King's College London - Faculty of Arts & Humanities

MA in Digital Humanities

This Digital Humanities MA combines digital theory and practice to study human culture. You’ll use critical theory, case studies, and hands-on, project-based exercises to examine digital representations of human culture in all forms, from history, languages, and music to museums, digital publishing, and more.

You will learn the basic structures and syntax of several digital tools and frameworks, including the widely-used programming language Python. As well as giving you an excellent conceptual understanding of how programming works, it will also teach you how to create coding-driven projects to generate your own research and equip you with desirable, transferable skills at the intersection between critical thinking and digital practice.

This Digital Humanities MA combines digital theory and practice to study human culture. It is led by Dr Barbara McGillivray, Lecturer in Digital Humanities and Cultural Computation in the Department of Digital Humanities of King’s College London.

Key benefits

• Develop a broad understanding of the most important applications of digital methods and technologies.
• Learn how to provide your own critical commentary on the relationship between culture and technology.
• Master how to scope, build and critique practical experiments in digital research with an arts, humanities, social sciences, or cultural sector focus.
• Graduate with Python programming skills that are highly desirable beyond academia.
• Learn from a team of multidisciplinary academics with expertise in data-driven research, natural language processing, digital publishing, digital cultural heritage, coding, open software, content creation, and the Geoweb.
• Join a Digital Humanities Department that’s the largest in the UK and a global leader in researching digital and culture.

Course essentials

Throughout this Digital Humanities MA, you’ll develop a range of key skills, including research methods, management, information management, information organisation, content design and production, leadership, theoretical thinking and writing, and technical skills like data science and programming.

You’ll begin this Digital Humanities master's by learning about the digital methods and techniques used to study human culture, explore society’s changing relationship with technology and its influence on how we create and share information, and assess digital resources. This compulsory module will also give you your first taste of working with digital tools.

In the second core Digital Humanities MA module, you’ll consider how to apply digital theory and practice to specific use cases in academic, cultural, and commercial spheres. You will explore how Digital Humanities can address the challenges of digital diversity, foster public action and engagement, and support professional development.

You’ll round off your core Digital Humanities MA modules by picking up Python programming skills and learning how coding works at a conceptual level. As part of this module, you will gain the necessary tools to apply basic programming to research challenges in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and beyond. You’ll also get to engage with professional roles and frameworks commonly used to generate culture-facing digital products.

This will be practised by producing your own coding-driven project, which you can include in your graduate portfolio. Previous students have used geospatial tools to map the evolution of Cantonese, used Python to see the language differences between male and female characters in Disney Princess films, and analysed what politicians tweeted during the Coronavirus outbreak in the UK.

Thanks to various optional modules, you can choose how to focus your studies. You could learn more about socio-technical methods and technologies, data and information analysis, or digital production. You will also get the opportunity to work on your very own research and produce a dissertation.

Duration: One year full-time, two years part-time, September to September