Data Science in the Humanities (DASH)

Please note: This list is ever evolving, check back with any questions or contact the Director of DASH program.

Via Arts & Sciences:

• L01 Art-Arch 3973 "New Media, New Technologies" (3 units): In the summer of 2013, Random International's "Rain Room" was installed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Lines to experience the sensation of being rained on without getting wet ranged up to seven hours at times. This merging of new technology with the gallery space proved irresistible, but it also raises questions as to the uses of technology in contemporary art and whether or not this could be much more than a gimmick. As one Yelp reviewer put it, "The Rain Room is definitely an experience. Let's be honest... I'm mostly upset that I didn't get a cool, new Facebook profile pic out of it." This course will consider technological developments in modern and contemporary art -- including photography, video and new media, and digital and Internet art -- as well as forays into new technology that blur the lines between art and science. 
• L04 Chinese 390 (L05 Japanese 390/L82 EALC 3900) "EALC Seminar: Screening East Asia: From Scroll Painting to Haptic Interface" (3 units): This course introduces students to East Asian media cultures by focusing on a specific topic - the "screen." Students will explore how screen is not only an architectural construct (the painted screen) or a projection surface, but an electronic display, interface, or game console. Through examining a selection of scroll paintings, films, and digital artworks in Japan, South Korea, China, and Taiwan, they will learn to be attentive to the material, infrastructural, and formal conditions of how mass media is produced, exhibited, and consumed. Other media objects and phenomena to be discussed include manga and anime, console games, advertising walls, immersive installations, TikTok/Douyin short videos, digital filters and selfies, touch-based interfaces, among others. The class will also scrutinize the employment of the screen as motifs and metaphors in East Asian visual cultures and discuss how these metaphors and motifs negotiate questions of national identity, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, socialism/post-socialism, colonialism/post-colonialism, global expansion of capitalism. This class will also offer students a chance to explore multimedia productions as a new mode of critical thinking and creative expression. This course is primarily for sophomores and juniors with a major or minor in the Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures. Other students may enroll with permission. No prior knowledge of East Asia is required.
• L04 Chinese 430 (L81 EALC 430) "Topics in Chinese Media Culture: Charting Identify in the Digital Age" (3 units): In contemporary society, global computational media have come to shape the new form and function of identity. As the users of these digital technologies, we have been conscripted into systems of compulsory identification ranging from fingerprint scanning and biometric facial recognition to big data documenting and calculating our age, gender, race, nationality, and even health conditions and shopping preferences. These technologies of identification promise to measure a truthful and core identity from the surface of a human body for the purposes of authentication, verification, and tracking in service of a mixture of commercial, state, and military interests. One dire consequence of the proliferation of these technologies of identification is the failure to recognize non-normative, minoritarian groups, and thereby replicating or even amplifying racial hierarchies, gender stereotypes, social division, and global inequality. This course asks what identity is and what function identity serves in the contemporary society in East Asia and on a global scale. Recognizing the changing scope of "Asia" as a vital concept and method, students will read extensively contemporary works in Asian Studies, Asian-American Studies, critical race and gender theory, and media theory that deal with the intersection of digital media, race and gender, and global socio-political transformation. Alongside these readings, students will explore contemporary films, artworks, social media events, and online activisms in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and beyond that reflect the questions of technologized identity and subjectivity. The class will also go back to western philosophies of technology, cybernetics, and media theories to rethink how the universalized prototype of the human (which is a white man) was constructed in scholars' inquiries into mind and body, the self and the other, and the then-new relationship between human and machine. 
• L14 E Lit 313W "Bots, Drones, and Cyborgs: Being Human in the Age of Intelligent Machines" (3 units): We live in a world where not only our access to information, but our social interactions, and bodily autonomy are increasingly mediated by- surveilled, analyzed, facilitated, enhanced- by technology. This course will ask what it means to be human in an age of intelligent machines. What happens to our notions of individuality, autonomy, and political subjecthood when domains or categories once thought exclusively to be the preserve of humanity- language, emotion, complex information processing (playing chess, or driving cars, for example)- are increasingly threatened, replicated, and extended by technology? We will cover a range of science fiction texts including Karel Capek's play Rossum's Universal Robots, Isaac Asimov's I, Robot, Phillip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and William Gibson's Neuromancer along with works of speculative fiction such as Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, and Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun along with films such as Blade Runner and The Matrix. We'll juxtapose these cultural representations of artificial intelligence with emerging philosophical and scientific discussions to ask to what extent the fundamental ways AI continues to redefine the boundaries of the "human" as a category.
• L14 E Lit 498W (L16 Comp Lit 498WA/L93 IPH 498W) "The Spenser Lab" (4 units): In this Writing Intensive course, the students will be given a variety of writing tasks: writing commentaries, introductions, software manuals, grant proposals, software requirements, and design documents (SRDDs).
