Digital Humanities: Collections and Connections

Catalog description

Two of the most important aspects of digital media are their capacity to allow for the organization of and creation of connections between data. Collecting and connecting technologies have enabled the development of complex information management and network creation systems, which are the foundations of everyday experience in the digital age. Because these systems play such a significant role in how we communicate with one another they are critical to understanding how new media can play a role in public discourse and scholarly conversations. This course will consider how different tools and platforms, such as WordPress, Omeka, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest, allow us to curate the things in our world and build networks within which to share our experiences. It will also consider how we can analyze these networks and collections to present intellectual arguments in new ways and tell more compelling stories. Along with practical work with digital tools, this course will include readings on network culture and digital curation by authors such as McLuhan, Gitelman, Castells, Shirky, Manovich, Cohen, Ramsay, and Galloway. This is one of two topics courses in the Digital Humanities (the other DH: Analysis and Visualization will be offered in the spring). These non-sequential courses provide a survey of questions and technologies fundamental to modes of academic inquiry made possible by new media and computational methods. While the two courses will cover different sets of technologies and digital practices, both will consider how we make our work public via digital platforms that provide rhetorical and design flexibility in making intellectual arguments.