Schedule S25
UNIT 1: DATA IN THE ARTS AND HUMANITIES
Week 1 Digital Arts and Humanities
| Time/Date | Reading/Material | Activity |
|---|---|---|
| Tues, 21 Jan (3:35PM-6:15PM) | -Mattingly, “How to Get Started in Digital Humanities in 2023, and Why” (requires account), Medium, 17 January 2023 -Berry, What are the Digital Humanities?, British Academy, 13 February 2019 -Rogers, So You want to make a DH Website |
Introduction to course, expectations, syllabus |
| Thurs, 23 Jan (3:35PM-4:50PM) | -Drucker, ch 1, 1-18. | -Discussion of Drucker -Slides: A few global examples of global communities doing digital arts and humanities [in Drive] |
Week 2 “On the Way to Computational Thinking”
| Time/Date | Reading/Material | Activity |
|---|---|---|
| Tues, 28 January 3:35PM-6:15PM | -Review NotebookLM audio summary [in drive] -Berry/Fagerjord, “On the Way to Computational Thinking,” Digital Humanities: Knowledge and Critique in the Digital Age, 2017, 40-59. [in Drive] -Drucker, ch 11, 192-210. -Download GitHub Desktop |
Lab: -Web Publishing Alternatives: Github Pages, Google Sites, Hypotheses, Notion, Vercel, NYU WP, Humanities Commons, HSS Commons -Working on our own blogs -pushing material to them using Github Desktop -discussion and practice with Markdown -a Markdown cheatsheet |
| Thurs, 30 January 3:35PM-4:50PM | -Posner, “How Did They Make That” 2014. -Chachra, “Why I am Not a Maker” The Atlantic, 23 January 2015. Full text here -The Making and Knowing Project -On Phronesis -LLMs and practical knowledge: What is intelligence?, 2024, pp. 19-26. |
-discussion: comparing and contrasting computational thinking and phronesis -set up and prompting a digital literacy narrative with GPT/DeepSeek |
Digital Literacy Narrative Instructions here Due Date 8 Feb, total of the assignment 10% final grade (in phases over the semester). This portion is ungraded.
UNIT 2: TEXTUAL DATA
Week 3 Distant Reading
| Time/Date | Reading/Material | Activity |
|---|---|---|
| Tues, 4 February 3:35PM-6:15PM | -Drucker, ch 7, 110-120 -Clark et al, “What’s Trending in the Chinese Google Books Corpus” Global Debates in the Digital Humanities, 2022 -Listen to Distant Reading: A Conversation with Ama Bemma Adwetewa-Badu |
-Lab: -Introduction to RStudio and Posit.cloud -Text Mining: Easy to Less Easy -Google NGram Viewer -Bookworm -Voyant |
| Thurs, 6 February 3:35PM-4:50PM | -What is a Corpus? -Rockwell and Sinclair, “The Measured Words: How Computers Analyze Text”, 25-43 |
More hands on with different corpora, including AI-created |
ASSIGNMENT 1: Exploring Textual Data from a Custom Corpus. Instructions Due 28 Feb, 20% final grade.
Week 4 Computational Analysis of (Historical) Text
| Time/Date | Reading/Material | Activity |
|---|---|---|
| Tues, 11 February 3:35PM-6:15PM | -Drucker, ch 3, 34-51. |
-RMarkdown notebook “The Grammar of Graphics, ch 2” of Humanities Data in R 2nd ed. -RMarkdown notebook” Identifying Most Distinctive Words in Three (Sets of) Texts” adapted from Text Mining with R: A Tidy Approach NB: This book was written in RMarkdown and Github using the bookdown package. |
| Thurs, 13 February 3:35PM-4:50PM | -Handwritten Text Recognition Transkribus Webinar for Beginners -Create a free Transkribus account |
- Mini lecture: “Digitization and Creating Our Own Textual Data” [slides in drive] -What is humanities ground truth? -Correcting and Retraining the Machine -Using Transformer Models to Analyze Historical Documents -Analyzing and Classifying Documents with OCR error |
EXTRA CREDIT OPPORTUNITY: It’s Love Data week! This year’s theme is “Whose Data is it, anyway?” To avail yourself of the extra credit, you should sign up for one of the events at NYU New York (or this lecture by a professor from NYU Wagner), attend and then write a post about what you learned. Due Date: 20 Feb, 1-2 points on Assignment 1. Guidelines on writing extra credit posts can be found here.
Week 5 A Language Model, with Historical Data
| Time/Date | Reading/Material | Activity |
|---|---|---|
| Tues, 18 February 3:35PM-6:15PM | -Barton, Experiments Using chatGPT With Archival Collections -Download DOT (optional, as we will demo it in class) -Kirmizialtin and Wrisley “Exploring Gulf Manumission Documents with Word Vectors, 2024, 1-29 -“Protect Your Privacy by Deleting Uploaded Files in chatGPT” - “Why Shouldn’t You Share Personal Data with chatGPT or other AI Chatbots |
-Hands on with DOT and other LLMs of your choice -summarization, OCR correction, information extraction (using Annie’s letters) |
| Thurs, 20 February 3:35PM-4:50PM | -GPT for the Arts and Humanities -Rane and Choudhary Role and challenges of ChatGPT, Google Bard, and similar generative Artificial Intelligence in Arts and Humanities |
-general discussion -questions regarding Assignment 1 |
UNIT 3: SPATIAL DATA
Week 6 The (Geo)spatial in the arts and humanities
| Time/Date | Reading/Material | Activity |
|---|---|---|
| Tues, 25 February 3:35PM-6:15PM | -Drucker, ch 8, 130-150 -The Sultanate of Zanzibar -Zanzibar (Wikipedia) -Make an account at OpenStreetMap |
-Visit to Special Collections and Lab -Hands on with the UFO dataset (in Drive) and kepler |
| Thurs, 27 February 3:35PM-4:50PM | -Exploring Spatial Projects -“A Place for Plant Data” (Loukissas) -“Mapping” (Wilson, in drive) |
-discussion of structured data |
Digital Literacy Narrative Revision #1 : instructions here, Due Date 30 March, total 10% of final grade, this part being 5%.
