Looking for classes to take this fall? Here are a few that will help you explore digital tools for Egyptian archaeology, consider how race and gender shape new technologies, learn about digital mapping in the context of public health, and more. Course offerings range from theoretical considerations of the digital humanities to hands-on practice with digital tools and methods.

If you are teaching a course connected to DH and would like it included in the list below, or if you would like someone from the Yale Digital Humanities Lab to speak with your class, please email the DHLab.

Race, Gender, and AI

AFAM 701, ENGL 720, WGSS 720
Fatima El-Tayeb

This course examines the idea of artificial life in art and science, addressing the tension between visions of minds without body and bodies without mind, their relation to the quest to identify what makes us human, and the role gender and race have played in this. The seminar will look at dominant (scientific, political, economic) models and at their critiques, in particular those from marginalized perspectives, and explore alternative forms of engaging with new technologies. The course’s main texts are Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) and Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein: A Love Story (2019).

Technology, Race and Gender

AMST 302, ER&M 312, HSHM 493, WGSS 312
Kalindi Vora

What assumptions and politics of imagination govern the design and development of new technologies, and what alternative imaginaries, politics, and speculations can be identified with a feminist analytic lens? This class discusses technology and the politics of difference through a survey of topics, including artificial intelligence, digital labor (crowdsourcing), and robotics and computer science. Students will study everything from active STEM projects at Yale to speculative fiction and film to examine how structures of race, gender, sexuality, ability, nation, and religious difference inform the ways we “speculate” or imagine the future, as well as the ways we design and build technological worlds in practice and in fiction. The seminar also features a practicum component where students practice the politics of speculation through writing and design projects.

Egyptian Archaeology in the Digital Age

ARCG 655, NELC 568
Gregory Marouard

User-friendly, affordable digital tools have transformed the field of Egyptian archaeology, allowing researchers to obtain rapid and extremely accurate records of archaeological and architectural remains, epigraphic data, and cultural heritage. Taking advantage of the most recent technologies, this course aims to provide students with a comprehensive understanding of these digital resources for mapping, recording spatial data, and modeling features. The class includes theoretical overviews and practical training in the use of modern mapping tools for topography, photography, photogrammetry, digital drawing, RTI, post-processing, and immersive virtual reality. It also features lectures and seminars by guest speakers with extensive experience using these techniques in Egypt, as well as workshop sessions and some lab activities. In addition to analyzing archaeological data from excavation sites in Egypt, students will practice using digital methods to document physical structures on Yale’s campus.

Prerequisite: Permission from the instructor is required to confirm that students have a general background in archeology, the ancient Near East, or Egyptology.

Virtual Futures

ARCH 1249
Jason Kim

This course investigates how technology will continue to impact our relationship with the built environment through platforms like extended reality (XR), as well as the architect’s role in developing these new digital horizons. The class features a special guest instructor, the Brooklyn-based visual artist Olalekan Jeyifous, whose work describes urban issues, politics, art, and popular culture as expressions of the black diaspora, and explores dystopian visions of the future that critique contemporary society. Students will examine the existing urban condition as an environment co-constitutive of other realities, such as social structures, institutionalized injustice, and prevailing false narratives about the future. Collectively, these imagined futures reveal the thin line between hope and despair in expressing uncomfortable truths about society’s current trajectories.

Introduction to Digital Humanities I: Architectures of Knowledge

CPLT 606, FREN 945, HUMS 387, SPAN 291, SPAN 845
Alex Gil

This course introduces students to the broad field of digital humanities, theory and practice, through a stepwise exploration of new architectures and genres of scholarly and humanistic production and reproduction. The class will combine a seminar, preceded by a brief lecture, and a digital studio. Students will learn about the basics of plain text, file and operating systems, data structures, and internet infrastructure, and will learn to understand, produce, and evaluate a few popular genres of digital humanities, including digital editions of literary or historical texts and exhibits of primary sources and interactive maps. Students also will collaborate with one another on a shared research project. No prior experience is required.

Python Programming for Humanities and Social Sciences

CPSC 110
Sohee Park, Ozan Erat

Designed for non-STEM majors, this class provides an introduction to computer science and Python programming and discusses practical ways to apply computing techniques to the humanities and social sciences. Topics will include abstraction, algorithms, data structures, web development, and statistical tools. At the end of the semester, students will have the opportunity to conduct a data science project using data from their own areas of interest. No previous programming experience is required.

Data and Information Visualization

CPSC 446, CPSC 546
Holly Rushmeier

Visualization is a powerful tool for understanding data and ideas. This course provides an introduction to the concepts needed to build new visualization systems, as opposed to using existing visualization software. The class will cover topics such as 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 will include a wide range of visualization types and applications in the humanities, engineering, science, and social science.

Prerequisite: CPSC 223.

Introduction to GIS for Public Health

EHS 568
Jill Kelly

This course teaches the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), a collection of hardware and software tools that allow users to acquire, manipulate, analyze, and display geographic data in its spatial configuration. Students will learn both the theory of geospatial analysis and practical applications of GIS in a public health context.

Digital Humanities Practical Workshop Series

SPAN 984
Alex Gil

Every term, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese will offer practical digital humanities workshops for graduate students. Workshops may vary from individual two-hour offerings to series of two or four workshops on a particular theme or scholarly toolset. If a student is planning to attend four or more workshops in a term, they should register for this course in order to receive proper credit. Workshop topics include digital editions, digital exhibits, computing fundamentals, bibliographic management, advanced scholarly research leveraging computation, interactive maps and visualizations for humanistic data, data and project management, plain text authoring, file management, privacy and security for scholars, copyright law for digital scholarship, and more. Workshops and workshop series are also available on demand at the request of four or more graduate students.

Independent Group Study in Digital Humanities

SPAN 990
Alex Gil

This independent study allows graduate students to form teams to pursue research questions in the digital humanities, and aims to help them produce an appropriate research output for their project. During the course of their research and digital production, student teams are guided and mentored by an instructor and other relevant professionals at Yale. Besides the option to pursue their own original scholarly project, students may also participate in projects designed by the instructor or other faculty in the humanities.