Schedule F26
Introduction to Digital Humanities
This Fall 2026 schedule is organized by week. Reading and assignment details may continue to be posted on the course site as we progress through the semester. All material is subject to change at the instructor’s discretion based on our progress in the course. If there are changes which impact due dates or the timeline of work, they will be clearly stated here and in class.
Important Dates for Fall 2026 from NYUAD Registrar
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| Monday, 31 August | First Day of Classes |
| Friday, 11 September | Add/Drop Deadline (14-week courses) |
| Saturday, 17 October; 18-22 October | Reading Day & Finals for 7 week courses (no classes) |
| Friday-Sunday 23-25 October | Fall Break (no classes) |
| Monday, 26 October | Classes Resume (14-week courses) |
| Friday, 20 November | Withdrawal Deadline (14-week courses) |
| Wednesday-Friday, 2-3 December | National Day Holiday (no classes) |
| Monday, 14 December | Legislative Day - Thursday classes |
| Monday, 14 December | Last Day of Classes |
| Wednesday, 16 December | All work due |
UNIT 1: DATA IN THE ARTS AND HUMANITIES
Week 1
Topic: This week will be an introduction to the field of Digital Arts and Humanities, a minor that is offered at NYUAD that brings together digital and computational thinking with the subjects and thinking characteristic of the arts and humanities. We will discuss some of the core values and skills important for success in it.
| Time/Date | Preparation | Activity |
|---|---|---|
| Tues, 1 Sept (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 -Introducting ourselves -Github Education |
| Thurs, 3 Sept (3:20PM-4:35PM) | -Sign up for Github and Github Education -Share your Github username here -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] |
Week 2
Topic: It has been argued that being “On the Way to Computational Thinking,” is not such much acquiring a specific set of technical skills useful for critical analysis in the arts and humanities, as it is about critical postures we adopt with respect to information and the technical landscape that surrounds us today. Our awareness of this landscape helps us look at the arts and humanities through different lenses, but also to bring critique to the world of technology. The rise of generative AI merits special attention since it offers both new opportunities and challenges for working with technology.
| Time/Date | Preparation | Activity |
|---|---|---|
| Tues, 8 Sept 3:20PM-6:00PM | -Berry/Fagerjord, “On the Way to Computational Thinking,” [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: -Slides: A few global examples of global communities doing digital arts and humanities [in Drive] -Working on building our course sites -pushing material to them using Github Desktop -discussion and practice with Markdown -Markdown Preview OR Markdown Preview in VSC -a Markdown cheatsheet -Trying out gentle agentic coding -Slides “Distant Coding” in Drive |
| Thursday, 10 Sept 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 -Connecting VSCode and Copilot -set up and prompting a digital literacy narrative in VSCode |
Extra Credit: 25 September NYU New York Data Services classes “Introduction to R”. Up to 2 points on one assignment. Register here. Guidelines here.
Digital Literacy Narrative Instructions here Due Date 18 Sept, total of the assignment 10% final grade (in phases over the semester). This portion is ungraded.
UNIT 2: TEXTUAL DATA
Week 3
Topic: In this week, we will contrast close and “distant” reading, that is, moving between detailed interpretation of individual texts and a “birds’ eye” analysis of patterns across larger textual collections. Students will use a web based corpus analysis tools “Voyant” and scripts in R to explore features such as word frequency, collocation, similarity. We will see that computational methods complement, rather than replace, interpretive reading.
| Time/Date | Preparation | Activity |
|---|---|---|
| Tues, 15 Sept 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 - discontinued -Voyant -Using VSCode with agentic coding to extend basic text mining and visualization |
| Thurs, 17 Sept 3:20PM-4:35PM | -What is a Corpus? -Rockwell and Sinclair, “The Measured Words: How Computers Analyze Text”, 25-43 |
-Discussion of Unstructured textual data -More hands on with different corpora |
ASSIGNMENT 1: Exploring Textual Data from a Custom Corpus. Instructions Due 5 Oct, 20% final grade.
Extra Credit: 7 October NYU New York Data Services classes “Breaking Up with Google Docs,” an introduction to privacy-centered Joplin and Obsidian. Register here. Guidelines here.
