New York University
Department of Media, Culture, and Communication
MCC-GE 2144 Digital Humanities
COURSE DESCRIPTION
The class will introduce students to the key concepts and concerns animating the growing field
of the Digital Humanities. The course will give an overview of the questions that have
historically driven digital humanities research, the critical debates that have oriented the field,
and the new technologies and techniques that digital humanists have adopted. While many of the
course readings will be drawn from recent and emerging conversations, these will be paired with
core texts in the humanities. The class will ask students to think deeply about what it means to
engage in humanistic inquiry in a digital environment, as well as what it means to think about
digital environments from a humanities perspective. It will both teach students about new digital
techniques for analysis and ask them to reflect on the relationship between such tools and the
critical analysis of culture, gender, race, and power.
LEARNING OUTCOMES
After completing this course, students will be able to effectively:
• Identify the key concepts and contributions of the field of the Digital Humanities.
• Compare the applicability of DH methodologies and critical frameworks for various
aspects of humanities research.
• Evaluate the relative affordances of various DH tools and techniques.
• Analyze existing digital humanities projects in terms of the politics of space, culture,
labor, economy, etc.
REQUIRED TEXTS
• Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History (London:
Verso, 2005).
• All other articles will be made available via NYUClasses.
ASSIGNMENTS
Participation will be based on attendance, diligent reading, and active participation in all class
discussions. The main work of the class will entail students’ production of an original digital
humanities research project.
Evaluation
Participation: 30%
DH Demos: 25%
DH Final Project: 45%
Evaluation Rubric
A= Excellent
This work is comprehensive and detailed, integrating themes and concepts from discussions,
lectures and readings. Writing is clear, analytical and organized. Arguments offer specific
examples and concisely evaluate evidence. Students who earn this grade are prepared for class,
synthesize course materials and contribute insightfully.
B=Good
This work is complete and accurate, offering insights at general level of understanding. Writing
is clear, uses examples properly and tends toward broad analysis. Classroom participation is
consistent and thoughtful.
C=Average
This work is correct but is largely descriptive, lacking analysis. Writing is vague and at times
tangential. Arguments are unorganized, without specific examples or analysis. Classroom
participation is inarticulate.
D= Unsatisfactory
This work is incomplete, and evidences little understanding of the readings or discussions.
Arguments demonstrate inattention to detail, misunderstand course material and overlook
significant themes. Classroom participation is spotty, unprepared and off topic.
F=Failed
This grade indicates a failure to participate and/or incomplete assignments
A = 94-100
A- = 90-93
B+ = 87-89
B = 84-86
B- = 80-83
C+ = 77-79
C = 74-76
C- = 70-73
D+ = 65-69
D = 60-64
F
= 0-59
COURSE POLICIES
Absences and Lateness
Attendance is mandatory. More than two unexcused absences will automatically result in a lower
grade. Chronic lateness will also be reflected in your evaluation of participation. Regardless of
the reason for your absence you will be responsible for any missed work.
Format
Please type and double-space written work. Typing improves the clarity and readability of your
work and double-spacing allows room for me to comment. Please also number and staple
multiple pages. You are free to use your preferred citation style. Please use it consistently
throughout your writing. If sending a document electronically, please name the file in the
following format Yourlastname Coursenumber Assignment1.doc
Grade Appeals
Please allow two days to pass before you submit a grade appeal. This gives you time to reflect
on my assessment. If you still want to appeal your grade, please submit a short but considered
paragraph detailing your concerns. Based on this paragraph, I will review the question and either
augment your grade or refine my explanation for the lost points.
General Decorum
Slipping in late or leaving early, sleeping, text messaging, surfing the Internet, doing homework,
eating, etc. are distracting and disrespectful to all participants in the course.
Academic Dishonesty and Plagiarism (http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/policies/academic_integrity)
The relationship between students and faculty is the keystone of the educational experience at
New York University in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.
This relationship takes an honor code for granted and mutual trust, respect, and responsibility as
foundational requirements. Thus, how you learn is as important as what you learn. A university
education aims not only to produce high-quality scholars, but to also cultivate honorable citizens.
Academic integrity is the guiding principle for all that you do, from taking exams to making oral
presentations to writing term papers. It requires that you recognize and acknowledge information
derived from others and take credit only for ideas and work that are yours.
You violate the principle of academic integrity when you
• cheat on an exam,
• submit the same work for two different courses without prior permission from your
professors,
• receive help on a take home examination that calls for independent work, or
• plagiarize.
Plagiarism, one of the gravest forms of academic dishonesty in university life, whether intended
or not, is academic fraud. In a community of scholars, whose members are teaching, learning,
and discovering knowledge, plagiarism cannot be tolerated. Plagiarism is failure to properly
assign authorship to a paper, a document, an oral presentation, a musical score, and/or other
materials that are not your original work. You plagiarize when, without proper attribution, you
do any of the following:
• copy verbatim from a book, an article, or other media;
• download documents from the Internet;
• purchase documents;
• report from other’s oral work;
• paraphrase or restate someone else’s facts, analysis, and/or conclusions; or
• copy directly from a classmate or allow a classmate to copy from you.