• L15 Drama 390 "Immersive Story Studio" (3 units): What possibilities and pitfalls do immersive practices create for live storytelling? How do the affordances of a digital tool amplify or suppress aspects of a source story? What new insights into familiar stories can we generate with radical adaptation? To engage these questions, this studio seminar blends humanistic scholarship with critical making, theatrical practice, and interdisciplinary, team-based agile development processes. Each two-week "sprint" engages a different immersive, theatricalized context, asking students to envision how the tools utilized therein might illuminate latent aspects of familiar stories. Topics include spatial computing/AR/VR/ XR, immersive theatre, theme parks, and cultural institutions/ museums. Additionally, this course utilizes "critical making" as an epistemology, wherein the site of knowledge creation is the process of devising an object, tool, performance, or installation in conversation with a discipline's critical apparatus. Accordingly, course-long projects will find students selecting and using immersive tools-digital, analog, or both-to radically adapt a familiar story, broadly construed. Importantly, while technological skills are welcome, they are not required. Students are encouraged to envision gloriously and scope effectively as they design a hypothetical or prototyped research project and complementary critical engagement. This course may be repeated for credit for students who wish to design and execute a more robust project.
• L22 History 4887 "Advanced Seminar: Digital Frontiers in History" (3 units): Can digital technologies offer new ways to rethink historical narratives? Is DH the future of the humanities and of history as a profession? Can DH and critical inquiry be brought together? This course explores the history, present, and future of digital humanities (DH) to seek responses to these questions. From its origins in the Cold War to its rise to fame in the 1990s, the digital turn in the humanities has garnered excitement and support as well as critique and even disavowal from historians. In this course, we will examine the debates in the field of DH and learn about new ways in which historians are using digital tools for academic research as well as public outreach and activism. The course will be divided into two parts. The first half of the course will be devoted to understanding the historical growth and the present status of the field. In the second half, students will be learning basic digital tools to conduct research. The purpose of the course is not to turn historians into coders; it is to understand what codes can do for historians.
• L53 Film 337 (E81 CSE 337A) "Retro Game Design" (3 units): Before they became "retro," games played on platforms of the 1970s and 1980s were just games. But early game-console hardware was designed with very particular ideas of what made a game a game, and under extreme constraints of cost and technical viability. Creators designed for these constraints, and their work then influenced the design of later hardware and software.
  This is a course about the history, design, and technology of one retro game console, the 1977 Atari Video Computer System (also known as the Atari VCS or the Atari 2600). The first popular home console, the Atari VCS is a truly weird computer: It "boasts" 128 bytes of RAM, no video buffer, and a custom graphics and sound chip designed to interface with then-universal cathode ray tube televisions. Against all odds, creators made fun and successful games within these extreme constraints.
  Just as an artist benefits from learning the fundamentals of their craft, so a game designer or developer can benefit from returning to these early and crude hardware platforms. In this course, students will learn the technical and creative history of the Atari, and they will also learn the fundamentals of programming its unfamiliar hardware. Students will carry out programming exercises, mostly in the assembly language instructions required to operate this unusual computer. They will then make their own games for the Atari, which will be able to run on the actual, 45-year-old hardware.
• L53 Film 453 "Experiential Design for Immersive Media" (3 units): The term "metaverse" (originally coined by novelist Neal Stephenson) has recently come into vogue to describe a loose constellation of emerging technologies related to immersive media-particularly virtual, augmented, and mixed reality. In this course, we will explore new forms of creative practice enabled by this ecosystem. Students will analyze a variety of immersive experiences, ranging from 360 films and animations to interactive room scale experiences to multisensory installations, to understand the creative opportunities and challenges offered by these media. Students will then develop their own creative proposals and prototype an XR experience using a combination of 360 camera systems, digital production software, head-mounted displays, and physical and spatial computing elements.
• L53 Film 479 "Seminar in Interdisciplinary Approaches: How to Study Race Online" (3 units): Whether partnering with policymakers to create new Internet regulations or following breaking news from 'Black Twitter', media practitioners are consistently faced with both the explicit and not-so-obvious relationship between race and technology. Studying race online can often seem like a daunting task, however, or worse, a task only for those on the margins. Fortunately, Black communities have long showcased the potentials of media technologies toward resistance, joy, and longevity, creating a path forward for the study of race online. Like evergreen content-or a story that never goes stale-Black content creators have crafted and maintained 'evergreen' networks, which this class uses as a praxis that centers marginalized experiences in the study of race online. Students will learn how to study race, from gathering tweets around particular discursive formations to using methods such as algorithm audits to analyze big data. We will ground our analyses from an interdisciplinary and critical cultural perspective, drawing from scholarship in film and media studies, cultural and communication studies, information studies, and media history. Importantly, students will be exposed to some of the longstanding issues that might arise from the study of race online, such as surveillance, essentialism, and exploitation. Ultimately, students will have the practical and ethical skills needed to address some of the most complex questions regarding race and technology across an array of media industries, from software development and journalism to policy making and film writing.
• L90 AFAS 3644 (L53 Film 3644) " 'Look Here, Karen': The Politics of Black Digital Resistance to White Femininity" (3 units): In this course, we will explore the ways in which Black online publics use resistance strategies, such as mimetic imagery and racial humor, to call attention to white femininity and its deployment of the police against African Americans. We will trace the relationship between the police state and white femininity through the historical lens of 'innocence' and protection of the U.S. nation as well as the similarities and differences of Black online publics' responses in relation to past resistance strategies. What does it mean to be a 'typical' Karen in Internet culture? What are the aesthetic boundaries of Karens? And, what do digital platforms afford to Black users who make Karens visible? While paying attention to race, gender and class, this course offers students the skills to be able to collect and analyze online data, such as 'Karen' memes, in order to make critical arguments and observations that are grounded in historical accuracy.

