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Title
Academic Catalog
Category
courses
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a0044e362b1f4fb3a1c560ad94df4f2a
Source URL
https://catalog.hbku.edu.qa/course-descriptions/dhs/
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https://catalog.hbku.edu.qa/azindex/
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2026-03-24T05:56:46+00:00
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Academic Catalog

Source: https://catalog.hbku.edu.qa/course-descriptions/dhs/ Parent: https://catalog.hbku.edu.qa/azindex/

Digital Humanities & Societies (DHS)

DHS 622  Digital Communication and Media  3 Credits

Grade Mode: Standard Letter, Audit/Non Audit

Digital communication has transformed many aspects of representation and broadcasting, challenging existing roles, methodologies and practices of the media industry. This course will examine both theoretical and practical aspects of digital media and communication. Through real-life examples and case studies focusing on the Middle East, students will explore the impact of user-generated content and social media, the role of digital cultures in political transformations, the effect of mass digitization, and challenges in digital publishing.

DHS 623  Methods in Digital Humanities  3 Credits

Grade Mode: Standard Letter, Audit/Non Audit

The Digital Humanities is a huge and growing field spanning many disciplines and skill sets. The focus of this course is on tools and methods that allow students to collect, create and analyze textual corpora as purveyors of stories, information. This is the point of view often taken by analysts who work for universities, think tanks and intelligence agencies who seek to understand cultural trends and mindsets from volumes of digital texts. For such analysts, close reading is an indispensable part of their work and computing tools help focus their reading while reading helps refine their understanding of the computer output. The course will give students intensive practice with methods and tools for collecting and analyzing corpora of text at the word and sentence level, and with working with large scalable dictionaries. The students will be also introduced to an array of practical Digital Humanities Tools and Applications

DHS 624  The Global Digital Transformation  3 Credits

Grade Mode: Standard Letter, Audit/Non Audit

This course examines the dynamics and implications of digital transformation from a global comparative perspective, engaging with case studies and trends across international contexts, including the Middle East, Europe, East Asia, and North America. Students will critically explore how digital innovations are reshaping political economies, redefining the role of the state, and transforming international relations and foreign policy. Topics include the rise of artificial intelligence, digital governance frameworks, data ethics, and the geopolitical implications of digital technologies.

DHS 651  Emerging Technologies and Applications  3 Credits

Grade Mode: Standard Letter, Audit/Non Audit

There is now widespread recognition that digital technologies have profoundly changed the way we produce content, share information, interact with each other’s, develop and commercialize products and services, create knowledge or financial value, while defining new environments for these functions to flourish. The course discovers how political, social, economic, financial powers and knowledge are reshaped in our contemporary digital era. The course introduces students to the need of digitalization, continuously developing platforms and the fundamental knowledge of emerging new realities.

DHS 652  Digital Publishing and Design  3 Credits

Grade Mode: Standard Letter, Audit/Non Audit

This course provides students with a comprehensive foundation of layout and design principles to integrate digital media essential for effective print-based and web based business publications. The students will learn the graphic terminology, type specification, and evolution of the printed piece from concept to final printed project. An overview of the industry standard software will be introduced to understand the basics of web pages creation, page layout and design and various methods of reproduction for print and electronic delivery.

DHS 654  Civil Society and Digital Activism  3 Credits

Grade Mode: Standard Letter, Audit/Non Audit

This course aims to study how the ‘cyberspace’ theory and ‘new media’ have empowered societies to impose change and development on regional or global scales in a variety of domains. The course introduces the students to the effective role of social media ranging from websites, social networking apps, and collaborative platforms to promote and state positions toward theoretical fields, such as: empowerment of minorities, racism, feminism, global crises, climate and environmental change, emerging industries, peer-to-peer production, urbanism, and self-development.

