DH Courses
Spring 2021
Women Novelists of Queen Victoria's Reign and DH Methods
Prof. Alison Booth
English Department
Working with materials, tools, and data from Collective Biographies of Women (CBW), a Scholars’ Lab and IATH database project, we will branch out from the Jubilee volume of 1897: Women Novelists of Queen Victoria’s Reign, in which living women novelists write chapter-length biographical-critical notices of deceased novelists, excluding the Regency and earlier figures.
Hacking for Humanists
Brad Pasanek
English Department
This is an undergraduate course for English majors (and other students) that introduces the basics of computer programming, text analysis, text encoding, and statistics as experimental methodologies that promote new kinds of reading and interpretation. The aim is to move from “computation into criticism.” We’ll work, primarily, with a Shakespeare play, poetry by William Blake, and a Jane Austen novel. Students will find these works at the bookstore alongside manuals on Learning Unix and Text Analysis with R.
ARH 8006: Digital Humanities & Visual Culture: Untold Narratives of Albemarle County
Lisa Reilly
Architecture School
Digital tools have completely transformed the questions humanists ask, how they view the world and how they disseminate their scholarship. These new possibilities both open and close possible avenues of investigation. This course will introduce students to tools relevant to the analysis of visual culture and architecture as well as the process of how to learn to use digital tools – critical given the constantly changing array of options- as well as how to develop a digital project.
Fall 2020
ARAH/ARH 9510 The Visible Past
Lisa Reilly
Architectural History
The antique past is a familiar point of reference for many artists and architects across time and place. Throughout western Europe and around the Mediterranean, the Roman past has been visible through archaeological remains, drawings, prints and texts although the use of the antique past in later art and architecture is often discussed exclusively with regard to what remains in Rome itself.
ARH 5600: 3D Cultural Heritage Informatics Internship
Andy Johnston, Will Rourk
Architectural History, University of Virginia Library
This course counts toward DH Certificate Practicum credit.
DH 8000: Practicum of the DH Certificate
Professor Alison Booth
This is the required course for the graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities. It entails participation in colloquia, sixty hours of experience participating in a research project uniting computation and humanities, and a portfolio.
Spring 2020
DH 8991 Introduction to Digital Humanities
John Unsworth
This course is a graduate-level introduction to the history, theory, and methods of the digital humanities. It is also a required course for the graduate certificate in digital humanities. In it, we will cover a range of historical, disciplinary, technical, and contemporary issues in digital humanities. It is focused on digital humanities in the context of literature and language, but it also considers more general cultural and epistemological issues, as well as pragmatics, such as how maps and other spatial and temporal perspectives are enabled by the digital. This co
DH 8000: Practicum of the DH Certificate
Alison Booth
This is the required course for the graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities. It entails participation in colloquia, sixty hours of experience participating in a research project uniting computation and humanities, and a portfolio.
AMST 3001 Hands-On Public History (undergraduate course)
Lisa Goff
Tuesdays from 3:30pm - 6:00pm in New Cabell 068.
Some undergraduate course offerings can count toward your elective requirement, but that depends on the department and professor. If you'd like to take this course, contact the professor to see if they would allow you to take it and what they would require of your work in the course to ensure it counts at the graduate level.
ENGL 3500 Hacking for Humanists (undergraduate course)
Brad Pasanek
English Department
Some undergraduate course offerings can count toward your elective requirement, but that depends on the department and professor. If you'd like to take this course, contact the professor to see if they would allow you to take it and what they would require of your work in the course to ensure it counts at the graduate level.
HIST 5000 Introduction to Scholarly Digital Editing
Jennifer Stertzer
History Department
Thursdays from 2:00pm - 4:30pm in Bryan Hall 332.
This course will explore all aspects of conceptualizing, planning for, and creating a scholarly digital edition. It provides a basic introduction to the various types of digital editions, the practice of editing in the digital age, and a survey of the many digital tools available to serve project goals.
MDST 4803/7803 Computational Media
Kevin Driscoll
Media Studies Department
Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9:30am - 10:45am in Ruffner 175.
