The class will require you to be hands on about your learning. There will be lectures, recorded and online tutorials as well as guided exercises. There will also be discussion of short readings and some written responses to them. In discussion and writing you will have the opportunity to share critical ideas and opinions about the material.
Over the semester we will try out different digital environments and experiment with common practices in digital culture–from the easy to the less easy–to explore spatial data and its relationship to the humanities. We will not be building everything from scratch--that would not give us time to do everything that we do in a Core course--but rather experimenting with different forms of data creation, manipulation, visualization and storytelling.
Creating a site. Work in this course is paperless and will be done in an individual course site created in Google Sites which you will design and maintain. If you have another preferred mode of web publishing, please consult the instructor.
Responding in writing. There will be regular written responses, engaging with the subject material. They will be spaced across the semester. These will be done in your site and are expected to contain visual content.
Engaging with technology and writing about it. There are two assignments in the course which require you to engage with specific technologies, to produce some results and to evaluate both the process and the results critically in writing.
Engaging in a citizen science project. We will work on a existing project which brings together urban studies, linguistics and geolocating smartphones. We will read about citizen science and evaluate its promises as well as its shortcomings.
Building a spatial narrative about a historical place. There is a project focused around our modeling data from historical newspapers from Zanzibar. The class will build a common dataset and will use it for the purpose of storytelling. The final project will take the form of a storymap in which you bring together elements of interest to you in the history of the city.