University of Virginia
In this course we explore the Internet, and related networks of people and devices, as an historically unique global media ecology in which new forms of social organization and cultural practice have emerged since its beginnings in the late 1960s. Using anthropological understandings of community, nation, and public sphere as our starting point, we explore the history of the Internet as both a product and producer of the beliefs and practices of specific communities, from engineers employed by the US...
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This course will introduce you to the theory and practice of database application design in the context of the digital liberal arts. Beginning with the premise that the database is the defining symbolic form of the postmodern era, you will review critical and practical literature about databases, study examples of their use in projects from a variety of humanities disciplines, and engage in the actual design of a database application as a course project. Topics to be covered will include data models, web-based database development using PHP and MySQL, interface design, data...
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“We are living in the middle of the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race.”
— Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody
We live in a time of profound cultural change. One of the causes of this change is the transformation of our digital ecology from print and traditional broadcast media to networked digital media, characterized by the rise of database-mediated communication within a global sphere of information exchange. These changes in our media...
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The goal of this course is to get hands-on practice doing linguistic analysis based entirely on data collected from a native speaker of a language. [NOTE: “entirely” means that you should not look up already-published grammars and dictionaries or search the web for descriptions of the language we are working on. For the purposes of this course, we will act as if no grammar or dictionary yet exists.] We will work collaboratively on the same language for the whole semester. Data collection will begin with phonetic transcription of individual words, with the goal of...
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Have you ever wondered how daily life was in ancient times? How did houses look like, smell, taste and even sound like in the past? How did ancient people throw house parties and run businesses from home? Why did they bury people and objects under house floors?
These are some of the key questions we will explore in the Household archaeology class. Household Archaeology is a relative new sub-field of archaeology that moves away from the monumental and highly visible public spaces of...
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This course combines theory and practice: the theories and practices of writing a life (one’s own or someone else’s); and the theories and practices of digital representations of lives. Assignments and discussion will introduce the field of digital humanities (or humanities scholarship that uses intensive computation). Focusing on clusters of texts from the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, we will sample different genres and modes of writing and reading. We will consider the many media in which narratives about human lives can be expressed, and experiment in using some of them....
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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.
This is a course for English majors (and other students) that introduces the basics...
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