Week 0 | Jan 17–19
Overview of the course and introductions
Week 1 | Jan 24–26
The Short Arc of Computing Words
Seminar
To read
- Heffernan, Laura and Rachel Sagner Buurma. “Search and Replace: Josephine Miles and the Origins of Distant Reading.” Modernism/Modernity, Apr. 2018. modernismmodernity.org.
- Hockey, Susan. “The History of Humanities Computing.” A Companion to Digital Humanities. Schreibman, Susan, et al., eds. Wiley, 2004.
- Crimble, Adam. “The Origin Myths of Computing in Historical Research.” Technology and the Historian: Transformations in the Digital Age. University of Illinois Press, 2021.
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Terras, Melissa, and Julianne Nyhan. “Father Busa’s Female Punch Card Operatives.” Debates in the Digital Humanities, 2016.
- [Optional] Kizhner, Inna, et al. “The History and Context of the Digital Humanities in Russia” and “Debating and Developing Digital Humanities in China: New or Old? Global Debates in the Digital Humanities. Domenico Fiormonte, et al., eds. (2023)
Studio
Tutorial
- Let’s count words!
Week 2 | Jan 31–Feb 2
The Electric Loom
Seminar
To read
- Turing, Alan M. “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Mind, no. 59, 1950, pp. 433–60.
- Tenen, Dennis. “The Emergence of American Formalism.” Modern Philology 117, no. 2 (November 2019): 257–283.
- Hayles, N. Katherine. (Chapters 1–4). Writing Machines. MIT Press, 2002.
To skim
- Getty Museum. “Decoding the Medieval Volvelle.”
To watch
- IET. “The Story of Ada Lovelace: The World’s First Computer Programmer.” YouTube.
- Computer History Museum. “False Dawn: The Babbage Engine.” YouTube.
To play
Studio
Tutorial
- Let’s build a simple word machine
Week 3 | Feb 7–9
The Sense and Nonsense of Text
Seminar
To do
- Working in pairs, pick a contemporary article of thematic interest to both of you engaging with text or corpus analysis from Digital Humanities Quarterly or the “Journal of Cultural Analytics”. Read it online. As you read it, highlight the concepts you don’t understand in the article using hypothes.is. If you see a concept that you think you can explain to your partner, write a comment, start a dialogue.
To read
- Ramsay, Stephen. “Algorithmic Criticism.” Reading Machines: Toward an Algorithmic Criticism. University of Illinois Press, 2011.
To watch
- Muralidharan, Aditi. WordSeer Features. YouTube.
Studio
Tutorial
- How to read text analysis blogs and articles
In class case study
- McClure, David. “The (Weird) Distributions of Function Words across Novels.” Stanford Literary Lab. Accessed 16 Jan. 2023
Week 4 | Feb 14–16
The Agon of Cultural Analytics
Seminar
To read
- Computers for the Humanities? A Record of the Conference Sponsored by Yale University on a Grant from IBM, January 22-23, 1965. [Choose selections of interest and the Jacques Barzun entry] (Yale Libraries call number: Available as Non-Circ at the Franke Family Digital Humanities Lab (QA76 C644 1965). Good excuse to go say hi, learn more about the venue)
- Da, Nan Z. “The Computational Case against Computational Literary Studies.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 45, no. 3, Mar. 2019, pp. 601–39.
- Underwood, Ted. “Introduction.” Distant Horizons: Digital Evidence and Literary Change. University of Chicago Press, 2019.
- [Optional] Read the dialogue and responses to Da in “Computational Literary Studies: A Critical Inquiry Online Forum.” Critical Inquiry: In The Moment (2019)
Studio
Tutorial
- How to read tutorials
Week 5 | Feb 21–23
The Back and Forth Between Pictura and Poesis, oh, and Sound.
Seminar
To read
- Arnold, Taylor, and Lauren Tilton. “Distant Viewing: Analyzing Large Visual Corpora.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, vol. 34, no. Supplement_1, Dec. 2019, pp. i3–16.
- Kaufman, Micki. Selections from “Quantifying Kissinger.”
- Xu, Weijia, et al. “A Study of Spoken Audio Processing Using Machine Learning for Libraries, Archives and Museums (LAM).” 2020 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data), 2020, pp. 1939–48.
To explore
- Arnold, Taylor, N. Ayers, J. Madron, R. Nelson, Lauren Tilton, Laura Wexler, et al. “Photogrammar”
- Sá Pereira, Moacir P. de. “Mapping Fabula and Sjužet in ‘Wandering Rocks’.”
Studio
Tutorial
- Re-introducing colored pencils
Week 6 | Feb 28–March 2
The Social Life of Everything, Everyone and Everywhen
Seminar
To read
- Porter, J.D. “Pamphlet 17: Popularity/Prestige.” Stanford Literary Lab. September 2018.
- Ahnert, Ruth, et al. “The Network Turn: Changing Perspectives in the Humanities.” Elements in Publishing and Book Culture, Dec. 2020. www.cambridge.org,
To explore
- Gil, Alex and Kaiama Glover, eds. “In The Same Boats”
- The American Academy. “Open Syllabus Galaxy”
- Schmidt, Ben. “A guided tour of the digital library”
Studio
To study
- Froehlich, Heather. “Corpus Analysis with Antconc”
- Algee-Hewitt, Mark, Katherine Bowers, Quinn Dombrowski, and Heather Froehlich. “Data Sitters Club #10: Heather Likes Principal Component Analysis.” (July 20, 2021)
Week 7 | Mar 7–9
The Image of Absence
Seminar
- Klein, Lauren F. “The Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemings.” American Literature, vol. 85, no. 4, Dec. 2013, pp. 661–88. Silverchair.
- Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe, no. 26 (June 2008).
- Johnson, Jessica Marie. “Xroads Praxis: Black Diasporic Technologies for Remaking the New World.” archipelagos journal, no. 3 (July 2019).
To explore
- Naylor, Celia E., Alex Gil, Moacir P. de Sá Pereira, et al. “(Un)Silencing Slavery.”
To do
❃ ❊ ❋ Spring Break ❋ ✣ ✤
Week 8 | Mar 28–30
Midway
Review the results from the Midterm Exam
Breathe and chat
Week 9 | Apr 4–6
The Signatures of Writing
Guest Lecture by Michał Choiński and Maciej Eder
☞ To accommodate our guests, this class will meet on Zoom.
Studio
Tutorial
- Introduction to Stylo
Week 10 | Apr 11–13
Stochastic Parrots
Seminar
- Bender, Emily M., et al. “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜.” Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, ACM. 2021, pp. 610–23. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922.
- “On the dangers of stochastic parrots: Can language models be too big?” YouTube
- Tasovac, and Natalia Ermolaev, eds. “Parrots.” Startwords 3 (2022). (Read the essays by del Rio Riande, Klein and Underwood)
Studio
Tutorial
- Text generation exercise using GPT 4 (if not out yet, we’ll use GPT3)
Week 11 | Apr 18–20
Reconstitute the World
Seminar
To read
- Josephs, Kelly. “Versions of X/Self: Kamau Brathwaite’s Caribbean Discourse.” Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal. 1:1 (December 2003)
- Parham, Marisa. “.break .dance.” archipelagos journal, no. 3 (July 2019)
- Nowviskie, Bethany. “Reconstitute the World.” Bethany Nowviskie, 12 June 2018.
To listen
- Sun Ra [Selections]
- Puerto Rican Bomba [Selections]
Studio
Tutorial
- Image generation exercise using whatever AI consumer-grade tool is available in April.