Calendar
Readings are due on the dates indicated. Readings not linked to online can be found on our Blackboard site on the Course Readings page. “Background” readings are recommended, not required; they shed additional light on required readings and can also act as additional resources for your work in the class.
We will start Labs during the last hour of class, unless otherwise indicated.
I reserve the right to change the course calendar as needed; advance notice will be given of any changes.
Download a PDF of the syllabus here.
Monday, January 11: Introductions
- Susan Hockey, “The History of Humanities Computing”, from A Companion to Digital Humanities (2004)
- Matthew Kirschenbaum, “What is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?”, from Debates in the Digital Humanities (2012)
- Jamie “Skye” Bianco, “This Digital Humanities Which Is Not One”, from Debates in the Digital Humanities (2012)
- Alan Liu, “Where Is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?”, from Debates in the Digital Humanities (2012)
Background
- Marshall McLuhan, “The Medium is the Message,” from Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964)
- Alan Liu, “Imagining the New Media Encounter”, from A Companion to Digital Literary Studies (2007)
- Tara McPherson, “Why are the Digital Humanities So White? or Thinking the Histories of Race and Computation”, from Debates in the Digital Humanities (2012)
- Lisa Spiro, “Getting Started in Digital Humanities” (2011)
Monday, January 18: NO CLASS — MLK JR DAY
Monday, January 25: Scales of Reading
- Lorraine Daston, “Whither Critical Inquiry?” (2004)
- Jonathan Culler, “The Closeness of Close Reading” (2010)
- Franco Moretti, selections from Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History (2005), read pages 1-33, 91-92
- Methodological Analysis: Julie Orlemanski, “Scales of Reading” (2014)
- Everyone must complete this Methodological Analysis
- Stephen Ramsay, Ch. 1: “An Algorithmic Criticism,” from Reading Machines (2011)
Lab 1: Finding and Collecting Digital Texts
Background
- John Guillory, “Close Reading: Prologue and Epilogue” (2010)
- Heather Love, “Close but not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn” (2010)
- Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction” (2009)
- Katherine Hayles, Ch. 3: “How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine,” from How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (2012)
Monday, February 1: Texts as Data
- Lab 1 due by class
- Lisa Gitelman and Virginia Jackson, “Introduction” from Raw Data is an Oxymoron (2013)
- Yin Liu, “Ways of Reading, Models for Text, and the Usefulness of Dead People” (2013)
- Michael Witmore, “Text: A Massively Addressable Object” (2010)
- Alan Liu, “Transcendental Data: Toward a Cultural History and Aesthetics of the New Encoded Discourse” (2004), read pages 49-63 only
- The Text Encoding Initiative, “A Gentle Introduction to XML”
- Susan Schreibman, “Digital Scholarly Editing,” from Literary Studies in the Digital Age: An Evolving Anthology (2013)
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Download and install before class: Oxygen XML editor
- Download the free trial version from here: http://oxygenxml.com/download_oxygenxml_editor.html
- Register for a trial license key here: http://oxygenxml.com/register.html
- If you can’t use Oxygen on your device, try an alternative here: http://alternativeto.net/software/oxygen-xml/?license=opensource
Background
- Wikipedia on Markup languages
- Jerome McGann, “The Rationale of Hypertext” (1995)
- Julia Flanders, “The Productive Unease of 21st-century Digital Scholarship” (2009)
Monday, February 8: Text Analysis 1
- Lab 2 due by class
- Natalie M. Houston, “Text Analysis,” Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities__: Concepts, Models, and Experiments (2015-), read “Curatorial Statement” only
- Franco Moretti, “The End of the Beginning: A Reply to Christopher Prendergast,” read pgs 83-86 only (start at “Knowledge, critique, self-critique”)
- Ted Underwood, “We don’t already understand the broad outlines of literary history” (2013)
- Matthew Jockers, Ch. 3 “Tradition” and Ch. 4 “Macroanalysis,” from Macroanalysis (2013)
- Ted Underwood, “Where to start with text mining” (2012)
- Methodological Analysis: Tanya Clement, “‘A thing not beginning and not ending’: using digital tools to distant-read Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans” (2008)
- Do step 1 of this lab before class
Background
- Natalia Cecire, “Ways of Not Reading Gertrude Stein” (2015)
- Ted Underwood, “Genre, Gender, and Point of View” (2013)
Monday, February 15: Text Analysis 2 — Topic Modeling
- Lab 3 due by class
