Courses

Data analysis in the humanities presents challenges of scale, interpretation, and communication distinct from the social sciences and sciences. In recent years, a number of new practices in this sphere have begun to cohere: “cultural analytics,” “distant reading,” “macroanalysis,” and “data feminism.” This graduate seminar will develop skills to read and create scholarship in these computationalist traditions of the digital humanities. We’ll do so through more traditional seminar readings and a series of programming worksets that will teach you how to do a variety of types of data analysis and visualization.

This course provides a project-based approach to web programming and development. Students will study the principles of web design and each student will build two distinct websites based on topics relevant to their interests. To complement these practical skills, we will look at how the web has expanded our notions of discourse and explore how websites can be used for scholarly communication. A deeper understanding of these topics will help you make better decisions not only in your own web development practice but also in sharing your work more effectively.

This course will explore the relationship between two overlapping approaches to working with data: Graph Databases and Network Analysis. Students will learn to apply these approaches to their own work within the broad scope of the Ancient World. A “Graph Database” is a collection of heterogeneous entities and the relationships between them. The software tools that allow querying of these collections start from the perspective of the individual entities and allow these entities to be selected, grouped, and counted. For the purposes of this course, a “Network” is a collection of nodes and the edges that connect them to other nodes in the same set. A focus of the tools for working with networks is the whole collection. Which nodes are highly connected? What is the nature of the paths that exist between all the nodes? What subgroups exist within a network and which nodes mediate between those subgroups? It is the case that ‘nodes’ are analogous to ‘entities’ and that ‘edges’ are analogous to ‘relationships’. Starting with working examples, the course will explore these similarities as students learn how to implement these concepts within the context of their own work. How do these generic terms, methods, and questions relate to the past phenomena we study? Existing resources, including the Wikidata graph database and the networks that can be derived from it, will introduce students to specific tools such as the SPARQL query language and the Python programming-language libraries for working with networks. Visualization of results will be one focus of our work. While there is no prior technical expertise required, an openness and commitment to learning digital methods is essential. As the course progresses, students will increasingly work with their own data and this will lead to the development and implementation of a final project that uses the methods we learn in class. Weekly readings will explore working examples of both technologies and explore the impact they are having on scholarship and research in the Ancient World. The course may be particularly useful to archaeologists, historians, art historians, and philologists who want to explore how Graph Databases and Network Analysis can contribute to their own research.

This spring, the NYU Environmental Education program is offering a class on Environmental Justice and GIS. Digital mapping is a way of representing claims we make about justice and the use of space, whether this be the phenomenon of food deserts, resilience of coastal communities, sustainability of urban ecological habitat, or exposure of children to air toxics. Students are not required to have any knowledge of GIS entering the class. In class, four sessions at the computer lab will be used to build a working knowledge of GIS, so that students will be able to design and create maps using ArcGIS. These lab sessions require in-person attendance and, so, there is no zoom option for this class. The meetings will require, in total, eight in-class meetings (including the labs), and six or so online meetings.