Your professors are responsible for helping you to understand other people’s ideas, to use
resources and conscientiously acknowledge them, and to develop and clarify your own thinking.
You should know what constitutes good and honest scholarship, style guide preferences, and
formats for assignments for each of your courses. Consult your professors for help with problems
related to fulfilling course assignments, including questions related to attribution of sources.
Through reading, writing, and discussion, you will undoubtedly acquire ideas from others, and
exchange ideas and opinions with others, including your classmates and professors. You will be
expected, and often required, to build your own work on that of other people. In so doing, you
are expected to credit those sources that have contributed to the development of your ideas.
Avoiding Academic Dishonesty
• Organize your time appropriately to avoid undue pressure, and acquire good study habits,
including note taking.
• Learn proper forms of citation. Always check with your professors of record for their
preferred style guides. Directly copied material must always be in quotes; paraphrased
material must be acknowledged; even ideas and organization derived from your own
previous work or another's work need to be acknowledged.
• Always proofread your finished work to be sure that quotation marks, footnotes and other
references were not inadvertently omitted. Know the source of each citation.
• Do not submit the same work for more than one class without first obtaining the
permission of both professors even if you believe that work you have already completed
satisfies the requirements of another assignment.
• Save your notes and drafts of your papers as evidence of your original work.
Disciplinary Sanctions
If a professor suspects cheating, plagiarism, or other forms of academic dishonesty, appropriate
disciplinary action may be taken following the department procedure or through referral to the
Committee on Student Discipline. The Steinhardt School Statement on Academic Integrity is
consistent with the NYU Policy on Student Conduct, published in the NYU Student Guide.
STUDENT RESOURCES
• Students with physical or learning disabilities are required to register with the Moses
Center for Students with Disabilities, 726 Broadway, 2nd Floor, (212-998-4980) and are
required to present a letter from the Center to the instructor at the start of the semester in
order to be considered for appropriate accommodation.
• Writing Center: 411 Lafayette, 4th Floor. Schedule appts at rich15.com/nyu/ or walk-in.
SCHEDULE OF CLASSES, READINGS AND ASSIGNMENTS
Week 1: The Digital Humanities
Reading:
Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo Goldberg, “A Manifesto for the Humanities in a
Technological Age.” The Chronicle Review, February 13, 2004
http://chronicle.com/article/A-Manifesto-for-the-Humanities/17844
ACLS Humanities Definition, http://www.acls.org/info/default.aspx?id=198#humanities
4Humanities, Advocating for the Humanities, http://4humanities.org/
Week 2: Codes
Reading:
Daniel Chandler, “Codes,” Semiotics: The Basics (London: Routledge, 2002), 147-174.
Stuart Hall, “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse,” (Birmingham,
England: Centre for Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham, 1973), 507-17.
Rita Raley “Code.surface || Code.depth.” Dichtung-Digital 36 (2006).
http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2006/1-Raley.htm.
Mark Marino, “Critical Code Studies,” Electronic Book Review (2006).
Further Reading:
Roland Barthes, S/Z (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), selections.
Week 3: Reading, Texts, Hermeneutics
Reading:
Allen H. Renear, “Text Encoding,” A Companion to Digital Humanities, eds. Susan
Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).
http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/
Ted Underwood, “Where to Start with Text Mining,”
http://tedunderwood.com/2012/08/14/where-to-start-with-text-mining/
Franco Moretti, “Graphs,” Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History
(London: Verso, 2005), 1-34.
Review:
Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)
Erin Reilly, Ritesh Mehta, Henry Jenkins, Flows of Reading: Engaging with Texts,
http://scalar.usc.edu/anvc/flowsofreading/index
Digital Tools:
Google Books Ngram Viewer, http://books.google.com/ngrams
BookLamp, http://booklamp.org
Poem Viewer, http://ovii.oerc.ox.ac.uk/PoemVis/
Many Eyes, http://www-958.ibm.com/software/analytics/manyeyes/
Text Analysis Tools, http://hermeneuti.ca/voyeur/tools
Week 4: Archive, Canon, History
Reading:
Michael Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (London
and New York: Routledge, 2002), selections.
Matthew Kirschembaum, “The .txtual Condition: Digital Humanities, Archives, and the
Future Literary,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 7, no. 1 (2013).
Jussi Parikka, “Archives in Media Theory: Material Media Archaeology and Digital
Humanities.” In Understanding Digital Humanities, ed. David M. Berry
Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, “Promises and Perils of Digital History,”
http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/introduction/
Further Reading:
William G. Thomas, II. “Computing and the Historical Imagination.” A Companion to
Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).
Review:
Virtual Jamestown, http://www.virtualjamestown.org/
Television News of the Civil Rights Era 1950-1970,
http://www2.vcdh.virginia.edu/civilrightstv/
The Internet Archive, http://archive.org/index.php
Week 5: Workshop 1
Week 6: Knowledge Production and Data
Reading
Bruno Latour, “Visualisation and Cognoition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands,”
Representation in Scientific Activity, eds. Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 19-68.
Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, “Introduction: To Classify Is Human,”
Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences (Cambridge: The MIT
Press, 1999), 1-32.
