More DH classes than ever are being offered at Yale this spring, including courses that will help you explore the intersection of music and artificial intelligence, investigate the history of data visualization, improve your programming skills, and more. Course offerings range from theoretical considerations of technology and DH to hands-on practice with digital tools.

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, please email the DHLab.

Imaging Ancient Worlds in Museum Collections
ANTH 492, ARCG 492, NELC 321, NELC 538
Klaus Wagensonner

This class explores the merits, challenges, and best practices of the digitization of cultural heritage. Through hands-on engagement with the archaeological artifacts in the Yale Babylonian Collection, students will learn how new computer graphics technologies, including 3D imaging, can be used to document and interpret archaeological artifacts, and will consider ways that these technologies can support current research in archaeology and anthropology.

Columbus to Google: A Critical History of the Archive
CPLT 567, EMST 825, SPAN 754
Ayesha Ramachandran and Alexander Gil Fuentes

Modern libraries and archives cannot be understood without reference to the history of European conquest and colonial expansion. Scholars today train to read between the lines, against the grain, to mind the gaps, and even to critically fabulate in order to reconstruct the lived world and knowledge lost in the wake of European genocide and erasure. This course revisits key episodes, tropes, ideas, and practices from the past 500 years to investigate how the de facto archive of humanity came to be the way it is today. Students will examine the history of archives from the time of Columbus to the present, when generative AI has begun to make hallucinatory contributions to the human record and companies like Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Clarivate have gained enormous power through their ability to manipulate corpora.

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.

YData: An Introduction to Data Science
CPSC 123, PLSC 351, S&DS 123, S&DS 523
Roy Lederman

Computational, programming, and statistical skills are no longer optional in our increasingly data-driven world. YData is an introduction to data science that emphasizes the development of these skills while providing opportunities for hands-on practice. Focusing on the widely used computing language Python 3, the class is designed to be accessible to students with little or no background in computing, programming, or statistics, as well as to those who are more technically oriented.

AI for Future Presidents
CPSC 170
Brian Scassellati

AI is becoming an essential tool not only for scientists and engineers, but also for physicians, judges, artists, and presidents. This course aims to help students of all disciplines learn some of the basic limits of AI, understand how to critically analyze public claims made about it, and understand its societal impact. Topics will include job loss due to automation, how machine learning systems are impacting healthcare, the impact of language models like ChatGPT on education, and many other issues at the front of the headlines today. Prior experience with AI and programming is not required.

Decentering Computer Science: Transpacific Computing History across U.S., East Asia, and Beyond
CPSC 190, EAST 201
Yoehan Oh

This seminar examines how transpacific relations between China, Taiwan, and the U.S. have shaped the history of computer science, transcending simple “friend or foe” rivalries. Topics include China-born first-generation digital computer pioneers, the digitization of Asian characters, the development of transpacific computer and labor networks, transpacific work to build CS fundamentals, exclusionism, trade protectionism, and “friendshoring” across the Asia-Pacific region.

Telling Stories With Maps: From Ancient Times to the New York Times
CSGH 220
Aaron Reiss

From ancient mariners’ projections of what exists beyond the known world to high-tech visual journalism in modern war zones, maps have been used to construct narratives, make arguments, and find sense in the abstract. In this class, students will investigate the narrative possibilities of cartography through academic texts, investigative visual journalism, close readings of maps, and making maps of their own. By employing the cartographic and narrative strategies studied in class, students become visual journalists and digital storytellers in their own right.

Culture as Data: Thinking Computationally with Text
ENGL 2021, HUMS 321, LITR 325
Sayan Bhattacharyya

This course investigates the field of digital humanities and its limitations, focusing specifically on textual analysis. Through a combination of readings and hands-on tinkering, the class will investigate computational techniques such as vector semantics, topic modeling, and commonly used frameworks and toolkits for machine learning with text. Prior programming knowledge is not required.

Geographic Information Systems
EVST 290, URBN 319
Jill Kelly

This class offers a practical introduction to the nature and use of geographic information systems (GIS) in environmental science and management. Over the course of the semester, students will explore techniques for the acquisition, creation, storage, management, visualization, animation, transformation, analysis, and synthesis of cartographic data in digital form.

