Abstract:

The article is concerned with the concept of digital humanities and its subsequent application in the area of philology, especially literary studies and literary education. This approach is relatively new and thus not systematically developed in Slovakia. The aim is to explore ways digital humanities tools could modernise and improve education within philological study programmes (teacher and non-teacher training). Although digital technologies have become very popular in many areas of our life, the field of literary studies is perhaps the one in which technology has always been looked at with a considerable degree of suspicion since, as many researchers have pointed out, computational methods are based on a quantitative approach, i.e. on the analysis of extensive data, which is, on the other hand, incompatible with traditional literary studies drawing on the close reading of individual texts and their interpretation. However, despite this proclaimed incompatibility, we can witness a growing number of literary scholars who say that it is no longer possible to ignore the changing paradigm of the modern world and thus, it is necessary to change literary studies as well, using for teaching and research new digital technologies and tools - digital archives, databases, corpora, internet platforms, chatbots, computer translation tools and intelligent writing assistants, etc.

This article is part of the KEGA project, supported by the Slovak Ministry of Education, which integrates research and educational goals. The project´s primary research goal is to map the current situation in digital humanities regarding philological research and education in Slovakia, formulate a prognosis for its further development, and identify possible strengths and risks related to this development. The primary educational goal is to identify a set of modern digital teaching tools to be used for the students of English language and Anglophone literatures and cultures in teacher training and non-teacher training study programmes. To achieve both the research and educational goals, it is necessary first to identify a set of starting points, or conditions, permitting the interconnection of two seemingly contradictory fields of study and research, i.e. the data-based computing and the idea(causality)-based literary studies. This will be dealt with in the first part of the article, while the second part will demonstrate a concrete application of some of the tools for teaching topics within 19th-century American literature.

Keywords:

Digital humanities, literary studies, data, philology, teaching, American literature.