Lisa Gitelman and Virginia Jackson, “Introduction,” ‘Raw Data’ is an Oxymoron
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013), 1-13.
Megan R. Brett, “Topic Modeling: A Basic Introduction,” Journal of the Digital
Humanities 2, no. 1 (Winter 2012), http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/21/topic-modeling-a-basic-introduction-by-megan-r-brett/
Digital Tools:
Alan Liu’s Data Collections and Datasets Reference,
http://eng236introdh2013f.pbworks.com/w/page/67571536/Data-Collections-andDatasets
Scalar, http://scalar.usc.edu/
Week 7: Culture, Power, Subject
Reading:
Gayatri Spivak, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” in Selected
Subaltern Studies, eds. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1988), 3-34.
María Fernández, “Postcolonial Media Theory,” Art Journal 58, no. 3 (1999), 58-73.
“Room For Everyone at the DH Table?” http://dhpoco.org/blog/2013/05/15/room-foreveryone-at-the-dh-table/
Alan Liu, “Where is Cultural Criticism in the DH?” http://liu.english.ucsb.edu/where-iscultural-criticism-in-the-digital-humanities/
Review:
Six Degree of Francis Bacon: Reassembling the Early Modern Social Network,
http://sixdegreesoffrancisbacon.com/overview
Postcolonial Digital Humanities (#dhpoco)
#TransformDH
Further Reading:
Kavita Philip, Lilly Irani, and Paul Dourish, “Postcolonial Computing: A Tactical
Survey,” Science, Technology, and Human Values (2010)
Week 8: Gender, Sexuality, Difference
Reading:
Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the
Privilege of Partial Perspectives,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (Autumn 1988), 575599.
Alexis Lothian and Amanda Phillips, “Can Digital Humanities Mean Transformative
Critique?” http://journals.dartmouth.edu/cgibin/WebObjects/Journals.woa/1/xmlpage/4/article/425
Wendy Chun, “The Dark Side of the Digital Humanities,”
http://www.c21uwm.com/2013/01/09/the-dark-side-of-the-digital-humanitiespart-1/
Jacqueline Wernimont, “Whence Feminism? Assessing Feminist Interventions in Digital
Literary Archives,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 7, no. 1 (2013),
http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/7/1/000156/000156.html.
Review:
The Global Women Wikipedia Write-In (#GWWI): http://dhpoco.org/rewritingwikipedia/the-global-women-wikipedia-write-in/
Week 9: Race, Class, Agency
Reading:
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and Tukufu Zuberi, “Toward a Definition of White Logic and
White Methods,” White Logic, White Methods: Racism and Methodology
(Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), 1-27.
Tara McPherson, “Why Are the Digital Humanities So White? or Thinking the Histories
of Race and Computation.” Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew K.
Gold (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).
Amy E. Earhart, “Can Information Be Unfettered? Race and the New Digital Humanities
Canon.” Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew K. Gold (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2012).
Eric Zimmerman, “Narrative, Interactivity, Play, and Games: Four Naughty Concepts in
Need of Discipline,” in First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and
Game, eds. Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardup-Fruin
http://www.ericzimmerman.com/texts/Four_Concepts.html
Review:
The Racial Dot Map: http://www.coopercenter.org/demographics/Racial-Dot-Map
Week 10: Workshop 2
Week 11: Location, Territory, Map
Reading:
Edward Soja, “History: Geography: Modernity,” Postmodern Geographies: The
Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), 10-42.
Doreen Massey, “A Global Sense of Place,” Marxism Today (1991), 24-29.
Franco Moretti, “Maps,” Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History
(London: Verso, 2005), 35-66.
Review:
Vincent Brown, “Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761: A Cartographic Narrative,”
http://revolt.axismaps.com/project.html
Todd Presner, HyperCities, www.hypercities.com
Stanford Spatial History Project, www.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgibin/site/index.php
Digital Tools:
Keyhole Markup Language, https://developers.google.com/kml/documentation/
Neatline, http://neatline.org/
Week 12: Image, Aesthetics, Beauty
Reading:
Kevin Melchionne, “On the Old Saw ‘I Know Nothing about Art but I Know What I
Like,’” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 131141.
Edward Tufte, “Mapped Pictures: Images as Evidence and Explanation,” Beautiful
Evidence (Graphics Press, 2006), 12-45.
Anna Munster, “Introduction: Prelude to the Movements of Networks,” An Aesthesia of
Networks: Conjunctive Experience in Art and Technology (Cambridge: The MIT
Press, 2013), 1-18.
Johanna Drucker, “Speculative Computing: Aesthetic Provocations in Humanities
Computing,” A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray
Siemens, John Unsworth (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).
http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/
Further Reading:
Immanuel Kant, “The Critique of Aesthetic Judgement,”
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/k/kant/immanuel/k16j/book1.html
Terry Eagleton, “Introduction,” The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990),
1-12.
Review:
Information Aesthetics, http://infosthetics.com/
Information is Beautiful, http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/
Flowing Data, http://flowingdata.com/
Week 13: Final Project Workshop
Week 14: Final Project Workshop
Week 15: Final Project Presentations