Course Description
Design and creation of data structures for computer-based scholarship in literary and linguistic study. Students will be exposed to the relevant theoretical literature in humanities computing and will study several technologies in detail. Students will be expected to generate critical work and to complete a computer-based project.
Athena Title
HUM COMP I
Prerequisite
Permission of department
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Course Objectives
The student should become conversant with and demonstrate competence in the topics below. In particular, students should be able to understand the principles of mark-up, its differences from conventional editing and its application to literary texts; to write programs using regular expressions to analyze and manipulate text; to author simple conversational "'bots"; to appreciate the impact computer- mediated communication is exerting on print-based conceptions of "literature" and "writing"; and to compose sophisticated unix-based web-sites employing XML-mark-up, cascading style-sheets, and multimedia.
Topical Outline
Possible topics include the following: 1.Unix. an introduction to the operating environment for servers; its history and evolution over three decades; its "philosophy"; utilities; account management; Linux: unix for the desktop. 2. Emacs. the versatile, multi-featured text editor for Unix. 3. Perl. the powerful yet accessible language of choice for text manipulation in Unix; a brief review of programming fundamentals (arrays, conditional statements, loops) and, the reason for preferring Perl: 4. Regular expressions. the art and science of formulating algorithms to search and query strings of characters in ways adequate to the variation and complexity of literary text. 5. Optical character recognition. capturing text with a scanner and OCR software. 6. Mark-up. the art and science of making texts useful for computer manipulation by indicating or "tagging"--marking up-- aspects to be studied (an endeavor which connects directly with the rich history of editorial theory). The principles of eXtensible Mark-up Language (XML) and the Text-Encoding Initiative (TEI) are the principal concerns here, including their application in: 7. Large-text databases. a consideration of the Chadwyck-Healey and other literary databases; the linguistic atlas (UGA); other concordancing programs (Monoconc, WordSmith Tools) 8. MOOs. the composition of interactive, text-based environments; especially "'bots"--primitive programs which inter-act on the basis of text expressions and introduce elementary considerations of natural-language processing 9. Hypertext. an historical and theoretical consideration of the concept which embodies the new literary experience wrought by computer-enabled communication. 10. Image editing. basic techniques in "Photoshop," with particular attention to the optimization of images for use over the web. 11. PowerPoint. the widely-used electronic "slide-show" presentation device. 12. Web design. the authoring of web pages using XML, "style- sheets" and web scripting such as Perl-CGI and JavaScript; web site editing programs; an overview of the university-supported web-environment, WebCT. 13. Multimedia. basic audio and video capture, editing, and file management. Specific topics vary by instructor and at different times. Periodically during the semester, students will perform a number of graded tasks, including some combination of tests, computer work, and out-of-class papers. In-class exams and the final exam will require essays as well as objective questions and problems. Substantial out-of-class writing will be required, whether in essay form or computer tasks, amounting to c. 20 pages by the end of the term.