Overview
Overview & course components
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–from the easy to the less easy–to explore textual data, how we might create and analyze it. 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 with digital text. There are assignments where you will be using corpora which have already been built and are available to you. There are also assignments where we will look at the advantages and complexities of remediating digitized handwriting, pdfs and sound files into text.
Doing data storytelling about the corpus of your choice. There is a final project focused on analyzing a variety of corpora: scifi novels, NYUAD Art Center poetry performances, historical materials about the historical Gulf. The class will use common datasets and will use it for the purpose of storytelling. You will not only analyze the contents of corpora from using the methods of your choice, while critically examining how tech allows us to form new insights.