Courses

This course will provide students with an overview of the discipline of Digital Humanities and its varied applications across a range of disciplines and domains of knowledge. The course is designed to enable students to situate their own research interests within the broader framework of Digital Humanities and to make informed choices about how they structure the rest of their program. The course is divided into three key areas: 1) debates, theories, and key concepts; 2) emblematic projects and organizations; and 3) tools of the trade. Upon completion of the course, students will be able to situate their own research interests within the larger context of the field, evaluate existing methodologies and projects, consider the ability of computer systems to represent knowledge, and analyze the impact of technology on cultural production.

All students take DH 500 in their first term of studies.

These are variable content courses that focus on the theoretical and cultural implication of the digital.

DH 510 Contemporary Media Theory (M. Litwack)
For students with no background in media theory, this course will serve as an introduction to some of its key problematics and recent texts; for students interested in culture, society, philosophy, aesthetics, or politics, this course will offer you the opportunity to articulate your own work to, and test it against, questions of media and mediation; for all students, this seminar will provide an occasion to reflect upon and clarify your own protocols of reading and practices of critical thinking.

DH 510 Cultural Representation of Artificial Intelligence (M. Engel)
Recent advances in AI technology have brought it (whatever "it" is) to the fore of our cultural imagination. This course looks to trace the ways that AI has been represented and made meaningful in a variety of media and genres, from novel, to film, to popular journalism. The goal is to unpack the complex relationship between technological innovation and cultural representation. How significant an influence do the anxieties and desires of our creative outputs have on the development of actual technologies

DH 510 Digital Fiction (A. Ensslin)
The course offers a survey of the rich and burgeoning field of digital fiction from hypertext to literary videogames. We start from a broad narratological approach, looking at the ways in which studying digital fictions may help us expand transmedial, cognitive and unnatural narratologies in particular. Digital fictions are often multilinear and multi-variant, as Ryan (2004) puts it: they can be read and played in multiple forms for multiple and often contradictory meanings. As works of electronic literature, they experiment with multimodality, agency, play, authorship, materiality, code, and (post) digitality; they position us as reader-players between virtual and actual worlds, immersing us into their storyworlds while at the same time making us step back and reflect upon our roles as media pro-sumers. Furthermore, they critically engage with key concepts of culture, such as gender, the body, space, migration, and postcolonialism, which will form another key element of the syllabus.

DH 510 Health & The Digital World (Laforest)
This course is about the rapidly evolving relations between health and/or healthcare and the world of digital technologies. The course will offer a thematic survey of the major intersecting avenues between both worlds and will put significant emphasis on interdisciplinary and critical thinking. It will aim to introduce students to a wide array of concepts and current problems pertaining to the personal, social, and institutional management of health. Students’ creative skills in problem solving as well as project design and management will be brought to the forefront through lectures, in-class discussions of texts and other media, short debates, individual presentations, and the elaboration of a final paper or project. No prior knowledge related to healthcare or programming is required.

DH 510 History of Media Theory (J.Cohn)
What is a medium; what does it do; why should we care? This course will trace the history of attempts to answer these questions from Plato onward and the various debates that have spawned from them. In the process, we will read some of the canonical texts of media theory and discuss how they continue to haunt many of the most complex dilemmas today from how we can best create a more just society to how we can best care for our planet. For the final project, students will be able to either write a paper or create a creative and critical program/piece that directly addresses an issue from the course.

DH 510 Information Ethics (G. Rockwell)
This course is about ethical thinking in information-rich contexts. Students will explore different ethical theories and how they apply to moral problems in informatics. Topics may include the nature of information and the information society, common ethical theories applied to information contexts, privacy and censorship, the ethics of autonomous algorithms and artificial intelligence, professional ethics and research ethics. Activities in the course will include playing ethics games, student debates, designing an ethical framework, auditing a privacy statement, and developing your own ethical positions.

