ENGLISH 153H: Digital Humanities: Beyond the Book (seminar) Taught by: Matthew Jockers Fall Quarter, 2008-2009 TTh 1:15-3:05, Room: 240-110 | Digital texts and digital libraries offer us new opportunities for searching and accessing literary material. But more interesting and exciting than the mere searching of digital texts is the ability to leverage computation in order to process and analyze textual data, to provide new methods for reading, analyzing, and understanding literature. "Digital Humanites: Beyond the Book" provides an introduction to the field of humanities computing with a special emphasis on literary text-analysis. Students learn about the preparation and processing of digital texts while exploring literary questions. The course includes units dealing with "stylometry" (computer based stylistic analysis), authorship attribution, gender detection, text encoding, and the visualization of literary information using such tools as Many Eyes, Google Earth, Excel, and custom tools we develop in the class. Throughout the course we consider the theoretical issues associated with employing quantitative methodologies in a traditionally qualitative discipline; we read and discuss landmark essays in the field; and we end with an informed discussion of how digital libraries and computation are taking literary scholarship "beyond the book." Students will develop basic coding skills in an environment in which understanding literature is the only prerequisite. No programming experience is required; students will develop fluency in XML and PHP through exercises and work on a collaborative text-analysis project. This course fulfills the following Major Requirements:
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