Courses
NEWS
Spring 2019 DH classes
Spring 2019 DH classes
Monday, January 7, 2019
Looking for spring classes? We’ve prepared a list of options that will help you assemble, analyze, and visualize humanities data. Classes include theoretical discussions around data ethics and literacy, as well as hands-on practice with programming languages and digital tools.
If you are teaching a course connected to DH and would like it included, please email the Digital Humanities Lab.
American Public Sculpture: History, Context, and Continuing Significance
AMST 810, WGSS 815 Laura Wexler
Building on a new partnership between the Smithsonian Institution and Yale University, this course offers a broad-based and multidisciplinary exploration of public sculpture in the United States. Course work includes field trips and digital projects as well as readings in the scholarship of public memory, cultural heritage, conservation, and aesthetics.
Data and Information Visualization
CPSC 446, CPSC 546 Holly Rushmeier
Visualization is a powerful tool for understanding data and concepts. This course provides an introduction to the concepts needed to build new visualization systems, rather than to use existing visualization software. Major topics are abstracting visualization tasks, using visual channels, spatial arrangements of data, navigation in visualization systems, using multiple views, and filtering and aggregating data. Case studies to be considered include a wide range of visualization types and applications in humanities, engineering, science, and social science.
Prerequisite: CPSC 223.
Data Science for Politics and Policy
EVST 454, PLSC 454 Fredrik Sävje
Data plays an increasingly important role in policy making and politics. The ability to draw valid conclusions from quantitative information can tilt elections or be the difference between a successful or failed policy. This course teaches how to use tools from statistics, data science, and machine learning to solve problems and challenges faced in policy making and politics. Students learn how data can help people make campaign decisions, detect election fraud, predict election outcomes, and investigate if a policy had the intended effect. Students receive an introduction to statistical programming in R, supervised and unsupervised machine learning, and causal inference.
Digital Anthropology
ANTH 411 Eve Zucker
Digital Anthropology is an emerging field of anthropology that explores the ways in which digital mediums such as internet platforms are shaping and being shaped by human experience. This advanced seminar course is designed to be a collaborative exploration of the ways in which digital mediums, practices, and technologies have become part of the human experience. The seminar approaches the topic from an anthropological perspective drawing on relevant ethnographies as well as cross-disciplinary texts and media to explore this emergent topic.
Digital China: Using Computational Methods to Illuminate Society, Politics, Culture, and History
ANTH 405, EAST 403, SOCY 309 Charles Chang
In the humanities and social sciences, those who study China face a vast volume of disparate information that ranges from historical archives and maps to the news and social media posts of our time. Such abundance and variety of data can seem daunting, quite beyond an individual’s capacity to digest, and yet, with appropriate concepts and methods, the data can be accessed and sorted out in such a way as to allow the researcher to address questions, hitherto neglected or insufficiently analyzed, in Chinese history, politics, society, and culture. The course has two components: seminar and workshop. In the seminar, we discuss the ideas and concepts behind the collection of data, which could be temporal, spatial, or textual; this is followed by an introduction to network analysis and visualization. In the workshop, students gain hands-on experience in the full actualization of a project. Note that although the course’s title is “Digital China,” its ideas and methods are applicable to other non-Western countries. Students whose research interest lies in, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, or Africa are welcome.
Geographic Information Systems
EVST 290, F&ES 290 Charles Tomlin
A practical introduction to the nature and use of geographic information systems (GIS) in environmental science and management. Applied techniques for the acquisition, creation, storage, management, visualization, animation, transformation, analysis, and synthesis of cartographic data in digital form.
Intellectual Property in the Digital Age
CPSC 184 Xiyin Tang
The evolving and oftentimes vexing intellectual property regime of the new digital age. Focus on copyright, fair use, remix culture, access to knowledge, technological innovations, the increasing relevance of trademarks in the new information society, the tension between creativity/creating and the intellectual property rules which either foster or inhibit it, and the new information culture of the digital age.
Prerequisite: CPSC 183 or permission of instructor.
Printing Wars
FREN 868 Christophe Schuwey
Seventeenth-century France brought about a new relationship to writing, information, and media that transformed the style and the purpose of literature. In this course we explore various kinds of disputes in which writing and printing played a part. We examine literary quarrels and the way they created success and stars; delve into questions about propaganda, early modern fake news, and innovative strategies the government developed to control public opinion; and explore competition between the printed book and digital humanities, thinking about the way digital humanities have changed the way literature is studied and approached. Students create their own digital edition as an initiation to digital humanities. To become more familiar with book history, we also visit the Beinecke Library and try the Sterling Library’s printing press. Main authors are Boileau, Boursault, Corneille, Donneau de Visé, Guéret, La Bruyère, Molière, Racine, Scudéry, Segrais, Sévigné.
Visual Kinship, Families, and Photography
AMST 484, WGSS 462, AMST 729, FILM 810, HSAR 493, WGSS 746 Laura Wexler
Exploration of the history and practice of family photography from an interdisciplinary perspective. Study of family photographs from the analog to the digital era, from snapshots to portraits, and from instrumental images to art exhibitions. Particular attention to the ways in which family photographs have helped establish gendered and racial hierarchies and examination of recent ways of reconceiving these images.
YData: An Introduction to Data Science
S&DS 123, S&DS 523 Jessica Cisewski and John Lafferty
Computational, programming, and statistical skills are no longer optional in our increasingly data-driven world; these skills are essential for opening doors to manifold research and career opportunities. This course aims to dramatically enhance knowledge and capabilities in fundamental ideas and skills in data science, especially computational and programming skills along with inferential thinking. YData is an introduction to Data Science that emphasizes the development of these skills while providing opportunities for hands-on experience and practice. YData is accessible to students with little or no background in computing, programming, or statistics, but is also engaging for more technically oriented students through extensive use of examples and hands-on data analysis. Python 3, a popular and widely used computing language, is the language used in this course. The computing materials will be hosted on a special purpose web server.
RELATED NEWS
Fall 2023 DH Classes
Sep 06 2023
Looking for classes to take this fall? Here are some that will help you explore lyric poetry with digital tools, use data visualizations to address environmental problems, study the intersection...
Learn More »Spring 2023 DH Classes
Jan 09 2023
Looking for classes to take this spring? Yale will be offering more DH-related courses than ever. Here are some options that will help you learn Python and GIS, discover new...
Learn More »Welcoming Gavi Levy Haskell, Our New Developer
Nov 14 2022
The Yale Digital Humanities Lab (DHLab) is happy to announce that Gavi Levy Haskell has joined us as our new Digital Humanities Developer. Gavi has worked on digital humanities projects...
Learn More »