DH 510 Media and Abolition (B. Capper)
The 2020 global uprisings galvanized by the police murders of George Floyd Jr. and Breonna Taylor have inspired a reckoning with media about policing, prisons, and crime, from the cancellation of the reality TV series COPS to critiques of true crime media and police procedurals. Such critiques evidence the need for a critical genealogy of the relations among media, technology, and abolition. This class aims to construct such a genealogy, asking not only how abolitionist critique might sharpen media critique but also what an abolitionist media theory and practice might look like.

DH 510 Topics in Digital Theory/Culture: Connections, Mapping, & Space (D. Laforest)
This course will offer an overview of the physical and spatial potentialities of digital computing technologies. In many ways, the realities of spaces and places remain overlooked in digital practices, despite the numerous computing tools we use to interact with them. Together, we will examine foundational theories of space and place in philosophy and social sciences and ask how they can help us further our understanding of the digital world. We will also look at the physical impact the digital economy has on our world from the standpoints of urban spaces and the environment. The course will put emphasis on students' creativity through a final project involving a selection of digital mapping and storytelling platforms.

These are variable content courses that focus on technical skills.

DH 520 Topics in Technical Concepts and Approaches: Critical Algorithm Studies (H. Quamen)
This course is an introduction to critical algorithm studies for digital humanities students. In computational terms, algorithms are simply recipes for problem-solving, but in wider cultural circles algorithms can often represent the biases, politics, and oppressions of their human creators. This course looks at both ideas and therefore has two goals:

1) To understand algorithms from a digital humanities perspective. How can a study of algorithms help digital humanities scholars enhance our research by solving a vast number of problems that we encounter on a daily basis?
2) To understand algorithms from a cultural perspective. How can we understand and engage with algorithms culturally by intervening in their all-too-human qualities of political unfairness, bias, and oppression. Is it possible through political activism to make algorithms more fair, more equal, and more objective?

Note: Although there is no prerequisite for this course, I strongly recommend that you have some experience with a programming language (such as what we cover in DH 520 Python, which is offered in the Fall). The best way to understand how an algorithm works is to write programming code that embodies its ideas; consequently, we will definitely be writing some Python in class.

DH 520 Data Visualization with D3 (H. Quamen)
This section of Digital Humanities 520 is an introduction to the interactive web environment—most notably, programming in Javascript and creating data visualizations with the D3 library.

Although this course presumes no prior web experience, it will move pretty fast and cover a wide range of topics: Hypertext Markup Language (HTML version 5), Cascading Stylesheets (CSS), Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), Javascript, the Document Object Model (DOM tree), Events, and the vast library of Data-Driven Documents (D3).

DH 520 Data Visualization with R (H. Quamen)
This course is an introduction to data visualization for digital humanities students. Our goals are threefold:
1) to increase our general literacy about data visualization (what do they do? why do we use them? what questions do they answer? what are the principles of good dataviz?)
2) to gain more technical expertise producing dataviz (hands-on coding knowledge)
3) to gain literacy about common data analysis techniques (what counts as data? how do we manipulate data in order to make persuasive visualizations?).

DH 520 Game Design (M. Johnson)
This course will teach game design across four different media - paper games, card games, board games, and digital games - with a focus on the commonalities of making interactive experiences across these media. We will begin with a number of conceptual questions about game design. These include how design should be affected by the intended audience of a game (and the concepts of "casual" and "hardcore"), the interplay of luck and skill (if relevant at all), the differences between singleplayer games, cooperative games, and competitive games, and the differences between simplicity and complexity and design. The course will then explore core game design principles through rapidly iterating on designing three kinds of games in class: paper games, board games, and card games. These will each develop elements of game design proficiency, and show how core game design principles can be applied in different media. For assessment the class will be assigned in groups to explore and develop a small game on one of three different game development platforms - Twine, GameMaker, and Unity - and then compare the benefits and drawbacks of each, reporting back to the class about the capacities of each and how game design is inevitably shaped by the tools and platforms at hand. The course will conclude by examining some practical concerns associated with game design that are rarely considered - managing scope, managing a team, building a game that will sell, etc - and how these factors come into play in constructing and finishing a digital game.

