PHIL 4500 Data and Culture

This is a new course that combines hands-on textual analysis with broader philosophical and cultural issues concerning the epistemology of data, the relations between the digital humanities and data science, and the tensions between traditional methods of the humanities and contemporary computational techniques. The course text is Text Analysis with R for Students of Literature by Matthew Jockers. The course is self-contained and is aimed at undergraduates in the humanities and social sciences who would like to acquire skills in these new areas. The course is restricted to third and fourth year students. We shall learn and use enough of the R programming language to write basic programs to analyze text. No previous knowledge of R is required but some familiarity with the basics of programming is expected, as is openness to discussions of interpretation. The class is interactive and you are expected to keep up with the assigned reading and exercises. Because discussing coding techniques with others is helpful, when possible, we shall pair students having a lower level of exposure to programming with students having a higher level. We hope this will benefit both students