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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-world scenarios to help you participate in digital projects, using both prepared materials and your own. The course fulfills an elective in the Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities (DH). We want to introduce you to literary computational methods as part of digital humanities, no matter what previous familiarity you might have. You will find any of your previous studies of literature highly relevant and useful for participating in this course. No one needs to be or to become a programmer. You will begin with your own interests and skills and help us encounter, together, specific methods of digital reading or ways to analyze and visualize the data of texts, including topic modeling and XML markup. There is room in our plans for us to consider how our methods could be applied for selected writers or literary works or genres that you want to write about or work on, or that you have encountered in other courses or personal reading. A focus on literary DH in this course doesn’t cover the entire spectrum of possibilities for digital research. We hope you will be interested to inquire further, and follow your paths with different tools and methods beyond this course.

Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9:30am - 10:45am in Ruffner 175.

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.

Computers are universal media. Our intimacy with computers shapes how we think about our communities, histories, cultures, society, and ourselves. Learn to program these "thinking machines" as an act of philosophical inquiry and personal expression, challenging your beliefs about creativity, intelligence, randomness, and communication. Students with no previous programming experience are especially welcome!

Tuesdays and Thursdays 9:30-10:45 a.m. in Minor Hall

Today, nearly every adult in the U.S. uses the internet. Wireless signals silently fill our public and private spaces. In this course, you will learn how computer networks became a medium for interpersonal communication and community. We will “reverse engineer” the technologies and technical cultures that gave rise to the global information infrastructure. Along the way, you will explore unfinished systems, abandoned experiments, and other historical “dead ends.” This course takes a hands-on approach to media history and you will become familiar with the technical concepts that make the internet possible

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Thursdays from 2:00pm - 4:30pm in Bryan Hall 332.

This course will explore all aspects of conceptualizing, planning for, and creating a scholarly digital edition. It provides a basic introduction to the various types of digital editions, the practice of editing in the digital age, and a survey of the many digital tools available to serve project goals. 

Stay tuned for course description

Stay tuned for course description

Stay tuned for course description

Tuesdays from 3:30pm - 6:00pm in New Cabell 068.

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.

Public History is history that is delivered to a popular audience of non-scholars, often at historic sites, museums, and, more recently, via digital tools and websites. This course will introduce students to the issues and goals that have shaped public history as a scholarly discipline, but the focus of the course will be on the contemporary practice of public history, with a focus on the public history of slavery.

Field trips to local sites and a final class project involving field work in several Reconstruction-era African American cemeteries are major components of this course. Readings, assignments, and tours of local historic sites will investigate the range of scholarly issues most relevant to the practice of public history today. Those include the challenges of presenting slavery as public history; enlarging the scope of historic sites to include the less powerful, especially women and enslaved workers; and ongoing debates about the difference between history and heritage. Who is the “public” in public history? Whose history gets told, and how? Throughout the semester, students will work closely with the librarians and curators at Special Collections; the GIS specialists in Scholars’ Lab; and community members from Buckingham County to research and present hidden or erased histories of African American life in the nineteenth century.

Tours of local historic sites and museum exhibits are a key element of this class. This semester, students will visit Monticello; Montpelier; take the African American History Tour of UVA led by the University Guide Service; and do a self-guided audio tour of the Daughters of Zion Cemetery in downtown Charlottesville. 

In  spring 2020 the final project will likely focus on the African American history of the Union Hill and Union Grove communities in Buckingham County. (If not Buckingham County, then we will do a similar project in Louisa County or Albemarle County.) We will do fieldwork in several cemeteries there, using ArcGIS technology to geolocate information about cemeteries, and the Story Map software to create layered digital narratives about people (living and dead), events, and places. We will also hold a community event in Buckingham County. You will present your final project, a Story Map, at the final class.