Digital Literary and Cultural Studies: Six Degrees of Francis Bacon // Schedule

The goal of this course is threefold: to give students a broad technical understanding of state-of-the-art methods in the digital humanities; to consider such methods in light of historical predecessors; and to run deep by illustrating their application in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies (ca. 1500-1700). Each class will generally include a short technical presentation on the methods (with ample time for questions) before opening up to a more seminar-style discussion focused on texts, documents, and problems related to the Renaissance/Early Modern period.

Week 1
Aug 26	Introduction
Aug 28	Dataset design; Digital Humanities	Binkley (1935), "New Tools for Men of Letters" Atkins et al. (1992), "Corpus Design Criteria," LLC. Williams (1981), "Formations" (Ch. 3 from Sociology of Culture), pp. 57-86 Warren et al. (2013), "An Entry of One's Own, or Why Are There So Few Women In the Early Modern Social Network?" Daniels (2013), "Legacy vs. Digital Models of Academic Scholarship"
Aug 29	No class
Week 2
Sep 2	No class
Sep 4	Networks	Easley and Kleinberg (2010), Networks, Crowds and Markets, ch. 2 ("Graphs"). Newman (2010), Networks: An Introduction, ch. 3 ("Social Networks") Michael Widner (2013), "The Digital Humanists' (Lack of) Response to the Surveillance State" Nadine Akkerman, "The Postmistress, the Diplomat, and a Black Chamber?: Alexandrine of Taxis, Sir Balthazar Gerbier, and the Power of Postal Control" Laura Gowing (1994), "Language, Power, and the Law: Women's Slander Litigation in Early Modern London"
Sep 5	Lab
Week 3
Sep 9	Networks	Easley and Kleinberg (2010), Networks, Crowds and Markets, ch. 3 ("Strong and Weak Ties"). Newman (2010), Networks: An Introduction, ch. 7 ("Measures and Metrics") Mac Carron and Kenna (2013), "Network Analysis of Beowulf, the Iliad and the Táin Bó Cúailnge"
Sep 11	Networks and Critical Theory	Bruno Latour (2005), Reassembling the Social, "Introduction," Part I (pp. 1-158) Alexander Galloway, "Networks"
Sep 12	Lab
Week 4
Sep 16	Reading for the Network	Elson et al. (2010), "Extracting Social Networks from Literary Fiction," ACL Patrick Jagoda, "Wired" Stiller et al. (2003), "The Small World of Shakespeare's Plays," Human Nature Franco Moretti (2011), "Network Theory, Plot Analysis"
Sep 18	Six Degrees of Francis Bacon	"Six Degrees of Francis Bacon" Project proposal Ruth Ahnert and Sebastian Ahnert, "Protestant Letter Networks in the Reign of Mary I: A Quantitative Approach"
Sep 19	Lab
Week 5
Sep 23	Information Diffusion	Easley and Kleinberg (2010), Networks, Crowds and Markets, ch. 16 ("Information Cascades"). Adar et al. (2004), "Implicit Structure and the Dynamics of Blogspace" Leskovec et al., "Meme-Tracking and the Dynamics of the News Cycle," KDD. Paul Arblaster, "Posts, Newsletters, Newspapers: England in a European System of Communications"
Sep 25		Lotan et al. (2011), "The Revolutions Were Tweeted: Information Flows during the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions," IJOC John Law, "On the Methods of Long-Distance Control: Vessels, Navigation, and the Portuguese Route to India" F.J. Levy, "How Information Spread Among the Gentry"
Sep 26	Guest speaker: Elaine Parsons
Week 6
Sep 30	Validity	Krippendorff (2004), "Validity," Content Analysis Primary source project due.
Oct 2		Roberts (2013), "Linguistic Diversity and Traffic Accidents: Lessons from Statistical Studies of Cultural Traits," PLOS One Francis Bacon, from Novum Organum Robert Filmer, from Patriarchia Thomas Hobbes, from Leviathan
Oct 3	Lab
Week 7
Oct 7	Search	Manning et al. (2009), "Boolean Search," From Introduction to Information Retrieval. William Sherman, "Sir Julius Caesar's Search Engine" from Used Books Noel Malcolm, "Thomas Harrison and his 'Ark of Studies': An Episode in the History of the Organization of Knowledge" Ann Blair, from Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age
Oct 9	Digital Tools
Oct 10	Lab
Week 8
Oct 14	Project proposal collaborative time.
