Humanities 290-01 (1169) Digital Humanities, Spring 2017
#digitalmediasua
DIGITAL HUMANITIES
When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered
Martin Luther King, The Riverside Church in New York, 1967
…nothing is so frightening as a labyrinth with no center.
Borges, citing G.K. Chesterton
INTRODUCTION
This course explores the intersection between digital technology and media with academic research in the Humanities. In recent years, this area of studies has flourished into one of the most popular and well-funded fields of inquiry. The corporate takeover of the Internet has prompted researchers to reflect on the impact that social networks, digital archiving, computer interfaces, and online communication, has had and will have on academic research, publishing, and social relations in general. Most authors we will be reading and discussing this semester seem to agree that the each year the arrival of new technologies in the consumer market appears to be intensifying. These new technologies both threaten and enhance our understanding of the capacities of human beings to remember, preserve, reproduce and represent reality. I hope that this course will grant us the opportunity to better understand the challenges and high hopes that digital technologies bring to the global community.
ASSIGNMENTS:
●All assignments for this course must be uploaded to a blog. Your blog should be dedicated only to this course. You can upload images, videos, links, and files to your blog. Please keep in mind that all your assignments need to be uploaded by the deadline(10%)
●Complete common readings and any additional readings assigned specifically to you(20%)
●Attendance and participation at film screenings (20%)
●8 writing assignments (15% each)
●Abstract and outline of your final presentation (10%)
●Final presentation (10%)
●Final Paper (15%)
ABBREVIATIONS
CRCommon Readings- Every student needs to do the reading and prepare for
class discussion
ARSAssigned Reading to 1 student: The student who is assigned the reading
must prepare a 5-10 minutes presentation on the reading and prepare to
engage with other readings or films scheduled for that day.
COURSE SCHEDULE
Tuesday, February 7th
Digital Humanities, why should we care?
Liu, Alan. The Meaning of Digital Humanities: What is the meaning of the
digital humanities to the humanities? (CR)11 pages
Mande, Joe. How I Learned To Game Twitter. The New Yorker (CR)
Thomas, Douglas. “(Not) Hackers: Subculture, Style, and Media Incorporation.”
Hacker Culture. (CR) 31 pages
Tuesday March 28th
Can machines think? AI
Kaplan, Jerry. “Introduction: Welcome to the Future,” “America, Land of the
Free Shipping.” Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.(CR) 14 pages
Kaplan, Jerry. “America, Land of the Free Shipping.” Humans Need Not Apply: A
Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.(ARS) 11 pages
Thursday March 30th
Herrera, Linda. “Wired Youth Rise,” Revolution in the Age of Social Media:
The Egyptian Popular Insurrection and the Internet. (1-24) (CR) 24 pages
Herrera, Linda. “Cyberdissident Diplomacy,” Revolution in the Age of Social
Media: The Egyptian Popular Insurrection and the Internet. (1-24) (ARS)
22 pages
Gerbaudo, Paolo. “Friendly Reunions: Social Media and The choreography Assembly.” Tweets and the Streets. Social Media and Contemporary Activism. (CR) 30 pages.
Gerbaudo, Paolo. “Introduction.” Tweets and the Streets. Social Media and Contemporary Activism.(ARS) 17 pages.
Heller, Nathan. “The Failure of Facebook Democracy.” The New Yorker, 2016. (ARS) 4 pages
Tuesday April 4th
Baym, Nancy K. “Communities and Networks,” “New Relationships, new Selves.”
Personal Connections in the Digital Age. (CR) 31 pages
In Real Life, dir. Beeban Kidron, 2014 (sequence screened in class). 0.:50.
Final essay due by midnight (Date to be announced)
Digital Humanities Bibliography
Aiden, E., & Michel, J. (2013). Uncharted: big data as lens on human culture. New York: Riverhead Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA).
Amichai-Hanburger, Y. (2005). The Social net: understanding human behavior in cyberspace. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Baudrillard, J. (1994). The illusion of the end. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Baym, N.K. (2010). Personal connections in the digital age. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Blikstein, P. (1992). Introduction. Travels in Troy with Freire.
Boyd, D. (2014). It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Network Teens. London: Yale University Press.
Cadwalladr, C. (2016). Google, democracy and the truth about internet search. The Guardian. Retrieved December 5, 2016, from http://www.theguardian.com/
Ceruzzi, P. E. (2003) A history of modern computing. London, Eng.: MIT Press.
Freire, P. (1973). Society in Transition. Education for Critical Consciousness. New York: Seabury.
Friend, Tad. (2017). “Silicon Valley’s Quest to Live Forever.” The New Yorker.
Morville, Peter. “The Sociosemantic Web.” Ambient Findability.
Galloway, A. R. (2012). The interface effect. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Garbaudo, P. (2012). Tweets and the streets: social media and contemporary activism. London: Pluto Press.
Golumbia, D. (2014). Death of a Discipline. A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 25(1), 156-176. Duke University Press.
Hayles, K. (2008). The Future of Literature. Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Library (pp. 159-186). Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame.
Heller, N. (2016). The Failure of Facebook Democracy. The New Yorker. Retrieved November 22,2016.
Herrera, Linda. (2014). Revolution in the Age of Social Media: The Egyptian Popular Insurrection and the Internet. Verso.
Jenkins, H. (2006). Converge culture: where old and new media collide. New York: New York University Press.
Kaplan, Jerry. (2015). Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Yale University Press.
Liu, A. (2013). The Meaning of the Digital Humanities. The Changing Profession, 128 (10), pp 409-423.
Mande, J. (2016). How I learned to Game Twitter. The New Yorker. Retrieved November 29, 2016.
Manovich, Lev. (2001). “What New Media Is Not.” The Language of New Media. The MIT Press.
Margalit, R. (2016). Should Auschwitz Be a Site for Selfies?. The New Yorker. Retrieved January 9, 2017.
Marwick, A. E. (2013). Status update: celebrity, publicity, and branding in the social media age. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Mone, G. (2016). What’s Next for Digital Humanities. Society, 59(6), 20-21.
Morville, Peter. “The Sociosemantic Web.” Ambient Findability.
Negroponte, N. (1995). Being Digital. New York: Knopf.
Rainie, H., & Wellman, B. (2012). Networked: The New Social Operating System. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Segovia, Kathryn and Jeremy N. Bailenson. (2013). ”Identity Manipulation What Happens When Identity Presentation is Not Truthful.” The Social Net: Understanding our online behavior. Ed. Yair Amichai-Hamburger.
Shirky, C. (2018). Here comes everybody: the power of organizing without organizations. New York: Penguin Press.
Thomas, D. (2002) (Not)Hackers: Subculture, Style, and Media Incorporation. Hcker culture (pp. 141-171). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Vaidhyanathan, S. (2011). The Goolization of everything: (and why we should worry). Berkley: University of California Press.
van Dijck, J. (2007). Mediated Memories as a Conceptual Too Mediated Memories in the Digital Age. Stanford University Press.
Tomás Crowder-Taraborrelli 