Critical Data Visualization: History, Theory, and Practice
EVST 349, HIST 449J, HSHM 449, HUMS 446, URBN 382
Bill Rankin

This class offers a critical analysis of data visualization, with an emphasis on the theory and politics of visual communication. In addition to examining historical data graphics from the late eighteenth century onward, students will study graphic semiology, ideals of objectivity and honesty, and recent developments in feminist and participatory data design. Technical tutorials in data visualization will be integrated into the course meetings, and optional support will be offered for advanced programming and mapping software. Prior software experience is not required.

Media Anxieties
FILM 438, FILM 766
Neta Alexander and Francesco Casetti

This seminar delves into the multifaceted anxieties entwined with our always-connected lives. Drawing from diverse methodologies such as film history, German media theory, affect theory, critical data studies, gender studies, and disability studies, this seminar explores how black box technologies produce and sustain regimes of anxiety, fear and dependency. Topics include cinephilia/cinephobia, surveillance culture, algorithmic biases, addiction, and the politics of representation in digital spaces.

Time Machines: Reimagining the Past
HIST 181J
John Gaddis

This seminar explores the concept of time machines, the ways they might be (or are) constructed, and how representations of the past can help us reimagine and “travel” to other times. Topics of discussion include the physics of time travel; some ways historians have used archives to reconstruct times past; the extent to which novelists complement, contradict, or complicate the work of historians; and the possibility of “animating” past visual representations, whether through art, film, or computer simulation. Students also will pursue individual projects using digitally available newspapers, focusing on a particular place in a particular year.

Art and Technology
HSAR 160
Pamela Lee

This introductory course surveys the relationship between art and technology, from prehistoric cave art and rock art to the rise of NFTs. Drawing on a wide variety of artistic media, the class will explore topics such as the use of textiles as data storage before the advent of the computer; technologies for representing space in European and Asian painting, and the centrality of Arab science in developing linear perspective during the Renaissance; the cybernetic revolution and the rise of computers; biometrics and surveillance; and machine learning and art without artists. Sections may include visits to collections and sites across Yale’s campus.

Music and AI
MUS 645
Ted Moore

This course introduces musicians to the concepts and implications of artificial intelligence (AI), with an emphasis on music generation tools. Students will examine how AI music systems work while considering the relationships between data, algorithms, and the humans that use them. In addition to analyzing music that uses AI, students will develop personally curated datasets and train AI models to experience how algorithms learn. No knowledge of programming is required.

The Philosophy of Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence
PHIL 740
Laurie Paul and Tyler Brooke-Wilson

What is the structure of the mind? Can what we think influence what we see? Are people rational or irrational? This course looks at a number of such questions in the philosophy of cognitive science and AI, examining the space of possible minds described by AI, the major division of the mind into perception and cognition, and contemporary philosophical issues raised by recent developments in AI. Prior coursework in philosophy required.

YData: Measuring Culture
S&DS 175, S&DS 575, SOCY 163, SOCY 537
Daniel Karell

This introductory course explores how data science can be used to measure the cultural landscape, trace the production and consumption of culture, and analyze the relationship between culture and a range of social phenomena. Students will review foundational and current theories and methodologies of computational approaches to studying culture, with an eye toward ultimately conducting their own social-scientific analyses.

Digital Technology and Politics
SOCY 250
Yuan Hsiao

Digital technologies, or information and communication technologies (ICTs), have become crucial components of contemporary politics. This class uses core concepts of media sociology to explore a variety of political phenomena, such as digital-enabled protests, political influencers, hate and radical speech, the spread of misinformation, and more. Special emphasis will be placed the internet and social media.

Digital Humanities Practical Workshop Series
SPAN 984
Alexander Gil Fuentes

Every term, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Humanities Program offer practical DH workshops for graduate students. Ranging from stand-alone sessions to series on particular themes or toolsets, the workshops cover topics such as 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.

Digital Humanities Practicum
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.

Nature, AI, and Performance
THST 359
Matthew Suttor

This course explores how new technologies, such as AI and environmental data mapping, can deepen our understanding of our planet’s complexities, and how performance might further enhance that understanding. Students will engage in hands-on experiments that translate natural phenomena—like avian murmuration or shifting ecosystems—into dynamic performative expressions, including music, movement, and visual installations. Course participants will use CCAM technologies in the Leeds Studio, including the motion capture system, multichannel sound system, and AI-driven data sonification and visualization software, to develop new modes of storytelling that blend the arts and sciences.