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In this class you will learn about the ways that digital technologies are changing the making and study of literature. The main goal, however, is to become a producer of creative digital materials. You will develop multiple projects with the aim of generating new knowledge about literary texts and of producing your own digital creative works. You will also develop your skills in collaboration, managing online content delivery, and computational/multimedia composing. And you will explore your own imagination, taking risks and experimenting with what it means to develop and study creative works in the twenty-first century.

Popular media often portray “big data” as the exclusive province of information scientists, but data collection in the humanities can swiftly exceed the capacity of the human brain to analyze. Increasingly, humanists turn to digital tools to conduct quantitative research on literary texts, websites, tweets, images and sound recordings. How does one create or reuse a humanities data set? What tools are used to store, manipulate and process that data? How does one begin to analyze humanities research data and share findings in the form of visualizations? This course will explore some methodologies of quantitative analysis in the humanities using free and open source digital tools to yield insights into data that would otherwise be difficult to obtain. Through lectures, discussion, labs, and a digital final project, students will familiarize themselves with the tools of digital humanities scholarship and learn to form arguments on the basis of a few simple computational techniques.

Is the divide between human and machine becoming harder to maintain? From the Golem of folk tales to Frankenstein and even Siri, the concept of the semi-artificial person, or cyborg, is long-lived, appearing across popular, religious, and scientific imaginations. As technology becomes more personal, the cyborg becomes less alien, and the prospect of our own transformation into technologically enhanced organisms seems imminent. In this course we will investigate posthumanism through a critical look at cybernetics in our culture, examining representations in media such as literature, film, television, advertising, video games, and comics. Students will research the current state of modern medical and robotics science and use this to inform their readings of the cyborg in our society. Critiques will be framed through the lens of gender, race, and labor using the theory of scholars Katherine Hayles, Donna Haraway, and Lennard Davis. The class will engage in multimodal research projects on a WordPress blog that focus on building written and visual rhetorical skills. Readings will include fiction such as Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Karel Capek’s R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), which will be paired with films such as The Stepford Wives and shows such as “Black Mirror.”

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.

This graduate seminar provides an introduction to the various theories and methods used by digital humanists to study culture. We’ll examine and critique recent computational approaches alongside the interpretative (hermeneutical) approaches found within cultural and literary studies. Throughout the term, we will give particular attention to subfields or areas of the digital humanities including critical code studies, game studies, machine learning, and text mining. Two short essays will enable you to 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, David M. Berry, Laura Mandell, Matthew L. Jockers, Lev Manovich, and Lisa Gitelman.

Key Questions:

• What happens to history as it gets digitized?
• That is, what does history look like, what happens to our materials, and the stories we tell or the questions we ask, as we abstract further and further away from ‘In Real Life’?
• What does ‘digital history’ really mean?

How will we explore these questions? You will choose a real world object/building/site here in Ottawa that you can access and:

• progressively abstract it away from the real world with a series of technologies from photogrammetry to augmented reality 
• all the while attending lectures to learn the context of what we’re doing and why,
• annotating the readings collaboratively on the open web
• as you keep open notebooks reflecting on this progression
• so that you can build a digital experience of your understanding of your results
• for a public reveal to be held on campus at the end of term.

The sources for the history of our times are fragile. Joe Ricketts, the billionaire owner of DNAInfo and Gothamist, shut the local news publications down rather than tolerate a unionized workforce. For 11 minutes, Trump was kicked off Twitter. Ian Bogost sees in both episodes a symptom of a deeper problem: both are pulling on the same brittle levers that have made the contemporary social, economic, and political environment so lawless. As public historians, what are we to do about this? There are a lot of issues highlighted here, but let’s start at the most basic. It takes nothing to delete the record. The fragility of materials online is both a danger, and an opportunity, for us. Some scholars have “gone rogue” in trying to deal with this problem. That is to say, they neither sought nor obtained permission. They just scoped out a process, and did it. I initially called this class ‘guerrilla public digital history’ partly tongue in cheek. I imagined us doing some augmented reality type projects in public spaces. Reprogramming those public spaces. Using digital techs to surface hidden histories, and insert them into spaces where they didn’t ‘belong’. Counterprogramming. That was the ‘guerilla’ bit. I still want to do all that. But I think we’re going to have to do a bit more. Digital Public Historians have a role to play I suspect in countering the information power asymmetry. These ways are impromptu, without authorization. Rogue. Improvised. What is a ‘guerilla digital public history’? I don’t know. But we’re going to find out.

This course will consist of five modules with a combination of video, written materials, tutorials, and assigned readings. Modules each cover approximately three weeks of the semester, and end with either an online exam or a creative project. Each module will open on its scheduled date, and will include at least one video lecture recorded in advance. Remember that while this course is online, it is not self-paced: discussion topics open every week and are due at the end of the week, and the three scheduled exams and projects are due as listed in this syllabus and will not be accepted late. The syllabus will be reviewed in detail as part of the first lecture, but students are also encouraged to read through these materials carefully and ask for clarifications if necessary.