Spring 2023 | Yale University
In Part I: Architectures of Knowledge (Fall 2022) we studied the shape and construction of our new hybrid historical and cultural record—the analog and digital architectures of historical and cultural collections and data. Once those architectures are in place, new challenges and affordances open up. We can now manipulate historical and cultural data using various forms of computation at different scales, and for different purposes. In this course, we will study these practices as they take place in the Humanities by exploring the tension between two broad but linked concepts in practice and theory: analysis and poesis.
The course combines a seminar preceded by a brief lecture and a digital studio. Every week we will move through our discussions in tandem with hands-on exercises that will serve to illuminate our readings. You will also gain a measure of computational proficiency useful for humanities scholarship. Our approach will be markedly historical, connecting our evolving present to scholarly traditions and ideas spanning continents and centuries. You will also learn to understand and evaluate a few popular and emerging methods and genres of Digital Humanities connected to cultural analytics. We will also dedicate time towards the end of the semester to study the rise of machine learning, and what it may mean for the humanities. Though learning how to master advanced forms of computation in use today is well beyond the scope of this course, I will teach you instead the art of teaching yourselves computation.
General
Readings
Week 1: The Short Arc of Computing Words (Jan 24–26)
To Read:
[\o] Heffernan, Laura and Rachel Sagner Buurma. “Search and Replace: Josephine Miles and the Origins of Distant Reading.” Modernism/Modernity, Apr. 2018. modernismmodernity.org.
[\o] Hockey, Susan. “The History of Humanities Computing.” A Companion to Digital Humanities. Susan Schreibman, et al., eds. Wiley, 2004.
[\c] Crimble, Adam. “The Origin Myths of Computing in Historical Research.” Technology and the Historian: Transformations in the Digital Age. University of Illinois Press, 2021.
[\o] Terras, Melissa, and Julianne Nyhan. “Father Busa’s Female Punch Card Operatives.” Debates in the Digital Humanities, 2016.
[Optional] Kizhner, Inna, et al. Global Debates in the Digital Humanities. Domenico Fiormonte, et al., eds., 2023.
Tutorial: Let’s count words!
Week 2: The Electric Loom (Jan 31–Feb 2)
To Read:
[\a] Turing, Alan M. “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Mind, no. 59, 1950, pp. 433–60.
[\a] Tenen, Dennis. “The Emergence of American Formalism.” Modern Philology 117, no. 2 (Nov. 2019): 257–283.
[\c] Hayles, N. Katherine. Writing Machines. MIT Press, 2002. (Chapters 1–4)
[\o] To Skim: Getty Museum. “Decoding the Medieval Volvelle.”
To Watch:
[\o] IET. “The Story of Ada Lovelace: The World’s First Computer Programmer.” YouTube.
[\o] Computer History Museum. “False Dawn: The Babbage Engine.” YouTube.
[\o] To Play: AI Dungeon
Tutorial: Let’s build a simple word machine
Week 3: The Sense and Nonsense of Text (Feb 7–9)
[\o] To Do: Working in pairs, pick a contemporary article of thematic interest to both of you engaging with text or corpus analysis from Digital Humanities Quarterly or the Journal of Cultural Analytics. Read it online. Highlight the concepts you don’t understand using hypothes.is. If you see a concept you can explain, write a comment to start a dialogue.
[\o] To Read: Ramsay, Stephen. “Algorithmic Criticism.” Reading Machines: Toward an Algorithmic Criticism. University of Illinois Press, 2011.
[\o] To Watch: Muralidharan, Aditi. WordSeer Features. YouTube.
Tutorial: How to read text analysis blogs and articles
[\o] In-class Case Study: McClure, David. “The (Weird) Distributions of Function Words across Novels.” Stanford Literary Lab. Accessed 16 Jan. 2023.
Week 4: The Agon of Cultural Analytics (Feb 14–16)
To Read:
Computers for the Humanities? A Record of the Conference Sponsored by Yale University on a Grant from IBM, January 22–23, 1965. [Selections of interest and the Jacques Barzun entry]. Yale Libraries, call no. QA76 C644 1965. (Available as Non-Circ at the Franke Family Digital Humanities Lab).