DH 520 Topics in Technical Concepts and Approaches: Python (H. Quamen)
This section of DH 520 is a good foundational course that will give students hands-on experience with Python, which has quickly become the scripting language of choice among Digital Humanists. Python skills are useful in a variety of DH contexts: building customized tools, collecting and cleaning research data, and using any of the freely available libraries and toolkits that range from text analysis to data visualization to machine learning. We'll spend the first half of the semester working on the basic components of the language: variables, conditionals, loops, functions, and objects. Then we'll spend some time understanding how to install and use those third-party Python libraries and toolkits. The course will end with a customized Python project of the student's choosing. No prior programming experience is necessary.

These are variable content courses that bridge the technical and the theoretical in order to build DH projects in an integrated way. The technical is understood through the lens of the theoretical and creative, while the theoretical and creative is viewed through the lens of the technical.

DH 530 Big Data and Text Analysis (G.Rockwell)
The web is big data for the study of contemporary culture and society. It is being scraped and mined by governments, commercial interests and academics to identify trends, to create new value, for surveillance and to study recent history. In this course we are going to look at the hype and opportunities around big data through the lens of how the web can be treated as evidence. We are going to look at the definitions, projects, and the ethics of big data with special attention to how the web and social media are being used for research, surveillance, governance, and commerce. Students will be trained in how to use web scraping tools and analytical environments for the purpose of analyzing web cultures. The idea is to think through the big data revolution and claims made about data science by doing it. Students don't need to have a programming background to take this course, but you should be prepared to use complex research tools like Gephi, and Voyant as needed. Training on these tools and others will be provided as part of the course.

DH 530 Building Intersectional Feminist Archives (D. Verhoeven)
This is an all hands-on deck, intensive course in which students will collaborate with each other and a community organization to create an online information archive. In this process we will explore the capabilities and limitations of standardized information practices and develop an alternative digital archive inspired by intersectional feminist principles. Both existing and innovative information tools and techniques will be studied and evaluated. Topics such as open data, information inequality, collections as data, vernacular ontologies, data sovereignty and serendipitous discovery will be interrogated. No prior technical expertise is required for this course.

DH 530 Data, Power, and Feminism (D. Verhoeven)
Digital data is social at heart. Its binary form enables it to socialize easily with other digital data. This social or relational capacity of digital data has given rise to new, feminist, evidence-based studies that analyse uneven social relationships using novel data techniques and platforms. This course asks what people, processes, and institutions are involved in selecting the data that ends up as evidence and what decisions, standards, and conditions lead to data being “researchable”.

DH 530 Topics in Building in Context: Data, Power, Feminism (D. Verhoeven)
This course proceeds from the premise that data does more than describe. It can also be used to diagnose and intervene. In this course, we will explore the capacity of data to propose and inspire social change. Using real world examples, we will work collaboratively with data visualization tools and techniques to understand the capabilities and limitations of these approaches. No prior technical expertise is required for this course.

DH 530 Data Visualization (G. Rockwell)
This course is about interpreting and designing visualizations. The course will cover different types of data, different types of visualizations and the history of visualization. Students will learn how to use selected tools to visualize structured and unstructured data and then learn to program visualizations in Python. Students will be expected to both interpret and design visualizations.

DH 530 Topics in Building in Context: Developing Big Data Text Analysis Projects (G. Rockwell)
The web is big data for the study of contemporary culture and society. It is being scraped and mined by governments, commercial interests and academics to identify trends, to create new value, for surveillance, to study recent history and to train AI models. In this course, we are going to look at the hype and opportunities around big data through the lens of how the web can be treated as evidence. We are going to look at the definitions, projects, and the ethics of big data with special attention to how the web and social media are being used for research, surveillance, governance, and commerce. Students will be trained in how to use web scraping tools and analytical environments for the purpose of analyzing web cultures. The idea is to think through the big data revolution and claims made about data science by doing it. Students don't need to have a programming background to take this course, but you should be prepared to use complex research tools like Voyant as needed. Training on these tools and others will be provided as part of the course.

