Course Description
Currently the iSchool catalogue lists this following course description:
Explores use and application of technology to scholarly activity in the humanities, including projects that put classic texts on the web or create multimedia applications on humanities topics.
This isn’t necessarily wrong, but not quite descriptive enough for this version of the course.
Our goal in this course is to start to understand how emerging computing technologies and methodologies are helping scholars explore and experiment, specifically in the humanities. Rather than try to conclusively define either computing or humanities, we will focus on uncovering how this new ecosystem is transforming the ways we study culture with computers. Representing culture digitally or as data might seem obvious initially; after all, most of how we all work and socialize is now often experienced through digital platforms, generating bytes and bytes of data. However, in this course we will investigate how representing our cultural heritage and past is rarely straightforward or without tradeoffs.
This course will also explore how humanities can change how we think about computing. We will explore how histories of data collection and computation can help us understand that these activities are fundamentally political, even if we often see them as ‘technical’ and therefore somehow neutral or objective. We will consider the ways that interpretation can become ‘baked’ into these technologies, and how in turn this makes it difficult to discern how these forces are shaping both scholarship and society.
While these are all big topics, we will investigate them through weekly readings and assignments, as well as a semester-long project. We will experience the process of working in computing and the humanities - from developing an initial humanistic question to collecting data to analyzing and communicating results. Through weekly assignments and projects, we will debate larger issues in computing in the humanities, including data ethics and privacy, sustainability and curation of digital projects, the possibilities and limitations of computational methods, how this relates to other disciplines, and how computing in the humanities is part of global conversations about data and society.
Overall Learning Objectives
- Explore computing in the humanities as a research field. Through class discussions, readings, selected projects, and assignments, this course will provide an overview of the history, debates, and current trends in the field.
- Experiment with computing in the humanities as a research praxis. Through learning coding, data analysis, and project management, this course will provide a foundation for how to make projects that blend culture and coding, as well as engage with some of the debates over how to maintain and evaluate this type of scholarship.
What comes after this course?
Much of what you do with this course depends on your interests but at the very least you will be well equipped to continue undertaking substantive digital research in the humanities. You will also be able to transfer some of what you will learn in this course to study in data journalism or computational social science. Ideally, I hope that each of you continues to work on your final project and share your research long after the course ends.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to John R Ladd, Melanie Walsh, Brandon Walsh, Meredith Martin, Sierra Eckert, Anelise Shrout, Cameron Blevins, Lincoln Mullen, Benjamin Schmidt, Lauren Klein, Miriam Posner, Alan Liu, Ted Underwood, and Ryan Cordell for sharing their syllabi - all of which have been immensely helpful and influential.
I also want to especially thank Rebecca Munson, who remains an inspiration for how I think and teach about data and who is sorely missed but will never be forgotten.