MALS 289 Digital American Studies

This graduate seminar provides an overview of the various theories and methods used by digital humanists to study American culture. It is our institutions first methods survey course for digital humanities and thus we will all be participating in a bit of an experiment. The course takes up the question of “where is ’America’ in cultural studies” by examining the degree to which the nation still matters in the digital humanities. Recent approaches will be studied alongside traditional methods of humanistic inquiry. We will give particular attention to critical code studies, game studies, and machine learning approaches to distant reading. Two short essays will interrogate oppositional positions within the field of digital cultural studies. Final projects will approach an object of American culture through digital methods or produce a reading of a digital object. Course readings include (among others): Alan Liu, N. Katherine Hayles, Matthew L. Jockers, Lev Manovich, and Lisa Gitelman.