Working with Data

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Data analysis in the humanities presents challenges of scale, interpretation, and communication distinct from the social sciences and sciences. In recent years, a number of new practices in this sphere have begun to cohere: “cultural analytics,” “distant reading,” “macroanalysis,” and “data feminism.” But it can be hard for humanists to learn how to apply these practices, not just talk intelligently about them.

This graduate seminar will develop skills to read and create scholarship in these computationalist traditions of the digital humanities. We’ll do so through more traditional seminar readings and a series of programming worksets that will teach you how to do a variety of types of data analysis and visualization in the R language that are actually useful for humanists.

The programming in this class is a means towards an ends: understanding the many formal languages that computers let us use and develop to describe culture.

The problem sets for this course are tied to an online text with exercises.

You can read a preliminary syllabus on this site, which will change.

This course will meet on Wednesday evenings at about 6:20 over Zoom at New York University in Spring 2021.