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English 3386 equips students for critical encounters with the texts, images, sounds, and situations that constitute American life, politics, history, and culture. This section is organized around the theme of “Versioning Digital Humanities.” Many texts go through various “versions” as they are revised for republications, corrected for new editions, altered to suit audience responses, and so forth. To respond to the plural states of such texts, readers may draw on various tools, including digitizing, collating, versioning, and visualizing texts individually and in combination. Through a...
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This mid-level core course offers a survey of canonical Victorian literature through the lens of Victorian information theories and knowledge organization practices. Reading texts like Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H., Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, John Henry Newman’s The Idea of the University, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, we will investigate the...
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If you are a Facebook user, you know what it means to “friend” someone. But how old is this practice? Some might say a decade, and they would be technically correct since Facebook didn't exist until 2004. But the practice of establishing – what some might call superficial – friendships through written correspondence has a long history that extends beyond the surviving material record. Yet, we do have an abundance of evidence about the history of “friending” preserved in manuscript archives throughout the world, which maintain collections of earlier modes of epistolary exchange, or what...
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In FMS 321 we will study the cultural significance of videogames from a number of critical perspectives. As products of a complicated network of social, economic, and technological forces, videogames are dense objects, deeply layered with multiple meanings and hidden histories. Whether we consider early arcade games like Pac-Man or the latest blockbusters like No Man’s Sky, we find that videogames reveal much about our cultural values, hopes and anxieties, and assumptions about the world. We will examine a range of games this semester as we strive to understand both their narrative and...
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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...
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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...
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This course covers a wide range of current and emerging digital projects and topics in East Asian studies. Students will engage with digital projects focused on East Asia (encompassing Japanese, Chinese, and Korean languages) as well as research being done on digital methodologies for the humanities in those areas. Coursework consists of project and research analysis, active discussion, and learning about the implementation of various digital projects. No technical expertise is required but students must have reading knowledge of Chinese, Japanese, or Korean at the high-intermediate or...
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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...
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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...
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In the last ten years, the strange quasi-disciplinary formation known as DH or Digital Humanities has renewed the struggle over methods in literary studies. Analyses of digitized texts using computer-assisted techniques promise to transform the kinds of evidence, the methods of interpretation, and the modes of argument which matter to literary scholarship. Data is now a subject of energetic debate in literary studies: what constitutes literary data, and how should it be analyzed and interpreted? How might aggregation and quantification produce new knowledge in literary scholarship? What...
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