DHS 655  Exploring Digital Heritage Methods  3 Credits

Grade Mode: Standard Letter, Audit/Non Audit

This course addresses the needs of a growing cultural heritage industry; it provides opportunities to develop skills in which the material or tangible objects and digital culture relate. The course focuses on a wide spectrum of topics, starting with archaeology, arts, museum collections, historical data archiving, and built heritage. This course explores the techniques of how the tangible heritage is represented, transmitted and perceived in the digital world

DHS 656  Introduction to Human Language Technologies  3 Credits

Grade Mode: Standard Letter, Audit/Non Audit

This course is an introduction to the most important problems involved in Human Language Technologies (HLT) with a focus on the Arabic language. We will present the techniques and resources used and the theories they are based on. The course includes an overview of Natural Language applications. We will also explore the relationship between language and technology including language learning and speech technologies. Topics include machine translation, automatic speech recognition and generation, dialog systems as well as language technologies

DHS 657  Coding for Humanities  3 Credits

Grade Mode: Standard Letter, Audit/Non Audit

This course will provide students the technical skills necessary to conduct quantitative research in digital humanities and societies. In particular, this course will introduce students to the basic coding skills needed to be considered in any professional career nowadays. As an introductory programming course, we will introduce common practices to extract and collect raw data from a variety of digital sources, to organize, clean, explore, analyze, visualize and interpret such data, and to infer sensible information and draw conclusions

DHS 658  Digital Resources in the Humanities  3 Credits

Grade Mode: Standard Letter, Audit/Non Audit

This course explores a broad spectrum of perspectives on the digital humanities engage with a variety of digital humanities tools in order to choose the most appropriate technology to facilitate different work in different situations in order to develop familiarity with a range of digital humanities projects, as well as the ability to evaluate the tools and methods involved in creating those projects and become more thoughtful.

DHS 659  Digital Innovation and Transformation  3 Credits

Grade Mode: Standard Letter, Audit/Non Audit

This course provides analytical tools and frameworks to help students gaining a sound understanding of the potential and place of new developments and knowledge production in social media and digital industries. Students will appreciate the importance of innovation as a target and the way knowledge management will contribute to this innovation. Students will see knowledge as a commodity and how this commodity can be managed

DHS 660  Digital Disinformation and Propaganda in the Middle East and North Africa  3 Credits

Grade Mode: Standard Letter, Audit/Non Audit

This module combines practical and academic skills for students with no prior knowledge of the region to engage with contemporary debate on the ideas of digital propaganda, PR, and surveillance. It is designed for those interested in being able to tackle concerns about fake news, media distortions, and information hegemony in both the Middle East and the wider global context. The course consists of lectures, class discussions/seminars and student presentations. The module is suitable for interdisciplinary pathways, and incorporate current debates in both media and politics

DHS 661  Digital Writing  3 Credits

Grade Mode: Standard Letter

The course is called “Digital Writing” because it will employ state of the art technology that allows students to investigate their writing patterns in terms of topical structure and the various textural gestures (stance, sentiment, emotion, mood, register cues, genres cues) writers can use to embellish the topical structure.

DHS 662  Arabic Natural Language Processing  3 Credits

Grade Mode: Standard Letter, Audit/Non Audit

This course provides an in-depth exploration of Natural Language Processing (NLP) with a focus on the Arabic language. Students will examine the unique linguistic features of Arabic, including its script, morphology, syntax and how these influence computational processing. The course covers essential NLP tasks such as tokenization, morphological analysis, and syntactic parsing emphasizing challenges and solutions specific to Arabic. Through theoretical study and practical assignments, students will gain the skills necessary to develop and evaluate NLP applications tailored for Arabic.

DHS 669  Independent Research Project  3 Credits

Grade Mode: Pass/Non Pass

The Digital Humanities and Societies program requires students to either undertake an internship or an independent research project. This course allows students to explore their specific research interests within a relative field through a research agenda. The student will work closely with academic advisor and supervisor to implement this project within a given time period. The project may be capitalized on for the purposes of the thesis.

DHS 691  Internship  3 Credits

Grade Mode: Pass/Non Pass

The Digital Humanities and Societies program requires students to either undertake an internship or an independent research project. This course allows students to explore their specific research interests within a relative field through a research agenda. The student will work closely with academic advisor and supervisor to implement this project within a given time period. The project may be capitalized on for the purposes of the thesis.

DHS 695  Master's Thesis Hours  1-6 Credits

Grade Mode: Pass/Non Pass

Designed like an independent study, this course supports students in their endeavor to conduct research in the field of Digital Humanities. Students can produce a research-based thesis or a project-based thesis of up to 15,000 words or equivalent. The thesis should showcase the student's ability to collect/assess data, build an argument; and critically apply the main theories in their area of study. The thesis is an opportunity for students to gain the requisite skills necessary for writing a publishable article.