Week 4
Topic: This week we go fully hands on, experimenting with a computational notebook to analyze a corpus of South Asian texts.
| Time/Date | Preparation | Activity |
|---|---|---|
| Tues, 22 Sept 3:20PM-6:00PM | Instructor at a conference | no class |
| Thurs, 24 Sept 3:20PM-4:35PM | -RMarkdown notebook “The Grammar of Graphics, ch 2” of Humanities Data in R 2nd ed. -experiment with notebook -go over Assignment 1 |
-continuing with Rmd Notebooks (Project Gutenberg Explorer and Colonial South Asian Fiction Explorer) |
Week 5
Topic: We look this week, at a much more distant form of Textual Analysis, that is most distinctive word analysis and also TF-IDF Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency using prepared corpora. We also investigate how you might build a custom corpus from a historical handwritten archive.
| Time/Date | Preparation | Activity |
|---|---|---|
| Tues, 29 Sept 3:20PM-6:00PM | -Most Distinctive Word Analysis of 3 Texts -TF-IDF Analysis of Science Fiction Texts |
-Lab with Most Distinctive Analysis and TF IDF |
| Thurs, 1 Oct 3:20PM-4:35PM | -Handwritten Text Recognition Transkribus Webinar for Beginners -What is humanities ground truth? -“Gemini 3 Solves Handwriting Recognition and it’s a Bitter Lesson” (Humphries) |
- Mini lecture: “Digitization and Creating Our Own Textual Data” [slides in drive] -Hands on intro to Transkribus -Trying other platforms for transcription: OLM or the LLM of your choice. |
UNIT 3: SPATIAL DATA
Week 6
Topic: In this section we begin an introduction to geospatial thinking in the arts and humanities. We will experiment with the visualization with spatial data on map interfaces and what kinds of symbology allow those visualizations to reflect the desired aspect of the data.
| Time/Date | Preparation | Activity |
|---|---|---|
| Tues, 6 Oct 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, 8 Oct 3:20PM-4:35PM | -Exploring Spatial Projects -“A Place for Plant Data” (Loukissas) -“Mapping” (Wilson, in drive) |
-discussion of structured data in a geospatial context |
Digital Literacy Narrative Revision #1 : instructions here, Due Date 30 October, total 10% of final grade, this part being 5%.
Oral Exam week of XXX. Sign ups available here.
Week 7
Topic: This week we explore how spatial data is structured, and can be modeled using historical artefacts. We will experiment with both manual and automated creation of data, as well as using an LLM to help us with complex historical sources.
| Time/Date | Preparation | Activity |
|---|---|---|
| Tues, 13 Oct 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, 15 Oct 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 30 October, 20% final grade.
FALL BREAK – keep calm and have a break!
If you can find it, watch the German Netflix mini series, The Billion Dollar Code over the break. It’s all about spatial data! Trailer here
Week 8
Topic: Humanitarian Mapping
| Time/Date | Preparation | Activity |
|---|---|---|
| Tues, 27 Oct 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, 29 Oct 3:20PM-4:35PM | -Explore some HotOSM projects | -Discussion and continuation of geospatial coding in VSCode |
Week 9
Topic: More Maps
| Time/Date | Preparation | Activity |
|---|---|---|
| Tues, 3 Nov 3:20PM-6:00PM | - make an account at Recogito and share your username -About Socotra -What is a Gazetteer? (slides) |
-spatial close reading of the section on Socotra in “Southern Arabia” by J. Theodore Bent and Mrs. Bent |
| Thurs, 5 Nov 3:20PM-4:35PM | -What is OSM? -What is the Overpass API? |
-editing, querying & visualizing Overpass Turbo with the help of Gemini -Notebook: “Querying and Visualizing OSM data with R” (posit.cloud) -Distant coding with UAE data (geonames) and leaflet in R |
UNIT 4: IMAGE DATA
Week 10
Topic: Images as Data
| Time/Date | Preparation | Activity |
|---|---|---|
| Tues, 10 Nov 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, 12 Nov 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
Instructor away at a conference. Independent work.
Week 12
Topic: “Looking at and through the algorithm”
| Time/Date | Preparation | Activity |
|---|---|---|
| Tues, 24 Nov 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, 26 Nov |
-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 |
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 13
Topic: Computer Vision and Historical Images
| Time/Date | Preparation | Activity |
|---|---|---|
| Tues, 1 Dec 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, 3 Dec 3:20PM-4:35PM | no class |
Digital Literacy Narrative Revision #2 : instructions here, Due Date 8 May 2024, 5% final grade.
Week 14
Topic: CV
| Time/Date | Reading | Activity |
|---|---|---|
| Mon, 8 Dec | CV | |
| Mon, 10 Dec | CV |
UNIT 5: WRAP UP
Week 15
| Time/Date | Reading | Activity |
|---|---|---|
| Mon, 14 Dec | wrap up |