Instructor: Prof. Seth Fogarty
Email: sfogarty@trinity.edu
Office: CSI 270M
Meets: TuTh 3:35-4:50, CSI 356
This course will explore the use of computational tools to solve problems and analyze questions in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. We will examine fields like history, anthropology, library science, and literature. The course will be taught as a seminar, devoting class time to reading humanities papers whose results were obtained with computational tools or techniques from computer science.
- Gain an understanding of existing digital humanities research, in terms of computation, practice, and disciplinary results.
- Gain an understanding of computational techniques appropriate to problems that arise in the humanities and social sciences.
- Be able to determine what parts of a workflow can benefit from computation, and design a tool to complement that workflow.
- Be able to collaborate with non-technical experts in the humanities on computational problem solving.
- Produce, as a group, a digital humanities resource: we will transform this site into both a summary of our work and a resource for other scholars.
- Methodology: What is the process by which humanities research is conducted, and how can computation benefit that workflow?
- Categorization: Digital humanities covers an vast range of activity. As a premise, we differentiate the use of digital media to disseminate knowledge from the use computation to help produce knowledge. What are other useful ways to categorize or cluster these activities?
- Impact: What makes a tool useful to non-technical users? What are the consequences of computational power on a discipline? What are the repercussions when certain approaches are amenable to computation, while others are not? When computation is accessible to certain groups, but not others?
For the three-hour version of the course, there will be additional artifacts, including short responses, reports on existing tools, a larger paper (<15 pages), and a final project.