Course Information & Policies

Technology

You will need to bring a laptop with you to class each week during weeks 2-6 of the semester; we will devote the last hour or so of each class session to beginning work on that week’s lab.

Digital Infrastructure

We will make use of multiple online systems and programs in this course: a course site, a Canvas site, and Zoom.

  • Course site: We will use this course site to manage course information and our schedule. You will find an online version of our course calendar here (including the most up-to-date version of reading assignments and due dates), as well as an online version of our course syllabus. You will also find all course assignment sheets here, as well as links to online materials.

  • Canvas: Our course readings that are not otherwise freely available online will be available via our Canvas site. You will also be able to access our individual meeting Zoom link (see below) via Canvas.

  • Zoom: I will hold office hours in person, but for meetings outside of office hours, I can meet with you either in person or on Zoom. If we meet on Zoom, we will utilize a standing Zoom link for our meeting. You can find this link via our Canvas site. To meet with me on Zoom:

    1. From our Canvas site, click on “Zoom” in the left menu.
    2. This will take you to a page where you will see our standing class Zoom link (which is titled “ENGL 6701 Humanities Data (2024SP)”). Click “Join” to join the meeting.
    3. These meetings will not be recorded. I have enabled a waiting room for these meetings, which you will enter first when signing on. I will then let you into the Zoom room. If I do not let you in right away, this means I am meeting with another student.

You will also create a Google drive folder to house your course work for the semester, including materials for all labs, your lab notebook, final project abstract, and final project itself.

  • Submitting course work: Please create a Google drive folder into which you will place your assignments and all associated materials throughout the semester and share that folder with me. Please share it with the following email address: lct64 at cornell dot edu. I will also submit my comments on your assignments to this shared folder. If you do not have a Google account, you can sign up for one through Cornell: https://it.cornell.edu/gsuite-student.

Digital CoLab at Olin Library

Eliza Bettinger and Iliana Burgos form the Digital Scholarship Services team at Olin Library on campus. Every Tuesday during the semester, they host open office hours from 10 am to 1 pm in Olin Library 701 (https://library.cornell.edu/about/staff/central-departments/digital-scholarship/colab-programs/co-working/). You can use this time to co-work and/or to ask questions about class assignments.

Communication

Please communicate with me if things come up and/or about your experience of the course, especially if you find yourself overwhelmed. I want to help you and to facilitate your learning. I am very happy to meet with you in office hours or in a meeting outside of office hours to discuss course assignments, readings, additional resources, strategies for success in the class, etc.

Accommodations and Accessibility

It is important to me that you can access this course and its materials and complete its assignments. If you anticipate or experience barriers to actively participating in or completing your work in this class due to a disability or for any other reason, please let me know early in the semester so that we can discuss options. While I do want you to communicate with me, it is not necessary to divulge the nature of your disability or personal experience.

Some resources that might be useful include:

Academic Integrity and AI Writing Tools

I think this probably goes without saying in a graduate class, but just in case: All students are expected to adhere to the Cornell University Code of Academic Integrity. Please see the Code of Academic Integrity at https://theuniversityfaculty.cornell.edu/dean/academic-integrity/code-of-academic-integrity/. The Code states, “A Cornell student’s submission of work for academic credit indicates that the work is the student’s own. All outside assistance should be acknowledged, and the student’s academic position truthfully reported at all times.”

Representing text generated by AI writing tools – such as chatGPT, AI tools embedded into Google docs, or other programs – as your own writing is a violation of this policy. If you use AI writing tools to assist you in the writing process, you must explicitly label all artificially generated text that appears in your writing, just as you would label any text written by someone other than you. This means that all text generated by AI must appear in quotation marks, and you must cite it just as you would cite any other source. If you use AI writing tools to help you brainstorm or generate ideas for your assignments, or to help you revise your own writing, you must acknowledge this explicitly in a statement at the end of your paper (i.e., “I used chatGPT to brainstorm ideas for this paper [then go into more detail about what ideas it helped you brainstorm],” or “I used chatGPT to correct my grammar and punctuation in paragraphs 2, 3, and 5,” or “I used chatGPT to format my Works Cited page,” etc.).

Doing New Things

In this class, you will be asked to do and to read new things, things with which you may not have much, or any, experience. This may include learning technical details or processes, including some coding, but it will also include learning about concepts and methods in how to collect, curate, organize, analyze, store, and make reproducible humanities datasets. These tasks involve new ways of thinking and will sometimes feel frustrating and hard. There will be times when you get stuck, or when you are confused about what to do in a lab, or when you are wrong. All of that is fine and expected, and I want to encourage all of us to make this class safe for experimentation, error, and failure. I do not expect anyone to walk into or out of this class an expert in work with humanities data. What I do expect is a good-faith effort, a willingness to experiment, and the ability to keep an open mind. Most importantly, please be gentle on yourself without giving up; failure is not a reflection on who you are as a person, student, or scholar – it’s just a reflection of the fact that you are learning something new.

We are doing some technical work in this class for three reasons: 1) To introduce you to what it’s like to work with data in a humanities research context and to communities of humanities scholars who collect and use data in their work; 2) To teach you how you can contribute to these communities (and to your other fields of expertise) by communicating your research and making it reproducible for others; 3) To help you to complete the final project in this class, which will involve creating your own humanities dataset.

While this course will include work with Python, this is not a course designed to teach you how to program or how to do quantitative analysis. That kind of course would look very different than this one. Instead, this course is designed to introduce you to a variety of skills and concepts involved in collecting, organizing, and analyzing data in the humanities; it is designed to show you where and how you might begin doing this work.

If you take away only one thing about the technical side of working with data in the humanities from this class, I hope it is that you can absolutely teach yourself the technical skills you need to do the research you want, even if you think you are not a “technical person.” There is no way that I can teach you every technical skill you might need to work with data in the humanities; there are simply too many different things one can do, and technical skills, methods, and platforms change very quickly. However, my hope is that in introducing you to some basics, you will learn that there is nothing special about learning to work with data in the humanities, and that given time and effort, you can learn to do it, too.