Like other universities around the world, FHM has begun offering an important course in Digital Humanities to many of its undergraduate students. The FHM course is innovative because it is a collaboratively taught by members of LCS, a literature department, and LML, a linguistics department. Both can bring insightful elements to the teaching of digital humanities. Taking a broad approach, this course guides students to understand and to apply emerging digital humanities tools and methods, while at the same time taking advantage of student’s emerging mastery of humanities disciplines. Three important areas in the course are textual analysis, network analysis, and geospatial analysis. Students explore these key developments in the digital humanities, with an eye toward developing new knowledge and skills that enable them to complete a digital humanities group project. In recent years, students have done excellent work on topics like Hong Kong’s declared monuments, (https://sites.google.com/s.eduhk.hk/cus-4020-group-7?usp=sharing), the history of Hong Kong’s “30-cent novels” (https://sites.google.com/s.eduhk.hk/30-centnovel/%E4%BD%8F%E5%AE%85), and the style of humor in the American sitcom The Big Band Theory (https://sites.google.com/s.eduhk.hk/neediness-in-tbbt/home). The 30-cent novel project will even be featured at an FHM conference on related topics. This shows how the FHM course in Digital Humanities connect undergraduate students to cutting-edge topics and methods, and each of these projects shows how new technologies for processing linguistic and other data can offer new insights into humanities questions.
