DHSS-GA.1120 | Fall 2021 | Ben Schmidt
Course description
Provides an introduction to the practice, history, and principles of programming for students in the humanities through the Python language.
DHSS-GA.1120 | Fall 2021 | Ben Schmidt
Provides an introduction to the practice, history, and principles of programming for students in the humanities through the Python language.
Digital Humanities: Collections and Connections
CEH-GA.1089 | Fall 2021 | Kimon Keramidas
Two of the most important aspects of digital media are their capacity to allow for the organization of and creation of connections between data. Collecting and connecting technologies have enabled the development of complex information management and network creation systems, which are the foundations of everyday experience in the digital age. Because these systems play such a significant role in how we communicate with one another they are critical to understanding how new media can play a role in public discourse and scholarly conversations. This course will consider how databases and networking tools allow us to organize the digital world and how different tools and platforms, such as WordPress, Omeka, Gephi, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest, allow us to curate the things in our world and share our experiences. It will also consider how we can analyze these networks and collections to present intellectual arguments in new ways and tell more compelling stories. Along with practical work with digital tools, this course will include readings on network culture and digital curation by authors such as McLuhan, Gitelman, Castells, Shirky, Manovich, Cohen, Ramsay, and Galloway.
DHSS-GA.1121 | Spring 2022 | Ben Schmidt
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.” But it can be hard for humanists to learn how to apply these practices, not just talk intelligently about them. 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 that are actually useful for humanists and others communicating in areas where the data is messy and culturally contingent, and where the reading audience is not necessarily trained or interested in statistics.
Digital Humanities: Analysis and Visualization
CEH-GA.1137 | Spring 2022 | Kimon Keramidas
This course will consider how the analysis and visualization of information through digital technologies has significantly changed the way we look at our world both within the academic community and in society at large. The data portion of the class will begin with an understanding of the ontologies of data and metadata and address analysis techniques such as distant reading, topic modeling, text encoding, and text analysis. The visualization portion of the class will interrogate just what it means to visualize an argument and will include both a critique of and experimentation with timelines, maps, infographics, charts, and visual confections that are used as alternatives to textual explanation. We will work with digital tools for analyzing and visualizing humanities data, such as AbbyFine, Voyant, Topic Modeling Tool, ArcGIS, and Agisoft Metashape.
Introduction to Web Development
DHSS-GA.1122 | Spring 2022 | Zach Coble
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.
Introduction to Programming
DHSS-GA.1120 | Fall 2022 | Marc Bacchus
Provides an introduction to the practice, history, and principles of programming for students in the humanities through the Python language.
Working with Data
DHSS-GA.1121 | Spring 2023 | Christine Roughan
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.
Introduction to Web Development
DHSS-GA.1122 | Spring 2023 | Zach Coble
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.
Cinema and the Digital Humanities: History, Concepts and New Approaches to the Study of Moving Images
CINE-GT.3040 | Fall 2022 | Marina Hassapopoulou
This course will explore Cinema Studies within the interdisciplinary context of the Digital Humanities (DH). Digital tools and platforms, along with the databases they create, have expanded the ways we study moving images and filmmaking traditions. Despite Cinema Studies’ important contributions to the expansion of DH, the study of moving images and time-based media is usually not at the forefront of DH-related inquiry. One of the course objectives is to therefore place Cinema Studies research at the center of DH methodologies in order to diversify interdisciplinary approaches to both DH and Cinema Studies. In this course, students will study DH practice alongside related theoretical frameworks in order to explore the profound historiographical, philosophical, sociocultural, and institutional imperatives that drive the need for digital tools and computational methods in the study of moving images. This approach will help students establish in-depth connections between theory and practice, and will assist them in planning, prototyping, and creating their own final projects to address significant research questions related to Cinema Studies and other fields.
Graph Databases, Network Analysis (Special Topics in Digital Humanities for the Ancient World)
ISAW-GA 3023 | Spring 2023 | Sebastian Heath
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.
Environmental Justice through Digital Empowerment
ENYC-GE 2018 | Spring 2023 | Raul Lejano and Carlos Restrepo
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.
Introduction to Programming
DHSS-GA.1120 | Fall 2023 | Marc Bacchus
Provides an introduction to the practice, history, and principles of programming for students in the humanities through the Python language.
