Subject guide to Digital Humanities
Digital Humanities at Manchester
Digital Humanities enables students to develop technical skills to create their own digital projects, products and exhibitions, and engage with debates about how digital technologies are shaping our lives and futures.
For most students, Digital Humanities is a new subject, and no prior knowledge or technical skills are required. The Digital Humanities Lab is an important learning hub where students use techniques in digital mapping, distant reading, and data visualisations. Students engage with AI and Large Language Learning Models in an ethical and sustainable way.
Students debate topics such as the inequalities of gender, race, and sexuality in digital culture, fake news, the uses and abuses of data, and digital activism.
I plan to work in a sector that utilises language and communication, such as in public relations or in journalism and publishing. I feel that my time at Manchester has helped me develop skills for this within my course, such as interpersonal and communication skills.
Alice Bull / Modern Languages, 2025
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Courses - 2027 entry
For the 4-year degree courses, Digital Humanities is a subject choice students make when they have enrolled at the University of Manchester. It’s not a course that students can apply to through UCAS.
Students integrate Digital Humanities into their degree through their course unit choices. Depending on their course, students may be able to choose 20, 30 or 40 credits of Digital Humanities course units per year.
BA Modern Languages students, who choose one language, can study Digital Humanities as a minor subject (40 credits per year), and it is included in their degree title. For example, BA Modern Languages (Italian) with Digital Humanities.
There are 3-year degree courses in Digital Humanities - BA Digital Media, Culture and Society, and BA Cultural, Creative and Media Industries.
Course structure
When considering the course unit choices you’d like to make, please note:
- Each year, all students study 120 credits of course units. Each course unit is 20 credits unless indicated.
- The number of Digital Humanities course units that can be taken each year varies by course – 0, 20 or 40 credits.
- The course unit titles for each year of study have been listed.
- Essential course information for students studying a 4-year degree.
Course content
As students from a range of degree courses can choose course units in Digital Humanities, it’s a great way to meet students from different subject areas, and seminar discussions bring together a wide range of perspectives.
All students must take the core unit, Decoding Inequality: Reimagining Digital Culture, which focuses on inequalities of gender, race, and sexuality in the digital environment. Issues discussed include, why are search engines and artificial intelligence often biased against people of colour? How is gender (mis-)represented in digital media? Why is ‘data’ in the humanities rarely transparent or objective?
20 credits must be taken from this core unit:
◆ Decoding Inequality: Reimagining Digital Culture
0 or 20 credits chosen from:
◆ Measuring Inequalities (Unequal Societies)
◆ Computing for Social Scientists (10 credits)
◆ Visualising Information: Uses and Abuses of Data
◆ Science, Technology and Democracy (10 or 20 credits)
◇ Fake Media
◇ Understanding Social Media
◇ Digital Society: Your Place in a Networked World (10 credits)
◇ AI: Robot Overlord, Replacement or Colleague? (10 credits)
◇ Histories of Data
◇ Digital Dissidents
◇ Media, Culture and Society
◇ Applied Statistics for Social Scientists
◇ Trust and Security in a Digital World: From Fake News to Cybercriminals (10 credits)
KEY:
◆ Semester 1
◇ Semester 2
◈ Full Year
In Year 2, classes have a mix of students – those who studied Digital Humanities in Year 1 and those who are new to the subject.
To support student choice, some course units that were available in Year 1 are also available in Year 2. Although if a student took a course unit in Year 1, they cannot choose it in Year 2. Course units are 20 credits unless indicated.
All students must take the core unit, Digital Ways of Seeing: Theory and Practice. Using John Berger’s influential rubric of ‘ways of seeing’, students consider how different artworks help us to investigate a digital ‘way of seeing’. For example, artworks that critique surveillance culture demonstrate how the traditional concept of the gaze is being transformed and applied to us as we become ‘the viewed’.
20 credits must be taken from this core unit:
◇ Digital Ways of Seeing: Theory and Practice
0 or 20 credits chosen from:
◆ Digital Marketing & Promotion (10 credits)
◆ Data Literacy in a Digital World
◆ Visualising Information: Uses and Abuses of Data (10 or 20 credits)
◆ Science, Technology and Democracy (10 or 20 credits)
◆ Skills for Geographers
◆ Quantitative Methods in Language Sciences
◇ Spatial Thinking with GIS: Constructing and Exploring Virtual Worlds
◇ Technology, Strategy and Innovation (10 credits)
◇ AI: Robot Overlord, Replacement or Colleague? (10 credits)
◇ Trust and Security in a Digital World: From Fake News to Cybercriminals (10 credits)
◇ Digital Society: Your Place in a Networked World (10 credits)
KEY:
◆ Semester 1
◇ Semester 2
◈ Full Year
This is the Residence Abroad year and students live in a country where their chosen language is spoken. Opportunities vary from year to year, and some opportunities are selective.
Please see Residence Abroad for information about funding and finance, the support provided to students to find suitable study or work placements, and for videos and blog posts from current students.
As in Year 2, classes have a mix of students – those who have studied Digital Humanities, and those who are new to the subject.
To support student choice, some course units that were available in previous years are also available in Year 4. Although if a student took a course unit in Year 1 or 2, they cannot choose it in Year 4. Course units are 20 credits unless indicated.
All students must take both core units. Mapping the Past introduces students to an emergent strand of history that studies the past by studying and making maps. Topics explored may include the history of borders, empires and indigenous land, urban decline, and epidemic disease. Students receive basic training in GIS and create their own maps.
In Digital Art undergraduate and postgraduate students study together, responding critically to artworks from the 20th Century to the present day that take digital technologies, techniques and media as material, subject matter, environment, and/or output.
20 credits must be taken from core units:
◇ Mapping the Past: Spatial History (10 credits)
◇ Digital Art (10 credits)
0 or 20 credits chosen from:
◆ Understanding GIS
◆ Digital Technology and the City
◆ Visualising Information: Uses and Abuses of Data (10 or 20 credits)
◆ Science, Technology and Democracy (10 or 20 credits)
◇ AI: Robot Overlord, Replacement or Colleague? (10 credits)
◇ Trust and Security in a Digital World: From Fake News to Cybercriminals (10 credits)
◇ Digital Society: Your Place in a Networked World (10 credits)
KEY:
◆ Semester 1
◇ Semester 2
◈ Full Year