Via McKelvey School of Engineering Computer Science & Engineering:

• E81 CSE 131 "Introduction to Computer Science I" (3 units): An introduction to software concepts and implementation, emphasizing problem solving through abstraction and decomposition. Introduces processes and algorithms, procedural abstraction, data abstraction, encapsulation, and object-oriented programming. Recursion, iteration, and simple data structures are covered.  Concepts and skills are mastered through programming projects, many of which employ graphics to enhance conceptual understanding. Java, an object-oriented programming language, is the vehicle of exploration.  

  Active-learning sessions are conducted in a studio setting in which students interact with each other and the professor to solve problems collaboratively.
  Prerequisites: Comfort with algebra and geometry at the high school level is assumed. Patience, good planning, and organization will promote success.  This course assumes no prior experience with programming.

• E81 CSE 204A "Web Development" (3 units): This course explores elementary principles for designing, creating, and publishing effective websites and web application front-ends. Topics include page layout concepts, design principles, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, front-end frameworks like Angular and React, and other development tools. Students apply the topics by creating a series of websites that are judged based on their design and implementation. Prerequisite: CSE 131 or equivalent experience.
• E81 CSE 247 "Data Structures and Algorithms" (3 units): Study of fundamental algorithms, data structures, and their effective use in a variety of applications. Emphasizes importance of data structure choice and implementation for obtaining the most efficient algorithm for solving a given problem. A key component of this course is worst-case asymptotic analysis, which provides a quick and simple method for determining the scalability and effectiveness of an algorithm. Online textbook purchase required. Prerequisite: CSE 131/501N, and fluency with summations, derivatives, and proofs by induction.
• E81 CSE 247R "Seminar: Data Structures and Algorithms" (1 unit): The content of this seminar will vary by semester, but it will generally complement the material taught in CSE 247 Data Structures and Algorithms. Corequisite: E81 CSE 247.
• E81 CSE 330S "Rapid Prototype Development and Creative Programming" (3 units): This course uses web development as a vehicle for developing skills in rapid prototyping.  Students acquire the skills to build a Linux web server in Apache, to write a web site from scratch in PHP, to run an SQL database, to perform scripting in Python, to employ various web frameworks, and to develop modern web applications in client-side and server-side JavaScript.  The course culminates with a creative project in which students are able to synthesize the course material into a project of their own interest.  The course implements an interactive studio format: after a formal presentation of a topic, students develop a related project under the supervision of the instructor. Prerequisite: CSE 131
• E81 CSE 457A "Introduction to Visualization" (3 units): Disciplines such as medicine, business, science, and government are producing enormous amounts of data with increasing volume and complexity. In this course, students will study the principles for transforming abstract data into useful information visualizations. They will learn about the state of the art in visualization research and development and gain hands-on experience with designing and developing interactive visualization tools for the web. They will also also learn how to critique existing visualizations and how to evaluate the systems they build. Topics include design, data mapping, visual perception, and interaction. Prerequisite: CSE 330S.