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) |
-Visit to Special Collections and Lab -Hands on with the UFO dataset 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 from a corpus -presentation of Assignment 2 |
Digital Literacy Narrative Revision #1 : instructions here, Due Date 6 March, total 10% of final grade, this part being 5%.
ASSIGNMENT 2: “Wrangle” data from a historical source, the Gazette of Zanzibar to build and visualize a spatial dataset. Instructions Due 22 March, 20% final grade.
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: GPT, Information Extraction and Digitized Historical Documents |
| Thurs, 6 March 3:35PM-4:50PM | Choosing pages from the Zanzibar Gazette | -Hands on -An R Markdown Notebook for visualizing spatial data |
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 TBA
| Time/Date | Reading/Material | Activity |
|---|---|---|
| Tues, 18 March 3:35PM-6:15PM | Instructor at a conference – Activities TBA | Google Space contributions |
| Thurs, 20 March 3:35PM-4:50PM | Instructor at a conference – Activities TBA | Google Space contributions |
Week 9 AI and Maps
| Time/Date | Reading/Material | Activity |
|---|---|---|
| Tues, 25 March 3:35PM-6:15PM | -Classifying Soviet Map Features -“The Soviet Military Program that Secretly Mapped the Entire World -Soviet Mapping of the World, 2017 |
Working with MapReader and Soviet Maps of the UAE from 1978 |
| Thurs, 27 March 3:35PM-4:50PM | -general discussion |
-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 | -Drimmer, “How AI is Hijacking Art History” -Impett and Offert, “[There is a Digital Art History”(https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01973762.2024.2362466#d1e113) |
In class exploration: -WCMA digital project -Selfie City -Photogrammar -MoMA photography -Exploring our own dataset with CLIP |
| Thurs, 10 April 3:35PM-4:50PM | -Fuchsgruber, “Dead End or Way Out?: Generating Critical Information about Painting Collections Using AI” |
Discussion of “Distant Viewing” |
ASSIGNMENT 3: Constructing an Image Dataset and using Orange Data Mining and/or 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 | Download Orange Data Mining -Looking for Patterns in Image Collections with IMJ |
Lab: -“How We Teach Computers to Understand Pictures” (Li) -Learning about Orange Data Mining -Clustering Monet and Manet (Orange) -Clustering of Image Datasets with Orange using different datasets (William Wegman portraits, Arabic magazine covers, manga photos, Ramadan images) -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 |