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The purpose of this graduate seminar is to introduce students to the key concepts, methods, theories, and emerging practices in the "Digital Humanities." The seminar will provide a historical overview of the field from its beginnings in the post-World War II era to the present, highlighting the major intellectual problems, disciplinary paradigms, and institutional challenges that are posed by Digital Humanities. While we will proceed from a trans-disciplinary perspective and focus on the transformation of disciplines such as literature, history, geography, archaeology, among others, the...
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This class, Digital Literary Studies, examines four elements of the field.
• Close reading, “deformance,” and remix.
• Distant & Surface Reading: computers allow us to view the “surface” patterns of texts from the “distance” of large data sets rather than “close,” isolated passages.
• Archives and Databases: digital literary studies began with digital scholarly editions, which eventually became “unbound” from the book and were built as author- and theme-specific databases. We’ll study several, and contribute to some. We’ll learn how to “clean”...
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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...
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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...
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We will examine how theoretical discourse has evolved through shifting technological platforms, with particular attention to the challenges software, code, and networks present to our understanding of texts. We will engage with examples of complex procedural works ranging from video games to electronic literature and social media. Each of these new platforms challenges our understanding of knowledge and how knowledge is circulated, curated, and redefined in a web-centric culture. Throughout the course, students will engage with current book-length scholarship on a variety of digital...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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This course explores the impact of digital technologies on notions of narrative or storytelling, examining how these technologies are changing the scope, definition, and ways of creating and experiencing the ‘literary’. We will examine works from four types of digital literature: 1) Writing Machines, or the intersection of the literary and digital 2 algorithms, formats, and programming languages; 2) Hypertext and Hypermedia; 3) Locative Narrative, which makes use of dynamic digital mapping technology to tell stories about and across material space; and 4) Digital Games and Narrative....
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