Some undergraduate course offerings can count toward your elective requirement, but that depends on the department and professor. If you'd like to take this course, contact the professor to see if they would allow you to take it and what they would require of your work in the course to ensure it counts at the graduate level.
LAR 7500 Digital Landscape Studies
Michael Lee, Elizabeth K. Meyer
Landscape Architecture Department
Fridays 1:00-3:30p.m. in CAM 108.
This digital humanities seminar combines archival research and close reading of texts with data visualization to explore new insights into two significant designed landscapes, Park Muskau, Germany and Central Park, New York. We focus on how concurrent developments in technology and science, changing social practices as well as territorial networks of material and information exchange impacted the form and experience of these 19th century landscapes.
DS 5001 Exploratory Text Analytics
Rafael Alvarado
Data Science Institute
ARH 8500 Digital Humanities and Visual Culture
Lisa Reilly
Art Department
Mondays from 1:00pm - 3:30pm in Campbell 108.
SARC 5400 Data Visualization
Eric Field
Architecture School
Tuesdays from 7:00pm - 9:30pm in Campbell Hall 158.
This is a course about information and data visualization. We live in a world rich with information. This course teaches visual and spatial thinking coupled with data analysis tools and custom web-enabled programming to construct and envision information. To find and even invent approaches toward seeing into complex problems, we will study, and make, useful, compelling and beautiful tools to see.
MDST 4101 Privacy and Surveillance (undergraduate course)
Siva Vaidhyanathan
Media Studies
Check back soon for a summary of the course
Fall 2019
HIST 5501 Historical Geospatial Visualization: Mapping Indigenous Worlds
Max Edelson
History Department
Thursdays 2:00-4:30 p.m. in New Cabell Hall 038
ARTH 4591 Architecture and Identity in Byzantine cities
Fotini Kondyli
Art and Architectural History
Wednesdays 3:30-6:00 p.m. in Fayerweather Hall 215
This seminar explores the development of Byzantine cities in relation to Byzantium’s political and socio- economic structures (4th-15thc). It aims at examining cities as lived spaces, investigating their architecture and topography as well as a range of urban experiences from mundane daily deeds to public processions. Emphasis will also be placed on the different social groups responsible for the transformation of Byzantine urban spaces.
Course aims:
MDST 3500 Comparative Histories of the Internet
Kevin Driscoll
Media Studies Department
Tuesdays and Thursdays 9:30-10:45 a.m. in Minor Hall
ARAH 9515 The Making of Sacred Spaces
Fotini Kondyli
Art and Architectural History
This course explores the nature of pre-modern sacred spaces, including sacred sites and landscapes as well as man-made structures, and the processes involved in their formation. While our case studies are primarily from the Mediterranean, we take a cross-cultural perspective to better appreciate how sacred spaces reflect both universal and culturally-specific characteristics. We focus on the study of sacred geography and the role of monumentality, performance and memory to explore how sacred spaces were conceptualized and experienced by different social groups.
Spring 2019
ARAH 9510 The Visible Past
Lisa Reilly
Art and Architectural History
The antique past is a familiar point of reference for many artists and architects across time and place. Throughout western Europe and around the Mediterranean, the Roman past has been visible through archaeological remains, drawings, prints and texts although the use of the antique past in later art and architecture is often discussed exclusively with regard to what remains in Rome itself.
DS 5559 Exploratory Text Analytics
Rafael Alvarado
Data Science Institute
Exploratory text analytics concerns the application of computational and statistical methods to the interpretation of large collections of digitized written documents. The field is motivated by the research of scholars from the humanities and human sciences interested in understanding the semantic, cultural, and social dimensions of texts from historical and contemporary sources, such as novels, newspapers, and social media.
