UNIT 1: DATA IN THE ARTS AND HUMANITIES

Week 1 Digital Arts and Humanities

Time/Date Preparation Activity
Tues, 20 Jan (3:20PM-6:00PM)
-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
-Data in the Humanities
Introduction to course, expectations, syllabus
Thurs, 22 Jan (3:20PM-4:35PM)
-Sign up for Github and Github Education
-Drucker, ch 1, 1-18.
-Posner, Humanities Data: A Necessary Contradiction
-Choose one of the links here to discuss Digital Humanities and AI

-Discussion of Drucker, Posner and DH/AI
-Slides: A few global examples of global communities doing digital arts and humanities [in Drive]

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Week 2 “On the Way to Computational Thinking”

Time/Date Preparation Activity
Tues, 27 January 3:20PM-6:00PM
-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]
-Slater, Distant Coding in the Digital Humanities,
-Download GitHub Desktop
-What is Markdown and Why Should we Use It?
-Register your GitHub username and site name here
Lab:
-Working on building our course sites
-pushing material to them using Github Desktop
-discussion and practice with Markdown
-a Markdown cheatsheet
-Trying out agentic coding
-Slides “Distant Coding” in Drive
Thurs, 29 January 3:20PM-4:35PM
-Drucker, ch 11, 192-210
-Posner, “How Did They Make That” 2014.
-Chachra, “Why I am Not a Maker” The Atlantic, 23 January 2015. Full text here
-The People Refusing to Use AI
-Pros and Cons of GitHub Copilot
-LLMs and practical knowledge: What is intelligence?, 2024, pp. 19-26.

-discussion: comparing and contrasting computational thinking and distant coding
-set up and prompting a digital literacy narrative in VSCode

Digital Literacy Narrative Instructions here Due Date 3 Feb, total of the assignment 10% final grade (in phases over the semester). This portion is ungraded.

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UNIT 2: TEXTUAL DATA

Week 3 Distant Reading

Time/Date Preparation Activity
Tues, 3 February 3:20PM-6:00PM
-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
-Using VSCode with agentic coding to extend basic text mining and visualization
Thurs, 5 February 3:20PM-4:35PM
-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

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ASSIGNMENT 1: Exploring Textual Data from a Custom Corpus. Instructions Due 20 Feb, 20% final grade.

Week 4 Computational Analysis of (Historical) Text

Time/Date Preparation Activity
Tues, 10 February 3:20PM-6:00PM
-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.
-Extending the Most Distinctive Words exercise with agentic coding
Thurs, 12 February 3:20PM-4:35PM
-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

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EXTRA CREDIT OPPORTUNITY: It’s Love Data week!

Due Date: 20 Feb, 1-2 points on Assignment 1. Guidelines on writing extra credit posts can be found here.

Ramadan starts. We will have a shorter Tuesday class to accommodate to rest before Iftar.

Week 5 A Language Model, with Historical Data

Time/Date Preparation Activity
Tues, 17 February 3:20PM-6:00PM
-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 in VSCode to extend text analysis
-summarization, OCR correction, information extraction (using Annie’s letters)
Thurs, 19 February 3:20PM-4:35PM Instructor at a Conference TBA TBA

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UNIT 3: SPATIAL DATA

Week 6 The (Geo)spatial in the arts and humanities

Time/Date Preparation Activity
Tues, 24 February 3:20PM-6:00PM
-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, 26 February 3:20PM-4:35PM
-Exploring Spatial Projects
-“A Place for Plant Data” (Loukissas)
-“Mapping” (Wilson, in drive)

-discussion of structured data

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Digital Literacy Narrative Revision #1 : instructions here, Due Date 10 March, total 10% of final grade, this part being 5%.

Ramadan begins around here

Oral Exam week of Mar 2. Sign ups available here.

Week 7 Extracting and Visualizing Spatial Information from Sources

Time/Date Preparation Activity
Tues, 3 March 3:20PM-6:00PM
-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, 5 March 3:20PM-4:35PM
-“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!

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Week 8 Humanitarian Mapping

Time/Date Preparation Activity
Tues, 24 March 3:20PM-6:00PM
-Krupar, Map Power and Map Methodologies for Social Justice
-Spatial Microtasking and Humanitarian OSM
-agentic coding of OSM/GeoNames street data and map making using Leaflet
Thurs, 26 March 3:20PM-4:35PM -Explore some HotOSM projects
-Discussion and continuation of geospatial coding in VSCode

Week 9 More Maps

Time/Date Preparation Activity
Tues, 31 March 3:20PM-6:00PM    
Thurs, 2 April 3:20PM-4:35PM
-work on Assignment 2

-questions regarding Assignment 2

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UNIT 4: IMAGE DATA

Week 10 Images as Data

Time/Date Preparation Activity
Tues, 7 April 3:20PM-6:00PM
-“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
-Looking for Patterns in Image Collections with IMJ
-Exploring Image Clustering with Orange
Thurs, 9 April 3:20PM-4:35PM
-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”

Week 11 “Looking at and through the algorithm”

Time/Date Preparation Activity
Tues, 14 April 3:20PM-6:00PM
-Orange Data Mining day
-Clustering vs classification
Lab:
-Clustering of Image Datasets with Orange using different datasets (William Wegman portraits, Arabic magazine covers, manga photos, Ramadan images)
-Extension of Distant Viewing Using scripts from the Distant Viewing Lab and agentic coding
Thurs, 16 April 3:20PM-4:35PM
-Discussion of Lang and Ommer, Impett and Offert, Fuchsgruber
-Exploring pre-assembled datasets with CLIP
-DV Explorer 2.1-2.7 and 5.1-5.2

-Discussion of How to Build an Image Corpus
-Journal of Open Humanities Data
-Zenodo

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ASSIGNMENT 3: Constructing an Image Dataset and using Orange Data Mining, 2DCLIP and the DV Explorer to analyze it. Instructions Due 8 May, 20% final grade.

Week 12 Computer Vision and Historical Images

Time/Date Preparation Activity
Tues, 21 Apr 3:20PM-6:00PM
-Browse the book: Distant Viewing: Computational Exploration of Digital Images
Lab: R Markdown Notebooks for Color, Object Detection and Face Detection
Thurs, 23 April 3:20PM-4:35PM Continuing CV
-Discussion
-Questions about Assignment 3

Digital Literacy Narrative Revision #2 : instructions here, Due Date 8 May 2024, 5% final grade.

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UNIT 5: WRAP UP

Week 13 Lab Work

Time/Date Reading Activity
Tues, 28 April lab  
Thurs, 30 April lab  

Week 14 Presentations

Time/Date Reading Activity
Tues, 5 May none in-class individual presentations reflecting on what we learned
Thurs, 7 May none wrap up

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