Oct 16	Ontologies.	Latour (2005), Reassembling the Social, part II (pp. 159-262) Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker, "Notes for a Liberated Computer Language" from The Exploit: A Theory of Networks John Donne, selected poems
Oct 17	Lab	Project proposal due.
Week 9
Oct 21	Macroanalysis	Selections from Jockers, Macroanalysis Selections from Moretti, Graphs, Maps, and Trees
Oct 23	Cultural trends over time.	Michel et al. (2010), "Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books", Science. Supplement Selections from Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism
Oct 24	Lab
Week 10
Oct 28	Cultural trends over time.	Heuser and Le-Khac (2012), "A Quantitative Literary History of 2,958 Nineteenth-Century British Novels: the Semantic Cohort Method," Stanford Literary Lab 4. Daniel Shore (2010), "WWJD?: The Genealogy of a Syntactic Form"
Oct 30	Probability	Reference: Manning and Schütz (1999), Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing ch. 2, "Mathematical Foundations" from Ian Hacking (2006), The Emergence of Probability Luke Wilson, "Drama and Marine Insurance in Elizabethan London"
Oct 31	Lab
Week 11
Nov 4	Clustering	Manning and Schütz (1999), Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing ch. 14, "Clustering" Lawrence Stone, "Prosopography" (1971) David Como, "Print, Censorship, and Ideological Escalation in the English Civil War"
Nov 6	Topic Models	Blei (2012), "Probabilistic Topic Models" (CACM). Blei (2013), "Topic Modeling and the Digital Humanities", Journal of Digital Humanities Weingart (2012), "Topic Modeling for Humanists: A Guided Tour" Schmidt (2013), "Words Alone: Dismantling Topic Models in the Humanities," Journal of Digital Humanities.
Nov 7	Guest speaker: Patrick Juola
Week 12
Nov 11	Code and decipherment	Weaver (1949), "Translation" Reddy and Knight (2011), What We Know About the Voynich Manuscript," LaTeCH. Henry Veggian, "The State as a Work of Literature," pp. 78-91 from Mercury of the Waves: Modern Cryptology and U.S. Literature Francis Bacon from book VI, De Augmentis Scientiarum
Nov 13	Classification	Manning and Schütz (1999), Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing, ch. 16, "Text Categorization" John Wilkins, from An Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language Jorge Luis Borges, "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins"
Nov 14	Lab
Week 13
Nov 18	Classification	Mosteller and Wallace (1963), "Inference in an Authorship Problem," JASA. Jockers et al. (2010), "A comparative study of machine learning methods for authorship attribution," LLC Tweedie et al, "The Provenance of De Doctrina Christiana, attributed to John Milton: A Statistical Investigation" Selections from Reynolds and Saxonhouse, "Statistical Wordprinting" in Three Discourses: A Critical Edition of Newly Identified Work of the Young Hobbes, pp. 157-170 (1995)
Nov 20	Classification	Kao and Jurafsky (2012), "A Computational Analysis of Style, Affect, and Imagery in Contemporary Poetry," CLFL. Underwood et al. (2013), "Mapping Mutable Genres in Structurally Complex Volumes", IEEE Big Humanities. Jonathan Hope and Michael Witmore, "The Hundredth Psalm to the Tune of 'Green Sleeves'": Digital Approaches to Shakespeare's Language of Genre The Marprelate Controversy: choose 1 of the Marplate tracts
Nov 21	Guest Speaker: Jacob Heil	"Connecting History of the Book and Digital Humanities: Typefaces, the Book Trade, and the Early Modern OCR Problem"
Week 14
Nov 25	Visualizing arguments	Selections from Rosenberg and Grafton, Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline Frederic Jameson, "Cognitive Mapping" from Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Section VI) Drucker (2011), "Graphesis: Visual knowledge production and representation"
Nov 27	No class
Nov 28	No class
Week 15
Dec 2		Student presentations
Week 16
Dec 9		Final projects due