Clemson Digital History

Undergraduate

Starting in Fall 2020, Clemson history majors will have the option to enroll in a 15 credit undergraduate digital history emphasis area. Basic digital methods will increasingly be used by all historians and museum professionals and are relevant to many other fields. 

Digital history includes:

• developing and using online archives
• analyzing large amounts of data, such as census records
• studying interconnections using data visualization
• text searching and analysis
• working with historical images
• digital processing and storage of oral history interviews
• integrating historical data with maps (old and new) using geographical information systems
• presenting historical results and engaging larger audiences using web pages

Emphasis Area Curriculum: 

• STAT 2220 or 2300 or 3090 (meet mathematics general education requirement) or CPSC 1010 or 1060
• HIST 2150 - Introduction to Digital History
• GEOG 3100 - GIS for Humanities and Social Sciences
• At least 6 credits from HIST 3880 - Digital History Creative Inquiry and/or HIST 4150 - Topics in Digital History

Graduate

Digital history utilizes computer technology to foster new ways to collaboratively collect, preserve, and share historic artifacts and voices with a variety of publics. The creation of computational methodologies also provides historians with new ways of developing and investigating historical research questions. It allows historians to conduct textual, spatial, and network analysis and visualize these results over time and space. This type of research training will become necessary for historians of the future who will conduct research in digital archives and examine emails, social media posts, and other digital sources. Historians must be able to recognize the built-in biases of digitized collections and the algorithms used to create and access their content. 

In the Spring of 2019, the Clemson Board of Trustees approved a new Ph.D. program in Digital History. The program as currently envisioned will accept students with master's degrees, not necessarily in history, and require them to do a field in digital history, a major field in some area of history, and a minor field, usually in an area of history. We plan for the first cohort to enroll in the fall of 2021 with five students admitted each year with five years of funding per student. If you are interested in learning more about opportunities for faculty or as an inaugural student, please contact Dr. Pamela Mack at pammack@clemson.edu.

Current Digital History Faculty:

Vernon Burton

Joshua Catalano

Pam Mack

William Terry