- Matthew Jockers, “The LDA Buffet is Now Open; or, Latent Dirichlet Allocation for English Majors” (2011)
- Ted Underwood, “Topic Modeling Made Just Simple Enough” (2012)
- David M. Blei, “Topic Modeling and Digital Humanities” (2012)
- Matthew Jockers, Ch. 8 “Theme,” from Macroanalysis (2013)
- Matthew Jockers, “500 Themes from a corpus of 19th-Century Fiction” (interactive site for exploring Jockers’ topic modeling; explore)
Background
- Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Ch. 6: “Trained Judgment,” from Objectivity (2010)
- David Mimno, “The Details,” talk given at MITH Topic Modeling Workshop, Nov 3, 2012
Monday, February 22: Text Analysis 3 — Topic Modeling, con’t
- Ted Underwood, “What Kinds of ‘Topics’ Does Topic Modeling Actually Produce?” (2012)
- Methodological Analysis: Lisa Rhody, “Topic Modeling and Figurative Language” (2012)
- Methodological Analysis: Andrew Goldstone and Ted Underwood, “The Quiet Transformations of Literary Studies: What Thirteen Thousand Scholars Could Tell Us” (2014)
- Benjamin Schmidt, “Words Alone: Dismantling Topic Models in the Humanities” (2012)
Monday, February 29: Network Analysis 1
- Lab 4 due by class
- Methodological Analysis: Franco Moretti, “‘Operationalizing’: or, the function of measurement in modern literary theory” (2013)
- David Easley and Jon Kleinberg, Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World (2010), read Ch. 1 pgs 1-8
- Scott B. Weingart, “Demystifying Networks, Parts I & II” (2011)
- Methodological Analysis: Franco Moretti, “Network Theory, Plot Analysis” (2011)
Background
- Matthew Jockers, Ch. 9 “Influence,” from Macroanalysis (2013)
- Elijah Meeks and Scott B. Weingart, “Introduction to Network Analysis and Representation”
- Elijah Meeks, “More Networks in the Humanities or Did Books have DNA?” (2011)
Monday, March 7: Network Analysis 2
- Methodological Analysis: Richard Jean So and Hoyt Long, “Network Analysis and the Sociology of Modernism” (2013)
- Methodological Analysis: Ryan Cordell, “Reprinting, Circulation, and the Network Author in Antebellum Newspapers” (2015)
- If you’re interested in reading the methodological supplement to this paper, you can find it here.
- Andrew Piper, “World Authorship: Three Computational Frameworks” (2014)
- Explore the following projects that utilize network analysis:
- Signs, Cocitation Network Graph (2014)
- Kindred Britain
Lab 5: Network Analysis, con’t
Friday, March 11
- Key Project Analysis due by 10 pm
Monday, March 14: NO CLASS — SPRING BREAK
Monday, March 21: Spatial Analysis
- Lab 5 due by class
- Jo Guldi, “What Is the Spatial Turn?”, read Introduction, The Spatial Turn in Literature, and at least one other disciplinary perspective
- Nora Reynolds, Ch. 3: “Maps of the Everyday: Habitual Pathways and Contested Places,” from Geographies of Writing: Inhabiting Places and Encountering Difference (2004)
- David J. Bodenhamer, “The Potential of Spatial Humanities,” from The Spatial Humanities: GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship (2010) (in Background readings folder)
- Methodological Analysis: Matthew Wilkens, “The Geographic Imagination of Civil War-Era American Fiction” (2013)
- Bethany Nowviskie, “Neatline & Visualization as Interpretation” (2014)
Lab 6: Mapping
Background
- Jen Jack Gieseking, “Opaque is Being Polite: On Algorithms, Violence, & Awesomeness in Data Visualization” (2013)
- Lauren F. Klein, “The Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemings” (2013)
- Franco Moretti, selections from Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History (2005), pages 35-64
Monday, March 28: What Have We Done?
Lab 6 due by class- Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Lisa Marie Rhody, “Working the Digital Humanities” (2014)
- Lisa Spiro, “‘This Is Why We Fight’: Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities”, from Debates in the Digital Humanities (2012)
- Alexis Lothian and Amanda Phillips, “Can Digital Humanities Mean Transformative Critique?” (2013)
- Bethany Nowviskie, “It Starts on Day One” (2013)
- Julia Flanders, “The Literary, the Humanistic, the Digital: Toward a Research Agenda for Digital Literary Studies”, from Literary Studies in the Digital Age: An Evolving Anthology (2013)
- Extra methodological analysis opportunity: Ed Finn, “Revenge of the Nerd: Junot Díaz and the Networks of American Literary Fiction” (2013)
Start work on final projects during lab time
Friday, April 1
- Final project abstracts due via email to Prof Thomas by 10 pm
Monday, April 4
- Work on final projects
- Students meet with Prof Thomas about final projects
Monday, April 11
- Work on final projects
Monday, April 18
- Final project presentations
- Work on final projects
Monday, April 25
- Final project due by 10 pm