Calendar

Readings are due on the dates indicated. BB indicates a reading can be found on our Blackboard site on the Course Readings page. All changes to the course calendar will be made with plenty of advance notice.

Download a PDF of the syllabus here.

What is Data?

Thursday, January 8: NO CLASS – Instructor out of town

• Make sure you read through the email I sent on Jan 4 titled “HON 2210: Welcome and Course Information”

Week 1

Tuesday, January 13

No blogging this week

• Jose Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel” (BB)
• Stephen Fortune, “A Brief History of Databases” (2014)
• Daniel Rosenberg, “Data Before the Fact,” from “Raw Data” is an Oxymoron (2013) (BB)

Thursday, January 15

• Please bring laptops to class today.
• Ellen Ullman, The Bug (2003), Part One

Week 2

Tuesday, January 20

Cycle 1.1 Blogging Schedule: Readers – Group 1; Responders – Group 2; Observers – Group 3

• Ellen Ullman, The Bug (2003), Part Two
• Lev Manovich, “The Database,” from The Language of New Media (2001), pp. 218-228 (BB)
• N. Katherine Hayles, “Narrative and Database,” from How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (2012), pp. 175-183 (BB)

Thursday, January 22

• Ellen Ullman, The Bug (2003), Part Three

Week 3

Tuesday, January 27

Cycle 1.2 Blogging Schedule: Readers – Group 3; Responders – Group 1; Observers – Group 2

• Ellen Ullman, The Bug (2003), Part Four
• Nathan Ensmenger, “Making Programming Masculine” from Gender Codes (2010) (BB)

Thursday, January 29

• Jentery Sayers, “Technology” from Keywords for American Cultural Studies (2014)
• Evgeny Morozov, Ch. 1 “Solutionism and Its Discontents,” from To__ Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technologial Solutionism (2014) (BB)

Big Data

Week 4

Tuesday, February 3

**Cycle 1.3 Blogging Schedule: Readers – Group 2; Responders – Group 3; Observers – Group 1**

• Alexis Madrigal, “How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood,” The Atlantic (2014)
• Alice Marwick, “How Your Data Are Being Deeply Mined,” The New York Review of Books (2014) (BB)
• John Foreman, “Data Privacy, Machine Learning, and the Destruction of Mysterious Humanity” (2014)

Thursday, February 5

• Steven Salzberg, “Why Google Flu is a Failure: The Hubris of Big Data” (2014)
• Rita Raley, “Dataveillance and Countervailance” from “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron (2013) (BB)

Week 5

Tuesday, February 10

No blogging this week

• Data Critique Due by class
• Nathaniel Rich, Odds Against Tomorrow (2013), Part One
  • Recommended: RadioLab podcast on the experiments Facebook conducts on us using our data (especially pertinent to last week’s readings): http://www.radiolab.org/story/trust-engineers/

Thursday, February 12

• Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, “What is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?” ADE Bulletin, no. 50 (2010) (BB)
• Lev Manovich, “Trending: The Promises and the Challenges of Big Social Data” from Debates in the Digital Humanities (2012)
  • Recommended: Franco Moretti, “Graphs” from Graphs, Maps, and Trees (2005) (BB)

Week 6

Tuesday, February 17

Cycle 2.1 Blogging Schedule: Readers – Group 1; Responders – Group 2; Observers – Group 3

• Nathaniel Rich, Odds Against Tomorrow (2013), Part Two
• Ted Underwood, “We don’t already understand the broad outlines of literary history” (2013)
  • Recommended: Jean-Baptiste Michel et. al, “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books,” Science 331 (2011) (BB)

Thursday, February 19

• Nathaniel Rich, Odds Against Tomorrow (2013), Part Three

Visualizing Data

Week 7

Tuesday, February 24

Cycle 2.2 Blogging Schedule: Readers – Group 3; Responders – Group 1; Observers – Group 2

• Mark Z. Danielewski, Only Revolutions (2006), Hailey and Sam, pp. 1-88

Thursday, February 26

• Mark Z. Danielewski, Only Revolutions (2006), Hailey and Sam, pp. 89-184

Week 8

Tuesday, March 3

**Cycle 2.3 Blogging Schedule: Readers – Group 2; Responders – Group 3; Observers – Group 1**

• Mark Z. Danielewski, Only Revolutions (2006), Hailey and Sam, pp. 185-272
• Micki Kaufman, “‘Everything on Paper Will be Used Against Me’: Quantifying Kissinger” (2014) (Read “About the Project;” watch the introductory video; read at least three posts in the Visualizations post category)

Thursday, March 5

• Mark Z. Danielewski, Only Revolutions (2006), Hailey and Sam, pp. 273-360

Week 9

Tuesday, March 10

No blogging this week

• Edward Tufte, Ch. 1 and Ch. 2 from The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (2001) (BB)
• Johanna Drucker, “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 5.1 (2011)
• Periodic Table of Data Visualizations
• In-class workshop
  • Recommended: Stephen Ramsay, “Toward an Algorithmic Criticism,” Literary and Linguistic Computing 18.2 (2003): 167-174 (BB)

Thursday, March 12

• In-class workshop

Friday, March 13

• Machine Reading due by 10:00 pm

Week 10

Tuesday, March 17 – NO CLASS: Spring break

Thursday, March 19 – NO CLASS: Spring break

Personalizing Data

Week 11

Tuesday, March 24

No blogging this week

• Ted Chiang, “Understand” (2002) (BB)
• Stephen Wolfram, “The Personal Analytics of My Life” (2012)
• Naveen Selvadurai, A Personal API (2013)

Thursday, March 26 – NO CLASS: Instructor out of town

Week 12

Tuesday, March 31

Cycle 3.1 Blogging Schedule: Readers – Group 1; Responders – Group 2; Observers – Group 3

• Jennifer Whitson, “Gaming the Quantified Self,” Surveillance & Society 11 (2013)
• Whitney Erin Boesel, “Data Occupations,” The New Inquiry (2013)

Thursday, April 2

• Taina Bucher, “Objects of Intense Feeling: The Case of the Twitter API,” Computational Culture (2013)

Feeling Data

Week 13

Tuesday, April 7

Cycle 3.2 Blogging Schedule: Readers – Group 3; Responders – Group 1; Observers – Group 2

• Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist (1999), Down, Part One
• Tara McPherson, “US Operating Systems at Mid-Century: The Intertwining of Race and UNIX” from Race After the Internet (2012) (BB)

Thursday, April 9

• Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist (1999), Down, Part Two

Week 14

Tuesday, April 14

**Cycle 3.3 Blogging Schedule: Readers – Group 2; Responders – Group 3; Observers – Group 1**

• Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist (1999), Up, Part One
• Jonathan Harris, “We Feel Fine” (Best viewed in Firefox, Safari, or Internet Explorer. Make sure pop-up blockers are turned off. You may be prompted to download a plugin or to confirm that you trust the site. Choose accept.)
  • Read “Mission,” “Movements,” and “Methodology”
• Eric Drass, Machine Imagined Artworks (2013)

Thursday, April 16

• Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist (1999), Up, Part Two

Week 15

Tuesday, April 21

No blogging this week

• Final Projects workshop

Thursday, April 23

• Final Projects workshop

Finals Week

Thursday, April 30

• Final Project due by 9:30 pm