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The purpose of this graduate seminar is to introduce students to the key concepts, methods, theories, and emerging practices in the "Digital Humanities." The seminar will provide a historical overview of the field from its beginnings in the post-World War II era to the present, highlighting the major intellectual problems, disciplinary paradigms, and institutional challenges that are posed by Digital Humanities. While we will proceed from a trans-disciplinary perspective and focus on the transformation of disciplines such as literature, history, geography, archaeology, among others, the...
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English 3386 equips students for critical encounters with the texts, images, sounds, and situations that constitute American life, politics, history, and culture. This section is organized around the theme of “Versioning Digital Humanities.” Many texts go through various “versions” as they are revised for republications, corrected for new editions, altered to suit audience responses, and so forth. To respond to the plural states of such texts, readers may draw on various tools, including digitizing, collating, versioning, and visualizing texts individually and in combination. Through a...
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This mid-level core course offers a survey of canonical Victorian literature through the lens of Victorian information theories and knowledge organization practices. Reading texts like Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H., Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, John Henry Newman’s The Idea of the University, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, we will investigate the...
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New York has played a crucial role in the history of media, and media have placed a crucial role in the history of New York. New York has been represented by media since Henry Hudson wrote his reports to the Dutch. Media institutions have contributed centrally to its economy and social fabric, while media geographies have shaped the experiences of city living. This course explores media representations, institutions, and geographies across time and is organized around the collaborative production of an online guidebook to the media history of the East Village. Concretely, we will be...
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This seminar will provide students with the foundations for designing and executing oral history research projects. Students will read and discuss literature about oral history theory and methods and they will examine how historians use oral history interviews to construct interpretive historical narratives. The class requires prior knowledge of or the willingness to learn how to use digital recording devices, digital playback software, and digital methods of submitting course projects for archival preservation. Students will undertake independent fieldwork that will allow them to apply...
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The bite of lead type into handmade paper where ink pools in the recesses pressed by the weight of the letters; a literal subtext on the page surfaced through acts of erasure; the hot liquid polymers of 3D-printed objects, deposited in tiny incremental layers to make shapes; lines of circuitry written into lines of text and animated with current; a book that tweets at you; a book that is also a toy box; a book that becomes what the poet and printer William Blake 2 once called an “unnam’d form” (see last page of syllabus). Taught with the resources and facilities available in our BookLab...
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Welcome to Digital History Methods (History and New Media HIST 677-477). This course explores the current and potential impact of digital media on the theory and practice of history. It also counts as a tool of research course, which means that it will provide you with knowledge of “standard tools of research/analysis.” In this course we are going to explore the impact digital technologies on the historian’s craft. The notion of the historian’s craft here is intentionally expansive. Digital tools are effecting nearly every aspect of historical work, including but not limited to;...
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What happens when books become screens? When narrative turns into an interactive multimedia experience on a tablet? When reading becomes augmented by statistical analysis and data visualization? When literature is less written than composed as a form of new media art? When communities of readers interact with texts and each other through digital networks? This class invites students to ask these and more questions about how our texts, reading, and interpretive practices are changing in a digital age. We will examine electronic texts as well as experimental books and apps; read...
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This course invites first-year students into a historically ranging, critically intensive, and hands-on learning environment about the technologies by which humans transmit our cultural inheritance and ideas. “Interpretive Machines” takes a long view of how we got to now, from the history of manuscripts, books, and print media to the opportunities for innovation in the digital present. It argues that 1) then and now, our technologies for sharing text, image, and data crucially shape the ideas which they convey, and 2) these contexts can help students plan and execute new mechanisms for...
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In the last ten years, the strange quasi-disciplinary formation known as DH or Digital Humanities has renewed the struggle over methods in literary studies. Analyses of digitized texts using computer-assisted techniques promise to transform the kinds of evidence, the methods of interpretation, and the modes of argument which matter to literary scholarship. Data is now a subject of energetic debate in literary studies: what constitutes literary data, and how should it be analyzed and interpreted? How might aggregation and quantification produce new knowledge in literary scholarship? What...
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