Ramadan begins around here
Week 7 Extracting and Visualizing Spatial Information from Sources
| Time/Date | Reading/Material | Activity |
|---|---|---|
| Tues, 4 March 3:35PM-6:15PM | -Broman and Woo, “Data Organization in Spreadsheets”, 2018, 2-8 -Drucker, ch 6, 86-109 -“Why We Should Digitize Historical Newspapers”, “How Do we Digitize Historic Newspapers?”, |
-Lab: Share back about the sample spatial projects -LLMs, Information Extraction and Digitized Historical Documents -theme exploration across all the ZG issues |
| Thurs, 6 March 3:35PM-4:50PM | -“Thick Mapping” Hypercities, pp. 49-65. |
-Hands on - Finalize topics from the Zanzibar Gazette -presentation of Assignment 2 |
ASSIGNMENT 2: “Wrangle” data from a historical source, the Gazette of Zanzibar to build and visualize a spatial dataset. Instructions Due 15 April, 20% final grade.
Spring Break and Eid If you can find it, watch the German Netflix mini series, The Billion Dollar Code over the break. It’s all about spatial data!
Week 8 Humanitarian Mapping
| Time/Date | Reading/Material | Activity |
|---|---|---|
| Tues, 18 March 3:35PM-6:15PM | -Instructor at a conference -Krupar, Map Power and Map Methodologies for Social Justice -Spatial Microtasking and Humanitarian OSM |
Google Space contributions |
| Thurs, 20 March 3:35PM-4:50PM | -Instructor at a conference -Explore some HotOSM projects |
-Google Space contributions -Choose one HotOSM project and explain in the Google Space (in about 150-200 words with links or images) what it attempts to do |
TWO EXTRA CREDIT OPPORTUNITIES: A Humanist’s Intro to VS Studio Code** that teaches you the fundmentals of Visual Studio Code, another text editor many people use to work with GitHub, signups here. Please do not choose this option if you are already using VSC. Include in your writeup a comparison using screenshots of how you have been using sublime Text this term. To avail yourself of either extra credit opportunity, you should register for the event, attend and then write a post about what you learned. Due Date: 26 March, 1-2 points on Assignment 2. Guidelines on writing extra credit posts can be found here.
Week 9 More Maps
| Time/Date | Reading/Material | Activity |
|---|---|---|
| Tues, 25 March 3:35PM-6:15PM | ||
| Thurs, 27 March 3:35PM-4:50PM | -work on Assignment 2 |
-questions regarding Assignment 2 |
UNIT 4: IMAGE DATA
Week 10 Images as Data
| Time/Date | Reading/Material | Activity |
|---|---|---|
| Tues, 8 April 3:35PM-6:15PM | -“How We Teach Computers to Understand Pictures” (Li) -Learning about Orange Data Mining -Clustering Monet and Manet -Drimmer, “How AI is Hijacking Art History” -Binkyte, “Distant Reading and Viewing: “Big Questions” in Digital Art History and Digital Literary Studies” |
In class exploration: -WCMA digital project -Selfie City -Photogrammar -MoMA photography -Looking for Patterns in Image Collections with IMJ -Exploring Image Clustering with Orange |
| Thurs, 10 April 3:35PM-4:50PM | -Download Orange Data Mining -Lang and Ommer “Transforming Information Into Knowledge: How Computational Methods Reshape Art History” -Impett and Offert, “There is a Digital Art History” -Fuchsgruber, “Dead End or Way Out?: Generating Critical Information about Painting Collections Using AI” |
-Discussion of “Distant Viewing” -Clustering of Image Datasets with Orange using different datasets (William Wegman portraits, Arabic magazine covers, manga photos, Ramadan images) |
ASSIGNMENT 3: Constructing an Image Dataset and using Orange Data Mining and the DV Explorer to analyze it. Instructions Due 2 May, 20% final grade.
https://developers.google.com/earth-engine/datasets/
Week 11 “Looking at and through the algorithm”
| Time/Date | Reading/Material | Activity |
|---|---|---|
| Tues, 15 April 3:35PM-6:15PM | Lab: -Exploring pre-assembled datasets with CLIP -DV Explorer |
|
| Thurs, 17 April 3:35PM-4:50PM | More Exploration of DV Explorer | Discussion of How to Build an Image Corpus |
Week 12 Computer Vision and Historical Images
| Time/Date | Reading/Material | Activity |
|---|---|---|
| Tues, 22 Apr 3:35PM-6:15PM | -Browse the book: Distant Viewing: Computational Exploration of Digital Images |
Lab: R Markdown Notebooks for Color, Object Detection and Face Detection |
| Thurs, 24 April 3:35PM-4:50PM | Continuing CV | -Discussion -Questions about Assignment 3 |
Digital Literacy Narrative Revision #2 : instructions here, Due Date 2 May 2024, 5% final grade.
UNIT 5: WRAP UP
Week 13 Lab Work
| Time/Date | Reading | Activity |
|---|---|---|
| Tues, 29 April | lab | |
| Thurs, 1 May | lab |
Week 14 Presentations
| Time/Date | Reading | Activity |
|---|---|---|
| Tues, 6 May | none | in-class individual presentations reflecting on what we learned |
| Thurs, 8 May | none | wrap up |