[\a] Da, Nan Z. “The Computational Case against Computational Literary Studies.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 45, no. 3, Mar. 2019, pp. 601–39.
[\a] Underwood, Ted. “Introduction.” Distant Horizons: Digital Evidence and Literary Change. University of Chicago Press, 2019.
[\o] [Optional] “Computational Literary Studies: A Critical Inquiry Online Forum.” Critical Inquiry: In The Moment (2019).
Tutorial: How to read tutorials
Week 5: The Back and Forth Between Pictura and Poesis, Oh, and Sound (Feb 21–23)
To Read:
[\a] Arnold, Taylor, and Lauren Tilton. “Distant Viewing: Analyzing Large Visual Corpora.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, vol. 34, no. Supplement_1, Dec. 2019, pp. i3–16.
[\o] Kaufman, Micki. Selections from Quantifying Kissinger.
[\a] Xu, Weijia, et al. “A Study of Spoken Audio Processing Using Machine Learning for Libraries, Archives and Museums (LAM).” 2020 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data), 2020, pp. 1939–48.
To Explore:
[\o] Arnold, Taylor, N. Ayers, J. Madron, R. Nelson, Lauren Tilton, Laura Wexler, et al. Photogrammar.
[\o] Sá Pereira, Moacir P. de. “Mapping Fabula and Sjužet in ‘Wandering Rocks’.”
Tutorial: Re-introducing colored pencils
Week 6: The Social Life of Everything, Everyone, and Everywhen (Feb 28–Mar 2)
To Read:
Porter, J.D. “Pamphlet 17: Popularity/Prestige.” Stanford Literary Lab, Sept. 2018.
[\o] Ahnert, Ruth, et al. “The Network Turn: Changing Perspectives in the Humanities.” Elements in Publishing and Book Culture, Dec. 2020.
To Explore:
[\o] Gil, Alex and Kaiama Glover, eds. In The Same Boats.
[\o] Schmidt, Ben. “A Guided Tour of the Digital Library.”
To Study:
[\o] Froehlich, Heather. “Corpus Analysis with Antconc.”
[\o] Algee-Hewitt, Mark, Katherine Bowers, Quinn Dombrowski, and Heather Froehlich. “Data Sitters Club #10: Heather Likes Principal Component Analysis.” July 20, 2021.
Week 7: The Image of Absence (Mar 7–9)
[\a] Klein, Lauren F. “The Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemings.” American Literature, vol. 85, no. 4, Dec. 2013, pp. 661–88.
[\a] Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe, no. 26 (June 2008).
[\o] Johnson, Jessica Marie. “Xroads Praxis: Black Diasporic Technologies for Remaking the New World.” archipelagos journal, no. 3 (July 2019).
[\o] To Explore: Naylor, Celia E., Alex Gil, Moacir P. de Sá Pereira, et al. “(Un)Silencing Slavery.”
[\o] To Do: Midterm Exercise
Week 9: The Signatures of Writing (Apr 4–6)
Guest Lecture: Michał Choiński and Maciej Eder
To accommodate our guests, this class will meet on Zoom.
[\o] Tutorial: Introduction to Stylo
Week 10: Stochastic Parrots (Apr 11–13)
[\o] Bender, Emily M., et al. “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? ” Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. ACM, 2021, pp. 610–23.
[\o] Tasovac, and Natalia Ermolaev, eds. “Parrots.” Startwords 3 (2022). (Read the essays by del Rio Riande, Klein, and Underwood).
Tutorial: Text generation exercise using GPT-4 (if not out yet, we’ll use GPT-3).
Week 11: Reconstitute the World (Apr 18–20)
To Read:
[\o] Josephs, Kelly. “Versions of X/Self: Kamau Brathwaite’s Caribbean Discourse.” Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal 1:1 (Dec. 2003).
[\o] Parham, Marisa. “.break .dance.” archipelagos journal, no. 3 (July 2019).
[\o] Nowviskie, Bethany. “Reconstitute the World.” Bethany Nowviskie, 12 June 2018.
To Listen:
Sun Ra [Selections]
Puerto Rican Bomba [Selections]
Tutorial: Image generation exercise using whatever AI consumer-grade tool is available in April.