Today, we'd like to offer advice on getting a Digital Arts and Humanities PhD minor or graduate certificate and help you design a program of study that makes sense for you.
Basic information on both the minor and certificate are available in the Degrees and Training section of our web site at I d a h dot indiana dot edu
Both the certificate and minor offer graduate students at IUB a transcripted credential that documents their experience with digital arts creative activity, digital humanities analysis, or critical digital humanities.
The first thing to consider is the difference between the certificate and the minor.
The two programs offer two different levels of engagement with digital arts and humanities. While both will support a variety of career paths and research goals, 
The minor is designed for people who are working with tenure track job ambitions or who are interested in largely academic careers that don't require extra credentials. The certificate allows graduate students to formally credential a peer-reviewed digital arts and humanities capstone.
Many graduate students are preparing to work in academia outside of tenure-track faculty jobs, or in nonacademic careers that range from data science and visualization to technical writing to project management. The certificate offers recipients the ability to demonstrate that they understand grant writing, project management and sustainability practices within the digital arts and humanities in addition to demonstrating their digital arts and humanities analytical and creative skills.
The coursework associated with each program reflects the difference in purpose. The minor requires 12 credit hours spread across 4 courses that is available as an outside minor to enrolled PhD students at IU Bloomington. Coursework for the minor needs to be completed before qualifying exams, and courses for the PhD minor cannot be counted toward the PhD major field of study.
The certificate requires 18 credits, with the added credits distributed across a technical course and a peer-reviewed capstone course. It is available to any graduate student at IUB, and PhD students who wish to complete a certificate in addition to the minor can complete the minor prior to qualifying exams and the additional 6 credits after their exams are complete.
The second question we want to address is how to choose courses for the certificate and minor.
Our first goal is for minor and certificate recipients to have a clear understanding of digital arts and humanities, which is accomplished by ILS-Z657 Introduction to Digital Humanities. We also want our certficiate recipients to demonstrate technical proficiency in a skill of their choice, and to document the project management and sustainability efforts in a peer-reviewed capstone project.
The remainder of the electives in the DAH certificate are designed to be flexible, so that we can offer individualized support for each student's research and career needs. This can make planning coursework both easier, and more difficult. We offer a list of courses each term that are well-suited to minor and certificate recipients, as well as a list of course numbers that have been offered over the last 5 years.
We also approve courses that are well-aligned with student interest and for which an instructor has agreed to a digitally-inflected major project. For instance, 3D rendering is an obvious choice for a sculptor interested in digital arts. We would also count a sculpting course in which the student has arranged with the instructor to produce a mixed-media sculpting project in which a digitally produced sculpture is projected onto a physical sculpture.
The same is true of students interested in analytical approaches to digital humanities.
Courses like database design, algorithmic Textual Analysis markup, digital poetics or digital history are obvious choices. We would also accept a course that is focused on a specific topic like 18th century letter writing, but for which the student has arranged with an instructor to work on a computational-analysis project centered on that topic.
We ask students to confirm that their instructor will support that digitally inflicted project and provide a brief justification of the course in writing to the IDAH advisor prior to taking a course that is not on the existing list of courses.
To help students choose courses in our existing list, we list courses by the type of requirement they meet and we are explicit about courses with pre-requisites for technical proficiency. There are a number of courses that have a tech requirements stamp that do not have previous Tech experience, which we recommend for students who are still engaging in theinitial stages of computational thinking. Courses like introductory database design and introductory Python offer inroads to the digital arts and humanities for students who have little previous technical experience.
We also want to note that even folks with a significant amount of technical experience may find that some of the more traditional computer science courses are above their skill set. We do recommend that students looking at C S C I courses contact the instructor to confirm the level of skill that is necessary.
Finally, each semester we send around a survey to our affiliates asking for updates to course 
That survey also provides set-aside office hours and consults with the IDAH team for minor and certificate recipients so that you can ask questions about planning out your course of studies over the course of this semester, the upcoming semester and in the semesters to come