2025-26)
  • ARTS 244: Alternative Processes (not offered 2025-26)
  • ARTS 339: Advanced Photography
  • CAMS 187: Cult Television and Fan Cultures (not offered 2025-26)
  • CAMS 214: Film History III (not offered 2025-26)
  • CAMS 228: Avant-Garde and Experimental Cinema (not offered 2025-26)
  • CAMS 246: Documentary Studies
  • CAMS 252: Media Archaeology: History and Theory of New Media (not offered 2025-26)
  • CAMS 254: Cinematic Spectacle (not offered 2025-26)
  • CAMS 330: Cinema Studies Seminar (not offered 2025-26)
  • CAMS 340: Television Studies Seminar (not offered 2025-26)
  • CCST 245: Meaning and Power: Introduction to Analytical Approaches in the Humanities
  • CGSC 253: Philosophy of Cognitive Science (not offered 2025-26)
  • CGSC 330: Embodied Cognition (not offered 2025-26)
  • CHIN 239: Digital China: Media, Culture, and Society (not offered 2025-26)
  • CHIN 240: Chinese Cinema in Translation (not offered 2025-26)
  • CHIN 250: Chinese Popular Culture in Translation (not offered 2025-26)
  • CS 302*: The Why Behind Everyday Technologies (*=Junior Seminar)
  • CS 314: Data Visualization (not offered 2025-26)
  • CS 314*: Data Visualization (*=Junior Seminar)
  • CS 322: Natural Language Processing
  • CS 344: Human-Computer Interaction
  • DGAH 120: Interactive Digital Narratives: Theory and Practice (not offered 2025-26)
  • EDUC 242: The Future is Now: Education and Technology in the 21st Century
  • ENGL 256: Excavating Histories: Archival Research Methods
  • ENGL 257: Fandom and the Queer Digital Commons
  • ENGL 268: Writing with AI
  • MUSC 208: Computer Music and Sound (not offered 2025-26)
  • MUSC 313: Video Game Music: History, Interpretation, Practice (not offered 2025-26)
  • PHIL 112: Intelligence, Agency and Autonomous Machines
  • POSC 204: Media and Electoral Politics: 2024 United States Election (not offered 2025-26)
  • POSC 214: Visual Representations of Political Thought and Action (not offered 2025-26)
  • RELG 224: Religion, Science, and the Moral Imagination
  • SPAN 244: Spain Today: Recent Changes through Narrative and Film (not offered 2025-26)
  • SPAN 345: Culture, Capitalism and the Commons (not offered 2025-26)
  • THEA 320: Live Performance and Digital Media (not offered 2025-26)

Cross-disciplinary Collaboration in Digital Projects – Required Min 6 credits

Courses that emphasize hands-on, experiential learning by creating digital projects that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries or engage authentically with community partners and public audiences.

  • AMST 221: Indigenous Chicago: Indigenous Histories and Futures in Zhegagoynak (not offered 2025-26)
  • AMST 231: Contemporary Indigenous Activism
  • ARCN 211: Coercion and Exploitation: Material Histories of Labor (not offered 2025-26)
  • ARCN 222: Experimental Archaeology and Experiential History and Lab
  • ARTH 216: Revolutionary Image Regimes: Curating Middle Eastern Photographs and Prints after the Digital Turn (not offered 2025-26)
  • ARTS 220*: Art, Interactivity, and Microcontrollers (*=Junior Seminar)
  • ARTS 252: Metalsmithing: Ancient Techniques—New Technologies
  • ASST 285: Mapping Japan, the Real and the Imagined
  • CS 220: Art, Interactivity, and Microcontrollers (not offered 2025-26)
  • CS 220*: Art, Interactivity, and Microcontrollers (*=Junior Seminar)
  • DGAH 220: Creative Coding and Generative AI (not offered 2025-26)
  • DGAH 264: Visualizing the Ancient City (not offered 2025-26)
  • HIST 116: Intro to Indigenous Histories, 1887-present (not offered 2025-26)
  • HIST 206: Rome Program: The Eternal City in Time: Structure, Change, and Identity (not offered 2025-26)
  • HIST 231: Mapping the World Before Mercator (not offered 2025-26)
  • HIST 238: The Viking World (not offered 2025-26)
  • HIST 245: Ireland: Land, Conflict and Memory (not offered 2025-26)
  • HIST 301: Indigenous Histories at Carleton (not offered 2025-26)
  • HIST 338: Digital History, Public Heritage & Deep Mapping
  • MUSC 221: The Principles of Music Creation
  • RELG 243: Native American Religions and Law
  • RELG 289: Global Religions in Minnesota (not offered 2025-26)
  • THEA 234: Lighting Design for the Performing Arts (not offered 2025-26)

Senior Capstone Experience – Required 2 credits

  • DGAH 398: Digital Arts & Humanities Portfolio: A Capstone Seminar
    In this advanced capstone seminar, seniors will create an instructor-guided ePortfolio that curates and critically reflects on the digital experiences in, and products of, courses taken for the minor. If appropriate, this may also highlight digital components of a comps project.