Text Analysis for Historical Language Research
ISAW-GA 3023-001 | Fall 2023 | Patrick Burns
This course introduces students to computational research methods helpful for producing data-driven scholarship involving large collections of historical-language text. Drawing on relevant topics in exploratory data science, corpus linguistics, and natural language processing, the course provides a forum for students to develop hands-on skills in computer programming (using Python), focused primarily on managing textual data, string manipulation, text mining and analysis, language modeling, and data visualization. Special attention will be given to the use of word embeddings and transformer models and their applicability to historical-language text collections. Demonstrations throughout the course will draw primarily on English-language examples, but because of the philological range and diversity at ISAW, students are encouraged to work with digitized text collections in the languages most relevant to their research. There are no prerequisites, though students are expected to be open to reading, writing, and editing computer programs; students are required to bring notebook computers to class. Note that historical-language text for the purpose of this course covers texts or collections of texts written before the Early Modern period. Permission of the instructor is required.
Introduction to Digital Humanities for the Ancient World
ISAW-GA 3024-001 | Fall 2023 | Sebastian Heath, Tom Elliott, and David Ratzan
This course will introduce students to the use of digital tools and computational methods in the study of the ancient world. There are no technical prerequisites and the course will be of particular interest to early-stage graduate students who want a broad introduction that involves hands-on work. The course will progress through topics and methods such as applying structure to text via XML-based markup languages, introduction to the programmatic manipulation of textual data, and how scholarly resources are shared on the public internet and edited in collaborative environments. There will also be a focus on structured datasets. Students will gain practical experience in acquiring, creating, querying, and displaying spatial data, digital images, and 3D models. The course also addresses the growing role of so-called "generative AI" and related tools. There will be frequent introductions to existing digitally-informed work in disciplines that are part of the study of the ancient world, such as textual studies, history, and archaeology, as well as more specific fields such as epigraphy, papyrology, and numismatics for which exemplary digital projects exist. Readings will introduce students to current trends, theories, and ethics in Digital Humanities and will encourage discussion of the impact that digital methods and open-licensed content are having on research, teaching, and public engagement with scholarly practice. Over the course of the semester students will design and then implement a final project that can overlap with their existing research interests. It is a requirement that students bring their own notebook computers to class. Permission of the instructors is required.
Topics in Digital Humanities
ENGL-GA 1972 | Fall 2023 | Jeffrey Binder
Creating Digital History
HIST-GA 2033 | Fall 2023 | Leah Potter
A hands-on introduction to “doing history” in the digital age, Creating Digital History focuses on the evolving methodologies and tools used by public historians to collect, preserve, and present digital sources. Students will become familiar with a range of web-based tools and learn best practices for digitizing, adding metadata, tagging, and clearing permissions. By evaluating existing digital history projects and discussing perspectives from leading practitioners, students will also consider the role of the general public as both audiences for, and co-creators of, digital history. The core requirement is a collaborative digital history project that will be developed throughout the semester on a selected historical theme.
Topics in ITP: Programming with Data for Artists, Designers and Researchers
ITPG-GT 2378 | Fall 2023 | Allison Parrish
Data is the means by which we turn experience into something that can be published, compared, and analyzed. Data can facilitate the production of new knowledge about the world—but it can also be used as a method of control and exploitation. As such, the ability to understand and work with data is indispensable both for those who want to uncover truth, and those who want to hold power to account. This intensive course serves as an introduction to essential computational tools and techniques for working with data. The course is designed for artists, designers, and researchers in the humanities who have no previous programming experience. Covered topics include: the Python programming language, Jupyter Notebook, data formats, regular expressions, Pandas, web scraping, relational database concepts, simple data visualization and data-driven text generation. Weekly technical tutorials and short readings culminate in a self-directed final project.
CEH-GA 1018 004 | Spring 2024 | Toussaint Nothias
In what ways do today’s digital technologies reproduce colonial power relations? Are these technologies merely replicating old forms of colonialism, or are they spearheading a distinctively new type of colonialism? Most importantly, what does it take to decolonize these technologies? Come and join this graduate seminar to read foundational texts in postcolonial and decolonial theory while engaging with the latest debates and research in critical data studies.
Introduction to Web Development
DHSS-GA.1122 | Spring 2024 | Jojo Karlin
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.