English
This course has two complementary goals. The first is to introduce the history of technologies used to produce and circulate literature, from the parchment upon which Beowulf is written to the social media platforms exploited by netprov artists. This history provides a broad overview of the material conditions of possibility for the emergence of literary form and genre in the Anglophone tradition. The second goal is to examine how digital media are transforming scholarly publishing and communication by reflecting upon our own writing practices and their attendant technologies. By...
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Perhaps no single activity defines college more than reading. We read textbooks and text messages, perform “close readings” of literature and “read between the lines” of course descriptions. Some readings are dense, and we struggle to discern their meaning; other texts are skimmed quickly. We take our literacy for granted, giving barely a thought to the complex neurological processes that enable us to interpret these lines. In an age of artificial intelligences, even machines “read.” In this seminar, we explore the histories, sciences, and technologies of reading. Guest lectures and...
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How do you measure a book? Can machines read? Do we read prose texts now the way people read them in 1919 or in 1819? We are swimming in textual data that could change our understanding of the written word - if you have the right tools and know how to access and work with it. What could you learn to do with all these different forms of textuality, with all this data? Can you find connections between your current interests in literature and the perspectives that technology opens up, or the goals of your career? This course is meant to give you practice with a variety of methods and real-...
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DH 8991. Generally taught by John Unsworth. This course is a graduate-level introduction to the history, theory, and methods of the digital humanities, and a required course for the new graduate certificate in digital humanities. In it, we will cover a range of historical, disciplinary, technical and contemporary issues in digital humanities. It is focused on digital humanities in the context of literature and language, but it also considers more general cultural and epistemological issues, as well as pragmatics, such as how maps and other spatial and temporal perspectives are enabled...
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"Monuments and Dust" names the work of an international group of scholars now assembling a complex visual, textual, and statistical representation of Victorian London--the largest city of the nineteenth-century world and its first urban metropolis. At the University of Virginia in the United States and at University College, London in the United Kingdom, the research group has two well-supported centers that serve as foci for the firmly bi-national initiative. At the time of this writing more than fifty researchers from the two countries have committed themselves to the project. They...
Project
CBW began as an exhaustive, annotated bibliography amassed through original research by Professor Alison Booth and graduate students at the University of Virginia. The digitization of that bibliography has allowed for the creation of a relational database interconnecting data about the women and men featured in the biographical narratives, the biographers, editors, and publishers of the collections, and the books and narratives themselves. In addition, CBW has become a narrative analysis project: under Booth’s supervision, expert readers are examining digitized texts and performing...
Project
This course combines theory and practice: the theories and practices of writing a life (one’s own or someone else’s); and the theories and practices of digital representations of lives. Assignments and discussion will introduce the field of digital humanities (or humanities scholarship that uses intensive computation). Focusing on clusters of texts from the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, we will sample different genres and modes of writing and reading. We will consider the many media in which narratives about human lives can be expressed, and experiment in using some of them....
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Some undergraduate course offerings can count toward your elective requirement, but that depends on the department and professor. If you'd like to take this course, contact the professor to see if they would allow you to take it and what they would require of your work in the course to ensure it counts at the graduate level.
This is a course for English majors (and other students) that introduces the basics...
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