Digital Studies

Catalog description

This course will introduce students to concepts, methods, and resources for digital studies, meaning both the study of culture using digital means and the study of digital culture and digital cultural objects in themselves. In some cases, digitization and digital production enrich existing approaches to English studies; in other cases, they present new paradigms and practices, requiring the cultivation of new analytic and theoretical approaches along with new technical skills. Accordingly, the course will emphasize both that enrichment of existing approaches to English studies, in the use of computers to present and analyze English-language materials preserved in the past, and the application of computing to the creation of expressive cultural artifacts unique to networked and programmable media (at the instructor's discretion, the creation of such artifacts may be incorporated into the course). Working in this balance of modes, students will also acquire familiarity with the intellectual history of digital studies and its key debates. Topics to be covered may include the fundamentals of the digital representation of linguistic, visual, and other cultural data; differences between language and code, including the difference between human languages and artificial languages, including computer programming languages; data storage methods and media; electronic archiving and digital preservation, both personal and institutional; issues and debates in electronic publishing, including intellectual property and open access; computer-assisted methods of cultural analysis; the history of creative and expressive computing, from video games to electronic literature, code poetry, glitch culture, esoteric programming languages, etc.; data privacy and security issues; differences between the traditional qualitative approaches of humanities research and the quantitative approaches to the study of writing and language preferred by some social sciences, and what is at stake in blending these approaches.