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 of “big data” and societal power dynamics, and more. Course offerings range from theoretical considerations of technology and DH to hands-on practice with digital methods.

For more detailed information about prerequisites and enrollment, please see the full course descriptions at courses.yale.edu.

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.

Introduction to Critical Data Studies
AMST 250, FILM 250, GLBL 249
Julian Posada, Madiha Tahir

“Big data” has become a buzzword these days—but what is data? This course introduces the study of data, data technologies, and data techniques through a critical and anti-colonial lens. Through humanities and social science scholarship, art, and data visualizations, students will interrogate how data both relies on and reconfigures societal power dynamics. How is data constituted through its entanglements with power? What is the relationship between data and social and material inequality? What methods can we use to study the making of data? How can we envision decolonial data technologies and techniques?

Virtual Futures
ARCH 1249
Jason Kim, Olalekan Jeyifous

This course investigates how technology impacts, and will continue to impact, our relationship with the built environment through platforms like extended reality (XR). The class features a special guest instructor, the Brooklyn-based visual artist Olalekan Jeyifous, whose work creates dystopian visions of the future that critique contemporary society and explores urban issues, politics, art, and popular culture as expressions of the Black diaspora. Students will examine how urban environments intersect with social structures, institutionalized injustice, and prevailing false narratives about the future.

Note: Architecture courses will open for registration on Aug. 25. Students from outside the School of Architecture must submit a request form in order to register; please see Yale Course Search for more information.

The Mechanical Eye
ARCH 2222
Dana Karwas

This course examines the human relationship to mechanized perception in art and architecture. Mechanical eyes—satellites, rovers, computer vision, autonomous sensing devices, and more—displace human perception, yet these mechanical eyes are also profoundly shaped by the motives, biases, and perspectives of the humans who created them. In this class, students will learn to uncover the human perspective behind a given mechanical eye. They also will investigate the impact of the mechanical eye on cultural and aesthetic inquiry into a specific site, creating a series of site analysis experiments across a range of mediums.

Note: Architecture courses will open for registration on Aug. 25. Students from outside the School of Architecture must submit a request form in order to register; please see Yale Course Search for more information.

Coded Design
ART 750
Bryant Wells

This course applies the medium of the Internet to the practice of design, considering how the shape and properties of information influence the digital surfaces around us. The class examines how HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and API allow the web browser to create the digital world, deepening our understanding of the information economy that feeds creation and consumption online. Students will investigate the nature of systems, develop new ways of looking at their own work through the lens of code, and conceptualize novel social experiences in distributed design. Prior experience with programming or HTML is recommended but not required.

Note: Instructor permission is required for this class; interested students should request permission by Aug. 14 for prime consideration. Please see Yale Course Search to learn more.

Python Programming for Humanities and Social Sciences
CPSC 110
Sohee Park

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. No previous programming experience required.

Law, Technology, and Culture
CPSC 183
Brad Rosen

This class explores the myriad ways in which law and technology intersect, with a special focus on the role of cyberspace. Topics include digital copyright, free speech, privacy and anonymity, information security, innovation, online communities, the impact of technology on society, and emerging trends. No previous experience with computers or law necessary.

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.

Environmental Data Visualization for Communication
ENV 603
Simon Queenborough, Jennifer Marlon

Data visualizations are an essential communication tool for researchers and policymakers addressing environmental problems. This course will teach students how to create and understand such visualizations, drawing on lectures about principles of design, data preparation, and visual communication; discussions of examples from the news and scientific literature; guest lectures; peer critiques; and hands-on individual and group activities. Students will gain proficiency in Excel, PowerPoint, R, Tableau, and other visualization tools, and will use a dataset of their own choice to create a final visualization project.

Note: Enrollment in this course is by application only; applications must be received by Aug. 28, 2023, at 5 p.m. Please see Yale Course Search for further details.