DH 530 Digital Games and Narrative (J. Laccetti)

DH 530 Digital Mapping (M. Engel)
This course examines the complex and contradictory relationship between "place" and "space." Space is a set of coordinates, an area that is delimited by objective data: latitude and longitude, topography, the location of rivers and roads and bridges. Place, on the other hand, is an area composed of subjective data: the stories of its history, the experiences of its residents, the values that we inscribe in it, and the uses to which we put it. This course will bring the concepts of "space" and "place" together and challenge students to analyze and to build "maps," broadly conceived, that can bridge that divide.

DH 530 Feminist Approaches to Digital Information (D. Verhoeven)
Data, famously, just wants to be free. But it might also be said that data just wants to tango. Digital data in particular, is social at heart. Its binary form enables it to socialise easily with other digital data. Machine reading technologies mean that data can communicate directly with other data, bypassing human mediation. This social capability has given rise to data techniques that favour comparison, correlation and conformity and value systems that prioritise precision, simplification and efficiency. This course examines the social life of data from a intersectional feminist perspective and explores how the relational capacity of data might also play a role insocial change. Using real world examples, we will work collaboratively with a specific data tool (the Humanities Networked Infrastructure - HuNI) to understand how data and power aremutually implicated, especially when data is integrated, exchanged and interoperated. No prior technical expertise is required (but will be developed) in this course.

DH 530 Video Games Across Cultures (A. Ensslin)
This course introduces students to videogames as objects of cultural studies and vehicles for developing intercultural understanding and competence. We will examine how games communicate cultural meanings and how pedagogical elements are built into the design of dedicated serious games for intercultural learning; we will engage with theories of critical play and postcolonial game analysis with the goal to develop the critical tools to analyze and evaluate videogames with respect to their appropriation and stereotyping of foreign cultures and nations. At the same time, we will examine the economic dictates and constraints underlying commercial game design, that inform cultural appropriation and stereotyping. We will engage with regional and ethnic game studies by studying a range of (mostly independent) videogames from and about different regional and ethnic communities, including indigenous games. We will examine how these games communicate historical, social and cultural values, issues and concerns, and how they might contribute to the decolonizing of game design and game studies. Through a variety of critical and creative assignments and activities, we will explore and familiarize themselves with a diversity of social roles that can help us develop an educated, critical, interculturally literate attitude towards gameplay and game design. These roles will include for example the critical player, the educational designer, the cultural expert, and the interactive story builder.

DH 530 Recovering Historical Software and Games (E. Kaltman)
All digital records are created and represented through software systems. Whether one is trying to play an old computer game, or simply read a file off a deprecated media object, a complex constellation of technical dependencies and social contingencies are required for access. This course will examine the methodologies and technologies needed for the recovery of historical software programs, including computer games. We will look briefly into the history of digital history (historiography) and confront the effects of the born-digital record on our access to the past. The accessible form of a record prefigures it position within the construction of historical narratives, and there will be a significant focus on how the representation of old data on newer systems both constrains and enables new means of historical study. Students will learn how to orchestrate virtualization solutions (primarily software emulators) to reproduce historical data, programs, and games, and make use of them toward novel historical inquiries. We may also explore hardware-based techniques. No prior technical experience is necessary. Students should be prepared to grapple with software-based records resistant to recovery. If possible, we will also attempt to recover data held in local institutional collections.

This course will provide students with an opportunity to complete a significant project in Digital Humanities that will serve as the capstone to their course-based degree. Students will initiate, design, and implement a project suitable to the discipline of Digital Humanities. Upon completion of the course, students will be able to situate their research interests within the larger context of the field, evaluate existing methodologies and projects, consider the ability of computer systems to represent knowledge, and analyze the impact of technology on cultural production. This course is available to course-based students only, to be completed in the final terms of their program.