Alan Liu

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[Go to Course Site] In recent years, the digital humanities field (“DH”) has reached a critical mass of participants, publications, conferences, institutional programs, job calls, critical discourse, and general visibility.  This course provides a graduate-level introduction to the field.  The course introduces major types of digital humanities work and central topics and controversies.  It asks students to develop project ideas and public visibility in their intended professional field in its relation to the digital humanities.  Major topics include: the emergence of the digital humanities and the relation of DH to the humanities in general; the logic of text encoding (with some attention to relational databases); methods of text analysis (including quantitative analysis, topic modeling, and social network analysis); deep space and time in the digital humanities (visualization, mapping, archival theory, and media archaeology); “algorithmic criticism” and “deformance” theory; and “critical digital humanities” (including controversies about the field’s relation to “theory” and “cultural criticism”).

A key aspect of the course is the balance it seeks between ideas and technology.  Far-reaching ideas from both the human past and present are reexamined from a technological perspective, and–just as important–vice versa.  The focal question for the first class, for example, is “What kind of ‘human’ subject do the digital humanities speak from, to, for?”  And the focal question for one of the last classes is “How can the digital humanities contribute to the humanities in helping human beings understand other ways of ‘understanding’ and of being ‘human’?”

Assignments in the course are designed to train graduate students in the digital humanities (Practicums); immerse them in the digital-humanities research community (Follow DH Community on Twitter); develop their professional profile in their intended research field (Blog Posts on Your Field in its Relation to Digital Humanities); and incubate a detailed “mock project prospectus” for a digital-humanities project (Mock Project Prospectus).  (Due to the constraints of a 10-week quarter, the project need not be implemented but could provide the basis for the student’s future research and professional development.)

Graduate Course – Winter 2012

Instructor: Alan Liu

UC Santa Barbara

Thur 2:00 – 4:30 pm, South Hall 2509

Digital methods shared with other disciplines have recently introduced new methods of literary “reading” that destabilize older methods and extend the interdisciplinary experiments of previous decades. This course uses the theoretical and practical tools of the digital humanities and new media studies to study the relaton between “close reading” and such methods as “distant reading,” “cultural analytics,” and “social reading” (with their component methods of text analysis, social network analysis, visualization, mapping, etc.).

The course is designed to be a hybrid discussion seminar and project-building workshop. We begin with discussion of selected theoretical readings and digital methods. Then students break into teams, choose a literary work, and collaborate in workshop/lab mode to produce a final project that uses digital methods to complement established modes of literary interpretation with some other kind of “reading.”  (Alternatively, students may work individually on projects designed to support or complement their dissertation topics.)  Students, for example, can choose a story or poem to data-mine, text-analyze, model, simulate, map, visualize, sonify, encode, remix, blog, social-network, or redesign as a database, game, app, database, hypertext, mobile or locative installation, or virtual world.  Individual students also undertake the following tasks: discover new online tools, prepare an annotated bibliography, write a brief research report, and write a final essay reflecting on the project. (Auditors participate in team projects and the minor assignments.)

Course site: http://english236-w2008.pbwiki.com/

Course Description: Because of the recent, shared emphasis in many fields on digital methods, scholars in the humanities, arts, social sciences, and sciences increasingly need to collaborate across disciplines. This course reflects theoretically and practically on the new digitally-facilitated interdisciplinarity by asking students to choose a literary work and treat it according to one or more of the research paradigms prevalent in other fields of study.

Students, for example, can choose a story or poem to model, simulate, map, visualize, encode, text-analyze, sample, mashup, storyboard, blog, or redesign as a game, machinima, database, hypertext, or virtual world.

English 236 studentsWhat are the strengths and weaknesses of one kind of research paradigm by comparison with others, including the new paradigms in the literary field that some scholars have recently called distance reading (as opposed to “close reading”) and modeling? For instance, what is the relation between interpreting and data-mining or visualizing?

This graduate-level course begins with discussion of selected readings and demos to set the stage. Readings include: Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees, Willard McCarty’s Humanities Computing, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman’s Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, Jerome McGann and Lisa Samuel’s “Deformance and Interpretation,” and Stephen Ramsay’s “Algorithmic Criticism.” Demos include: the NetLogo agent-modeling environment, the Scratch visual programming environment, digital mapping tools, text-analysis programs, “mashup”-creation tools, the Ivanhoe literary interpretation game, visualization/ pattern-discovery tools, machinima-creation tools, Second Life, and other resources usable by non-programmers to create interesting projects.

After the initial unit of the course, students break into teams, choose a literary work, and collaborate in workshop/lab mode to produce a “proof-of-concept” final project. (Alternatively, students wishing to create a project in support of their dissertation may choose to work individually.) Collaboration will occur both face-to-face and virtually in the class wiki (possibly supplemented by virtual meetings in the UCSB English Department’s new Second Life instructional space). Final projects can be digital, video, acoustic, material, social, or some combination, but some digital representation must be created that can be exhibited on the class wiki or in the English Department’s gallery space in Second Life. Individual students also prepare research reports as well as write a final essay reflecting on the project.

Course site: http://transcriptions.english.ucsb.edu/curriculum/courses/overview.asp?CourseID=290

Course Description: This course consists of two parts:

I. Romantic Landscape (7 weeks) This part of the course attends to the specificity of Romantic landscape during the so-called British “long 18th century” or (in art history) “great century”–i.e., to the unique contribution of Romanticism to an era when in great part landscape was art and art was landscape. Rivaled perhaps only by the novel, with which it was on intimate terms, landscape was the epic of the times. It was the familiar of that other great Romantic epic form: autobiography. This part of the course concentrates on the writings of the Wordsworth circle and the paintings and watercolors of John Constable and J.M.W. Turner. These materials are developed against a backdrop that includes 18th-century writers and painters, the aesthetic theories of the picturesque and sublime, and the history and theory of “descriptive” genres (including georgic and locodescription).

II. New Forms of Landscape (3 weeks) Whether developed in conceptual, metaphorical, or virtual form, navigable space–and often specifically landscape–is important to the contemporary artistic imagination. The course will conclude by making the transition through late-nineteenth-century landscape photography (Carlton Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge) to modern and contemporary forms of landscape imagination, including “land art” and new-media art. Materials include: the work of Robert Smithson, James Turrell, Andy Goldsworthy, Richard Long, Charlotte Davies, John Klima, and Sue Thomas as well as such forms as computer games and satellite imagery. The wager of the course is that we can learn something about the use of landscape as a major form of the social imaginary if we juxtapose Romantic poets and artists walking through nature and contemporary poets and artists browsing or navigating the networks.

The course is supported by an Online Image Gallery (login required).