Additional Departmental Notes

Students may count–with prior approval of both the course instructor and the minor coordinators–other advanced courses (200 or 300 level) in which the minor makes significant use of digital technology to produce a research project or creative product. Additional courses that engage substantially with a significant number of the DGAH learning goals may also be added to this list at the director’s discretion in consultation with the committee. Courses from OCS programs and independent studies may be submitted for consideration, but no more than six OCS credits may count towards the minor. For two-credit trailing courses and digital labs that require co-registration, only the digital component will be counted. Repeatable two-credit public outreach courses may be counted for up to six credits.

Digital Arts & Humanities Courses

  • DGAH 110 Hacking the Humanities

    The digital world is infiltrating the academy and profoundly disrupting the arts and humanities, posing fundamental challenges to traditional models of university education, scholarly research, academic publication and creative production. This core course for the Digital Arts & Humanities minor introduces the key concepts, debates and technologies that shape DGAH, including text encoding, digital mapping (GIS), network analysis, data visualization, 3D imaging and basic programming languages. Students will learn to hack the humanities by making a collaborative, publishable DH project, while acquiring the skills and confidence necessary to actively participate in the digital world, both in college and beyond.

  • DGAH 120 Interactive Digital Narratives: Theory and Practice

    Contemporary forms of interactive digital narrative, ranging from electronic literature to games, demonstrate the affordances of the computer as a site of storytelling. Working from the prehistory of Oulipian constrained writing through to early hypertext experiments of authors such as Shelley Jackson to contemporary games such as Kentucky Route Zero, we will develop an understanding of both the history and current trends in born-digital literary experimentation and practice. Through the lens of these digital texts, we will explore the potential for reimagining the "book" through new interfaces, interactions, and technologies. No knowledge of code is necessary.

    Not offered in 2025-26

  • DGAH 210 Spatial Humanities

    Spatial analysis is central to the digital humanities and a valuable methodology within history, literature, archaeology, anthropology, and many other disciplines. This course provides an introduction to Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and the key concepts, debates, and technologies behind digital mapping in the humanities and social sciences. We will learn technical GIS skills that include visualizing, analyzing, and managing various types of spatial data, digitizing historical maps, interactive web mapping, and basic cartographic design. This course is open to all students, regardless of prior experience, and covers the fundamental skills needed to produce spatial humanities projects within any discipline.

    Not offered in 2025-26

  • DGAH 220 Creative Coding and Generative AI

    Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and GitHub CoPilot are fundamentally reshaping programming practices and workflows, raising questions about the future of code and so-called "prompt engineering," or writing for the machine. This class will situate this moment of potential transformation in the history of literate programming and "natural language" coding using Inform 7, as well as current tools such as ml5.js, an accessible machine learning library. Students will engage this history and future of computational creativity through writing and re-writing code, both with and without generative AI interventions, for conversational bots, interactive fiction, and experimental games.

    Not offered in 2025-26

  • DGAH 264 Visualizing the Ancient City

    What makes a city, well, a city? This course examines urban society across different regions of the ancient world from the 2nd millennium BCE to 1st millennium CE. Taking a comparative approach to examples from the Mediterranean, Near East, Mesoamerica and China, we will reconstruct social, political, and topographic histories of urban space from a kaleidoscope of sources that include archaeological excavations, art & architecture, inscriptions, and literature. We will approach this source material using digital methods such as 3D modeling, GIS mapping, and digital storytelling to reconstruct both the physical environments and lived experiences of past cities.

    Not offered in 2025-26

  • DGAH 294 Directed Research in Digital Arts and Humanities

    Students work on a research project related to a faculty member's research interests, and directed by that faculty member. Student activities vary according to the field and stage of the project. The long-run goal of these projects normally includes dissemination to a scholarly community beyond Carleton. The faculty member will meet regularly with the student and actively direct the work of the student, who will submit an end-of-term product, typically a paper or presentation.

  • DGAH 394 Directed Research in Digital Arts and Humanities

    Students work on a research project related to a faculty member's research interests, and directed by that faculty member. Student activities vary according to the field and stage of the project. The long-run goal of these projects normally includes dissemination to a scholarly community beyond Carleton. The faculty member will meet regularly with the student and actively direct the work of the student, who will submit an end-of-term product, typically a paper or presentation.

  • DGAH 398 Digital Arts & Humanities Portfolio: A Capstone Seminar

    The work of Digital Arts & Humanities takes place at the crossroads of computing, humanities, and creative production. While digital tools and computational methods can enhance humanities research and artistic production, traditional humanistic approaches must also question digital technologies. Both the processes and products of this work stretch the boundaries of familiar academic formats. In this course, students will create an ePortfolio that curates and critically reflects on the digital processes and products of courses and co-curricular experiences at Carleton, guided by readings on the current state of interdisciplinary digital scholarship. A capstone for the DGAH minor, the seminar will include numerous workshop events and culminate in public portfolio presentations. Prerequisite: Prior DGAH coursework, including but not limited to the DGAH core courses.