Debates in Digital Studies

4.0 credits

This course is an introduction to theories, methods, and debates related to digital studies in literature, media, and culture. Designed with students from multiple disciplines in mind, the course will explore how the kinds of knowledge production enabled by digital media and technologies to think through the relationship between computational methods and more traditional modes of humanistic analysis. Topics to be surveyed may include, among others, what data is and how to work with it in the humanities; the role of coding and programming in humanistic thought; the tendency toward collaboration in digital studies; textual editing and time-based annotation in digital formats; where artificial fits into digital studies in literature, media, and culture; digital modalities such as visualization, network analysis, text analysis and topic modeling, gaming, mapping over time and space, spectral imaging, and videographic criticism. Students should exit the course with a cross-disciplinary understanding of the intellectual framework—from textual science and media theory to bibliographic and archival science—animating digital studies in both the past and present.