This 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.
| 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 |
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 environments with the critical and creative thinking characteristic of the arts and humanities. We will underscore 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 -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] |
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 | -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 |
| 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 |
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.
Topic: Distant 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 -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 |
More hands on with different corpora |
ASSIGNMENT 1: Exploring Textual Data from a Custom Corpus. Instructions Due 28 Feb, 20% final grade.
Topic: Computational Analysis of (Historical) Text
| Time/Date | Preparation | Activity |
|---|---|---|
| Tues, 22 Sept 3:20PM-6:00PM | -Drucker, ch 3, 34-51. |
-RMarkdown notebook “The Grammar of Graphics, ch 2” of Humanities Data in R 2nd ed. |
| Thurs, 24 Sept 3:20PM-4:35PM | -experiment with notebook -go over Assignment 1 |
-continuing with Rmd Notebooks (Project Gutenberg Explorer and Colonial South Asian Fiction Explorer) |
Topic:
| Time/Date | Preparation | Activity |
|---|---|---|
| Tues, 29 Sept 3:20PM-6:00PM | -Drucker, ch 3, 34-51. |
-RMarkdown notebook “The Grammar of Graphics, ch 2” of Humanities Data in R 2nd ed. |
| Thurs, 1 Oct 3:20PM-4:35PM | -experiment with notebook -go over Assignment 1 |
-continuing with Rmd Notebooks (Project Gutenberg Explorer and Colonial South Asian Fiction Explorer) |
Topic: Much Larger Textual Analysis - Historical Corpora and Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency
| Time/Date | Preparation | Activity |
|---|---|---|
| Tues, 6 Oct 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, 8 Oct 3:20PM-4:35PM | -Handwritten Text Recognition Transkribus Webinar for Beginners -Create a free Transkribus account -What is humanities ground truth? |
- Mini lecture: “Digitization and Creating Our Own Textual Data” [slides in drive] -Hands on intro to Transkribus -Correcting and Retraining the Machine |
Topic: The (Geo)spatial in the arts and humanities
| Time/Date | Preparation | Activity |
|---|---|---|
| Tues, 13 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, 15 Oct 3:20PM-4:35PM | -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 31 March, total 10% of final grade, this part being 5%.
Oral Exam week of XXX. Sign ups available here.
Topic: Extracting and Visualizing Spatial Information from Sources
| Time/Date | Preparation | Activity |
|---|---|---|
| Tues, 27 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, 29 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 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!
Topic: Humanitarian Mapping
| Time/Date | Preparation | Activity |
|---|---|---|
| Tues, 3 Nov 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, 5 Nov 3:20PM-4:35PM | -Explore some HotOSM projects | -Discussion and continuation of geospatial coding in VSCode |
Topic: More Maps
| Time/Date | Preparation | Activity |
|---|---|---|
| Tues, 10 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, 12 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 |
Topic: Images as Data
| Time/Date | Preparation | Activity |
|---|---|---|
| Tues, 17 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, 19 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” |
Topic: “Looking at and through the algorithm”
| Time/Date | Preparation | Activity |
|---|---|---|
| Tues, 1 Dec 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, 3 Dec | no class |
-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.
Topic: Computer Vision and Historical Images
| Time/Date | Preparation | Activity |
|---|---|---|
| Tues, 8 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, 10 Dec 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.
Topic: Wrap up
| Time/Date | Reading | Activity |
|---|---|---|
| Mon, 14 Dec | wrap up |