ENSP 8559-001 Introduction to Digital Humanities
John M Unsworth
English Department
This course is a graduate-level introduction to the history, theory, and methods of the digital humanities, and a required course for the new graduate certificate in digital humanities. In it, we will cover a range of historical, disciplinary, technical and contemporary issues in digital humanities. It is focused on digital humanities in the context of literature and language, but it also considers more general cultural and epistemological issues, as well as pragmatics, such as how maps and other spatial and temporal perspectives are enabled by the digital. This course is also designed t
ENGN 5559 Digital Literary Studies
Alison Booth, Brandon Walsh
English Department
How do you measure a book? Can machines read? Do we read prose texts now the way people read them in 1919 or in 1819? We are swimming in textual data that could change our understanding of the written word - if you have the right tools and know how to access and work with it. What could you learn to do with all these different forms of textuality, with all this data? Can you find connections between your current interests in literature and the perspectives that technology opens up, or the goals of your career?
Fall 2018
AAS 3500-001 Digital Caribbean Studies
Marlene L Daut
Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies
Increasingly, we access, share, and create information in digital forms, and this has been referred to as a digital revolution. But how does — or how should — this revolution in the way we teach, learn, and conduct research also change the way we do scholarly work in the classroom? The digital humanities investigates how new media and digital tools are changing the way we produce knowledge in the humanities, by enabling us to share not only information, but sound, visualizations, and even performances using new platforms.
Spring 2018
SPAN 4500 Indigenous Arts Initiative: Mesoamérica Digital (undergraduate))
Allison Margaret Bigelow
Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese Department
Stay tuned for course description
Fall 2017
ENSP 5559 Life Writing and Digital Humanities
Alison Booth
This course combines theory and practice: the theories and practices of writing a life (one’s own or someone else’s); and the theories and practices of digital representations of lives. Assignments and discussion will introduce the field of digital humanities (or humanities scholarship that uses intensive computation). Focusing on clusters of texts from the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, we will sample different genres and modes of writing and reading. We will consider the many media in which narratives about human lives can be expressed, and experiment in using some of them.
ARTH 3591 Household Archaeology in the Mediterranean
Fotini Kondyli
Art and Architectural History
Have you ever wondered how daily life was in ancient times? How did houses look like, smell, taste and even sound like in the past? How did ancient people throw house parties and run businesses from home? Why did they bury people and objects under house floors?
ANTH 5401 Linguistic Field Methods
Lise Dobrin, Ellen Contini-Morava
Anthropology Department
The goal of this course is to get hands-on practice doing linguistic analysis based entirely on data collected from a native speaker of a language. [NOTE: “entirely” means that you should not look up already-published grammars and dictionaries or search the web for descriptions of the language we are working on. For the purposes of this course, we will act as if no grammar or dictionary yet exists.] We will work collaboratively on the same language for the whole semester.
MDST 3703 Introduction to the Digital Liberal Arts
Rafael Alvarado
Media Studies
“We are living in the middle of the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race.”
— Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody
MDST 3705 Code, Language, Media
Rafael Alvarado
This course will introduce you to the theory and practice of database application design in the context of the digital liberal arts. Beginning with the premise that the database is the defining symbolic form of the postmodern era, you will review critical and practical literature about databases, study examples of their use in projects from a variety of humanities disciplines, and engage in the actual design of a database application as a course project. Topics to be covered will include data models, web-based database development using PHP and MySQL, interface design, data visualization,
ANTH 2590 The Internet Is Another Country -- Community and Power in the Age of Social Media
Rafael Alvarado
SPAN 7559 Latin American Digital Humanities
Rafael Alvarado, Allison Bigelow
Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese Department
From the colonial period to the present day, the Popol Vuh, sometimes called the Maya book of creation, has been translated, edited, paraphrased, and glossed in more than 25 languages. WorldCat suggests that there are over 1,200 known editions of the work, published in verse, scholarly editions, and illustrated volumes. In addition to differences in form and genre, Spanish-language volumes offer very different interpretations of the K’iche’ source text.
PHIL 4500 Data and Culture
Paul Humphreys
Philosophy Department
This is a new course that combines hands-on textual analysis with broader philosophical and cultural issues concerning the epistemology of data, the relations between the digital humanities and data science, and the tensions between traditional methods of the humanities and contemporary computational techniques. The course text is Text Analysis with R for Students of Literature by Matthew Jockers. The course is self-contained and is aimed at undergraduates in the humanities and social sciences who would like to acquire skills in these new areas.