Modeling Geographic Objects
ENV 756
Charles Tomlin

This course offers an introduction to drawing-based (vector) geographic information systems (GIS) for the preparation, interpretation, and presentation of digital cartographic data. The course is oriented more toward discrete objects in geographical space (e.g., water bodies, land parcels, or structures) than the qualities of that space itself (e.g., proximity, density, or interspersion). Previous experience not required.

Digital Humanities I: Architectures of Knowledge
HUMS 387, SPAN 291/845, CPLT 606, FREN 945
Alexander Gil Fuentes

This course offers an introduction to digital humanities theory and practice through a combination of seminar meetings, brief lectures, and a digital studio. In addition to learning how to understand and produce popular genres of DH projects—for example, digital editions of literary or historical texts, exhibits of primary sources, and interactive maps—students will explore the basics of plain text, file and operating systems, data structures, and internet infrastructure. Students also will collaborate with one another on a shared research project. No prior experience required.

Form and Content in Digital and Analog Arts and Sciences
HUMS 392
Sayan Bhattacharyya

This interdisciplinary seminar examines the relationship between form and content in literature, visual arts, music, film and virtual and augmented reality. Students will consider the special challenges that digital and computational perspectives present in the context of these relationships, and how humanistic understanding of unifying metaphors drawn from fields such as physics, neuroscience, and AI can help make sense of humans as individuals and as a species with a shared legacy and future.

Thinking Digitally about the Humanities
HUMS 417
Sayan Bhattacharyya

This class explores how humanists and their associates from computational disciplines apply digital methods, broadly understood, to the kinds of questions that tend to be of interest in the humanities. Students will examine how methods drawn from information science, such as data analytics and artificial intelligence, are being applied to humanistic disciplines, especially textual understanding and analysis.

Seminar in Digital and Computational Methods in the Humanities
HUMS 500

This interdisciplinary seminar examines the capabilities and limitations of computational tools for the humanities, especially textual interpretation and literary studies. The class will acquaint participants with methodological and epistemological issues and case studies in the digital humanities, considering how digital methods can supplement (not replace) humanistic modes of inquiry. Participants from both humanities and non-humanities disciplines are welcome. Prior experience with computation is not necessary.

Imagining Global Lyric
LITR 161
Ayesha Ramachandran

What is lyric? And what might a multi-dimensional, expansive study of the lyric across cultures, languages, and media look like? This course investigates the possibility of studying lyric poetry in cross-cultural and transmedial ways by combining traditional humanistic approaches with new methods opened by the digital humanities. Participants will engage with primary texts in Yale’s special collections and contribute to a digital project to compile an exhibit of lyric poetry across the world—a project that highlights the importance and challenges of defining just what a lyric poem is.

Computers, Networks, and Society
SOCY 133
Scott Boorman

This course offers a comparison of major algorithm-centered approaches to the analysis of complex social network and organizational data, and aims to develop a disciplined, coherent perspective on modern information technology’s effects on societies worldwide. Topics include software warfare and algorithm sabotage; blockmodeling and privacy; and legal, ethical, and policy issues. No prior experience with computers required.

Digital Humanities Practical Workshop Series
SPAN 984
Alexander Gil Fuentes

These DH workshops for graduate students, which range from stand-alone sessions to workshop series on a particular theme or toolset, are offered every term. Topics may include text analysis, web scraping and data mining, digital editions and exhibits, dissertation and general academic tech, advanced scholarly research techniques, interactive maps and visualizations, data and project management, privacy and security, copyright law, cultural analytics, and more. Workshops also are available on demand at the request of four or more graduate students.

Independent Group Study in Digital Humanities
SPAN 990
Alexander Gil Fuentes

Project-based learning and teams are at the heart of digital humanities pedagogy. This independent study course is designed to allow teams of graduate students to pursue a research question in the humanities, as well as to provide an appropriate research output for their scholarly project. Student teams will be mentored by an instructor and other relevant professionals at Yale. Students may either pursue their own original scholarly project or participate in projects designed by the instructor or other humanities faculty.