Course Description
A general introduction to the use of computers in humanistic study. Students will be exposed to the theoretical literature of humanistic computing and to several specific techniques popular among computing humanists. Students will also be expected to generate critical work and to complete a web-based project.
Athena Title
INTRO TO HUM COMP
Semester Course Offered
Offered fall
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Course Objectives
This course is a broad introduction to the use of computers in humanistic study. Students will survey the field of humanities computing from computational analysis of style to meditations on the cultural impact of computing in scholarly research and publishing. Students will also study several specific technologies in detail (which may include web design, the UNIX operating system, image processing, and other related technologies) with an eye toward becoming proficient creators of web-based scholarship. Students will be expected to generate critical work on subjects related to humanities computing and to complete a web-based project.
Topical Outline
This course will consist of seminar-style discussions of important critical work in humanities computing and formal instruction technologies relevant to computing in the humanities. Critical discussions may include several of the following topics: A. Important early work in humanities computing. B. Stylometrics and authorship attribution studies. C. Computational linguistics. D. Cultural impact of computing on research and publishing. E. History of computers and information technology. F. Design theory (particularly as it relates to the World Wide Web). G. Digital libraries and archives. H. Literary and artistic representations of computers and information technology. Formal technological instruction may include the following topics: A. UNIX. Fundamental concepts of the UNIX operating system with an introduction to the user command set. B. Text editing. Text editing in UNIX using Emacs and/or Vi. C. Text processing. Basic text analysis techniques using standard UNIX tools. D. Web design. Hypertext Markup Language (without the use of RAD tools) and Cascading Style Sheets. E. Image and data acquisition. The use of scanning, image manipulation, and optical character recognition software.