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In this course you will learn to apply computational methods to create historical arguments. You will learn to work with historical data, including finding, gathering, manipulating, analyzing, visualizing, and arguing from data, with special attention to geospatial, textual, and network data. These methods will be taught primarily through scripting in the R programming language. While historical methods can be applied to many topics and time periods, they cannot be understood separate from how the discipline forms meaningful questions and interpretations, nor divorced from the particularities of the sources and histories of some specific topic. You will therefore work through a series of example problems using datasets from the history of the nineteenth-century U.S. religion, and you will apply these methods to a dataset in your own field of research.

Welcome to a new semester at the University of Nebraska at Omaha! Below is a general outline of what we’ll be trying to achieve over the course of our semester together. If you have questions that you don’t see answered, feel free to email me or stop by my office. You can also chat about anything that comes up in this course. What is digital history and what does it offer the discipline? We will investigate how digital history can enrich the study of historical topics by looking at activities, tools, platforms, and projects. We also will explore the historical underpinnings behind knowledge production on which digital practice depend. We will focus on resources enabling new forms of scholarship, looking at tools for visualization and text analysis for generating historical interpretations, and explore alternative forms of publishing, design, and research. The course covers a range of readings along with a critical engagement with tools and resources that enable new methods for print scholarship and the possibilities of new forms of scholarship. In this directed readings course, you will study the relationship between the discipline of history and computing tools through a combination of theoretical and hands-on activities. You will read and respond weekly to a number of print and digital materials. There are two objectives for this directed readings: to explore the methods of digital history and to develop your analytic skills as a student of the liberal arts. The readings and activities reflect these objectives.

New York has played a crucial role in the history of media, and media have placed a crucial role in the history of New York. New York has been represented by media since Henry Hudson wrote his reports to the Dutch. Media institutions have contributed centrally to its economy and social fabric, while media geographies have shaped the experiences of city living. This course explores media representations, institutions, and geographies across time and is organized around the collaborative production of an online guidebook to the media history of the East Village. Concretely, we will be looking at media as networks with archæologies, sacrificing coverage for the opportunities to get dirty and trace spatiohistories from multiple vantage points. Our media history of New York, then, is an archæology of Downtown (south of 14th Street). We will first look to both the Astor Place Riot of 1849 and the Village Vanguard of the 1950s and 1960s before switching gears for the second half of the course to study the mediascape of the East Village and environs from the 1960s to today. The course culminates with producing a web-based exploration of that mediascape, “Downtown Archæologies,” through artifacts found and studied by students within either the Downtown Collection at the Fales Library or the Loisaida-specific collections at Centro, the Center for Puerto Rican Studies.

How does the geography of New York City shape the literature of New York City? Does the literature shape the geography in return? In this course, we aim to understand the spatiotemporality of the Big Apple through novels of the 20th and 21st centuries that recreate and react to it. Not only will we read spatially, however, but we will also create spatially. Students will make maps that launch projects of geographical storytelling as a mode of literary analysis. More concretely, we will build online data repositories and exhibits (using JavaScript and HTML) that synthesize our reading and mapping practices. No previous programming knowledge is needed, but a curiosity and interest in puzzle solving is.

This seminar will provide students with the foundations for designing and executing oral history research projects. Students will read and discuss literature about oral history theory and methods and they will examine how historians use oral history interviews to construct interpretive historical narratives. The class requires prior knowledge of or the willingness to learn how to use digital recording devices, digital playback software, and digital methods of submitting course projects for archival preservation. Students will undertake independent fieldwork that will allow them to apply the methods and approaches studied in class. Field interviews will be either of someone from the community associated with La Salle University or of a U.S. war veteran.

