Textual
Exploratory text analytics concerns the application of computational and statistical methods to the interpretation of large collections of digitized written documents. The field is motivated by the research of scholars from the humanities and human sciences interested in understanding the semantic, cultural, and social dimensions of texts from historical and contemporary sources, such as novels, newspapers, and social media. The course comprises three main sections: (1) an overview of text interpretation theory combined with information theory to introduce the domain knowledge required...
Course
SAH Archipedia is an authoritative online encyclopedia of the built world published by the Society of Architectural Historians and the University of Virginia Press, and contains histories, photographs, and maps for more than 21,000 structures and places. These are mostly buildings, but as you explore SAH Archipedia you will also find landscapes, infrastructure, monuments, artwork, and more. Currently, the content of SAH Archipedia is drawn from the award-...
Project
Increasingly, we access, share, and create information in digital forms, and this has been referred to as a digital revolution. But how does — or how should — this revolution in the way we teach, learn, and conduct research also change the way we do scholarly work in the classroom? The digital humanities investigates how new media and digital tools are changing the way we produce knowledge in the humanities, by enabling us to share not only information, but sound, visualizations, and even performances using new platforms. This class will provide an introduction to some of...
Course
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...
Course
The Text Encoding Initiative markup language, otherwise known as the TEI Guidelines, collectively define an XML format for the encoding of scholarly texts, in particular primary sources in print and manuscript form. The format differs from other well-known open formats for text (such as HTML and OpenDocument) in that it's primarily semantic rather than presentational; the semantics and interpretation of every tag and attribute are specified. Some 500 different textual components and concepts (e.g. word, sentence, character, glyph, person,etc.); each is grounded in one or more academic...
Tool
From the colonial period to the present day, the Popol Vuh, sometimes called the Maya book of creation, has been translated, edited, paraphrased, and glossed in more than 25 languages. WorldCat suggests that there are over 1,200 known editions of the work, published in verse, scholarly editions, and illustrated volumes. In addition to differences in form and genre, Spanish-language volumes offer very different interpretations of the K’iche’ source text. The opening line...
Course
In this course we explore the Internet, and related networks of people and devices, as an historically unique global media ecology in which new forms of social organization and cultural practice have emerged since its beginnings in the late 1960s. Using anthropological understandings of community, nation, and public sphere as our starting point, we explore the history of the Internet as both a product and producer of the beliefs and practices of specific communities, from engineers employed by the US...
Course
This course will introduce you to the theory and practice of database application design in the context of the digital liberal arts. Beginning with the premise that the database is the defining symbolic form of the postmodern era, you will review critical and practical literature about databases, study examples of their use in projects from a variety of humanities disciplines, and engage in the actual design of a database application as a course project. Topics to be covered will include data models, web-based database development using PHP and MySQL, interface design, data...
Course
“We are living in the middle of the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race.”
— Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody
We live in a time of profound cultural change. One of the causes of this change is the transformation of our digital ecology from print and traditional broadcast media to networked digital media, characterized by the rise of database-mediated communication within a global sphere of information exchange. These changes in our media...
Course
The goal of this course is to get hands-on practice doing linguistic analysis based entirely on data collected from a native speaker of a language. [NOTE: “entirely” means that you should not look up already-published grammars and dictionaries or search the web for descriptions of the language we are working on. For the purposes of this course, we will act as if no grammar or dictionary yet exists.] We will work collaboratively on the same language for the whole semester. Data collection will begin with phonetic transcription of individual words, with the goal of...
Course
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