The goals of this course are to:

● explore a broad spectrum of cultural institutions to discover the range of approaches to providing access to material, both in physical and digital manifestations
● develop familiarity with a range of digital humanities and cultural heritage projects, as well as the ability to evaluate the tools and methods involved in creating those projects
● become more thoughtful, critical, and reflective users of digital tools, technologies, and spaces by understanding that all technologies are complex, socially situated, and political tools through which humans make meaning

By the end of this course, students will be able to:

● demonstrate effective communication skills across a variety of media
● analyze how digital representations of artistic and historical artefacts communicate the materiality and significance of objects
● analyze how artistic and historical artefacts shape our understanding of culture and history
● integrate various disciplinary methods and apply them to course concepts

For more than a generation now, literary and cultural studies have operated amid the horizon of a historical turn—a sweeping deference to the almost palpable specificity of an acknowledged past, this deference governing projects across all major genres and periods. Increasingly, however, we see signs of what a 2011 volume of Continental philosophy named the speculative turn—or better, perhaps, acknowledging the Latin root speculat- (“to observe from a vantage point”), a speculative situation. Yet that situation is not one of philosophy only. “Speculation” is widely (if nebulously) understood as the root cause of the turmoil in the global financial markets of 2008. The speculative equally calls into view the data-driven forecasting whose scenarios of what-might-be have come to inform our daily experience of everything from the outcomes of elections to tomorrow’s weather. In literature, meanwhile, speculative fiction has emerged to name an increasingly prominent mode of writing that encompasses aspects of science fiction, environmentalism, and political and social critique.  

To constitute or construe this speculative situation for ourselves we will initially read deeply into the new speculative realist philosophy and accompanying—sometimes antagonizing—discourses such as the New Materialism, vitalism, feminist science studies, and object-oriented ontology. This reading will take up roughly the first half of the course. We will then look at a sampling of speculative fiction, including Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower and Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, as well as selections from popular non-fiction works like Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us and Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise. And we will revisit the financial speculation of a decade ago and consider the politics of occupying its aftermath. Other key authors (roughly in order of appearance) will include Quentin Meillassoux, Graham Harman, Levi Bryant, Tim Morton, Steve Shaviro, Ian Bogost, Elizabeth Grosz, Jane Bennett, Sara Ahmed, Rebekah Sheldon, Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, Fredric Jameson, Alexis Lothian, Kari Kraus, Andrew Blum, J. R. Carpenter, Katherine Hayles, Nick Srnicek, Benjamin Bratton, and the anonymous collective known as Uncertain Commons, among others, as well as Kant, Heidegger, and Deleuze and Guattari.

Throughout we will seek to foster awareness of the non-inevitability of the historical turn in literary and cultural studies, while also asking what is at stake in the current project of the speculative. History, nature, systems (and networks), and worlding will all be constant themes, as will what possibilities remain for acting, or simply living. The course should therefore be of interest to those working in any historical period, and to all citizens of a world that is still—however tenuously—with us.

The bite of lead type into handmade paper where ink pools in the recesses pressed by the weight of the letters; a literal subtext on the page surfaced through acts of erasure; the hot liquid polymers of 3D-printed objects, deposited in tiny incremental layers to make shapes; lines of circuitry written into lines of text and animated with current; a book that tweets at you; a book that is also a toy box; a book that becomes what the poet and printer William Blake 2 once called an “unnam’d form” (see last page of syllabus). Taught with the resources and facilities available in our BookLab (Tawes 3248), this course will be a historical, imaginative, and experiential introduction to the multitudinous forms of what is not the oldest but is surely among the most enduring of human technologies, the codex book. Our work will be organized around practical and in-depth explorations of different elements of the codex: papermaking, letterpress printing with traditional lead (movable) type, bookbinding, 3-D printing, altered and treated books, and so on. Class-time will be a mix of discussion and hands-on activity. Using BookLab’s rich collections we will look at the work of contemporary book artists and printers as well as historical predecessors like Blake; we will examine the genre and form of the chapbook in the poetry and small press world; we will try out various experiments with books at the interface between print and the digital, including examples of books as portals for augmented and virtual reality; we’ll spend time with graphic novels and other innovative approaches to the space of the page; we’ll read a mixed media novel, Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves; and we will discuss throughout the politics of books as some of the most powerful instruments ever made for consolidating and exercising social hegemony as well as books as tactical platforms for resistance. In addition, we will enjoy visits and workshops from several critics and artists, as well as excursions to the nearby studios of Pyramid Atlantic (one of the preeminent book arts studios in the country)— as well as the Folger Shakespeare Library’s conservation lab.