Curriculum
Courses

• FOLK-F804 Special Topics in Folklore (VT: Folklore & the Digital Humanities) (3 cr)
• *HPSC-X700 Computational Methods in History and Philosophy of Science: Encoding, archiving and computational modeling for projects of interest to historians and philosophers of science
• ENGL-L504/L746 The Rhetorics of Media and Literary Study in the 21st Century: This seminar asks two questions of advanced scholarship and interpretation of literature in the 21st century: what resources from the long tradition of rhetorical analysis and theory can be leveraged for contemporary work in literature? And how do the basic assumptions of literary study and literary history alter when seen through the prism of an expanded mediascape? These are enormous questions, and our approach is merely to do some initial mapping of the problems, and to provide students with the means to pursue more pointed inquiries within this complex territory. Some classics in both rhetoric and media history/theory will be surveyed, and some developing lines of inquiry will also be explored. We will retain a frequent focus on literary questions, as well as the problem of remediation and adaptation, using Edgar Allan Poe and his afterlives as a touchstone allowing for some consistency. The class aims both to be an intensive exploration of ideas, and a space for discussion of contemporary conditions of scholarly production. For the latter component, students are asked to contribute to a collective “autoethnography” of the mediascape of scholarly communication today (e.g., websites, film, blogs, wikis, online journals, digital archives, Zotero, Scalar, presentation styles, Twitter-- the list is much longer, and ideally created by you). What are the rhetorical affordances of these tools and platforms? What kinds of community do they sustain? What is the rhetoric about these tools and platforms?
• HIST-H685 History in the Digital Age: How can maps, text mining, databases, and visualization tools change the way we think about history? Should they? Historians and other humanities scholars now have a vast array of digital methodologies and technologies available for use in our own research, in teaching, and to engage the public outside of academia. This course will systematically examine how these approaches affect humanities scholars broadly, and historical practice in particular, by focusing on the intersection of digital history’s technical, theoretical and methodological perspectives and concerns. The lively debate between academic technoenthusiasts and techno-skeptics will help us build a theoretical foundation to understand the implications of collective knowledge building that comes from using digital tools. We can then push these theoretical boundaries in order to address more practical questions about how to analyze, manage, represent and interact with primary-source materials, both in terms of what is possible as a field and in terms of what is wise for us individually. Course assignments will allow you to invest time in evaluating and learning the tools you will need for your own scholarly endeavors. You will be asked to lay the plans for a digital project related to your work, and to use your acquired expertise to educate your classmates. Note: No programming experience is assumed, but some familiarity with computers is a prerequisite. In consultation with the instructor, you will be asked to develop one or more technical proficiencies appropriate to your experience and your project (skills may include, but are not limited to, GIS, text mining, data visualization, encoding, and/or a programming language such as Python or R suited to customizing a tool for one of these approaches)
• HIST-H650 Mapping the Black Experience: This course focuses on the history of African American Migration during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (1865-1920). The course will consist of three components. First, we will study the history of African American migration, which includes but is not limited to movement between rural areas and cities (and vice versa), migration to the South and to the West, northbound migration, transnational migration, and immigration by the African Diaspora. Second, we will look at the historiography of black American migration. This will include an examination of the methodologies employed by digital history and digital humanities scholars. Third, we will conduct our own research projects on African American migration. Students may choose to primarily use qualitative or quantitative research methodologies, but all projects must include at least one original GIS map. Students may generate maps at the neighborhood, city, state, national, or transnational level.
• ISL-Z503 Representation and Organization: Introduces students to various disciplines’ approaches to the understanding, organization, representation (summarizing), and use of knowledge and information. This survey looks for commonality among the approaches taken in information science, cognitive psychology, semiotics, and artificial intelligence, among others. The goal is to identify criteria for evaluation and improvement of ways to organize and represent information for future retrieval. Information systems currently used in libraries and information centers will be studied as examples. Emphasis in the course is on concepts and ideas, with appropriate attention to terminology and technology.
• *ILS-Z511 Database Design: Concerned with a comprehensive view of the processes involved in developing formal access to information from a user-centered point of view. Considers various database models such as flat file, hierarchical, relational, and hypertext in terms of text, sound, numeric, image, and geographic data. Students will design and implement databases using several commercial database management systems. ILS Z512 Information Systems Design: Students identify, design, and implement a significant information design project, such as the redesign of a complex Web site for a local business, library, or nonprofit. Principles and practices of project management are discussed in the context of team-based web site redesign.
• ILS-Z514 Social Aspects of Information Technology: The objective of this course is to help students think critically and constructively about information & communication technology and its relationship to work, leisure, and society at large. This course covers a series of concepts and analytical devices as well as empirical case studies related to social consequences of information & communication technologies when it is shaped and used by individuals, public agencies, and businesses.
• ILS-Z515 Information Architecture: Effective information system design integrates knowledge of formal structures with understanding of social, technological, and cognitive environments. Drawing from a range of disciplines, this course investigates how people represent, organize, retrieve, and use information to inform the construction of information architectures that facilitate user understanding and navigation in conceptual space.
• ILS-Z516 Human-Computer Interaction: Examines the human factors associated with information technology and seeks to provide students with knowledge of the variables likely to influence the perceived usability, and hence the acceptability, of any information technology. In so doing it will enable students to progress further towards specialist’s work in the important field of human-computer interaction.
• *ILS-Z517 Web Programming: The main focus of this course is to instruct students to develop and implement dynamic and interactive web applications. In order to do so, students will learn the basics of an open source programming language both through lectures and hands-on exercises in the lab.
• ILS-Z518 Communication in Electronic Environments: Examines conceptual perspectives on information in organizations, covering topics such as types of information, information activities, organizational culture and information technology, communication as information flow, obtaining and using information from the environment, managing information in specialized extended communities, and ethical and quality issues. Focus varies by type of community studied.
• *ILS-Z532 Information Architecture for the Web: Focuses on Web site development. Students study information architecture as an approach for site organization and design, and learn about project management for complex web development tasks. In lab sessions, students work with advanced markup languages and scripting and develop sites, typically for real clients.
• *ILS-Z534 Information Retrieval: Theory and Practice: Introduces basic information retrieval (IR) theory and examines cutting- edge IR research in order to gain insights into how theory can be applied to practice. After learning about IR models, classification, clustering, Web IR, and fusion IR, students will explore how these IR methods can be employed in working IR systems to enhance the retrieval outcome.
• ILS-Z543 Computer-Mediated Communication: Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is human-to-human interaction via computer networks such as the Internet. This course examines potentials and constraints of several types of CMC, and considers how content and dynamics are influenced by the systems’ technical properties and the cultures that have grown up around their use.
• ILS-Z544 Gender and Computerization: This course explores the relationship between information communication technologies (ICTs) and the gender of the people who design, use, administer, and make policy concerning computer systems and computer networks such as the Internet.
• ILS-Z556 Systems Analysis and Design: This course introduces the basic concepts underlying systems analysis and design, focusing on contextual inquiry/design and data modeling, as well as the application of those analysis techniques in the analysis and design of organizational information systems.
• ILS-Z561 User Interface Design for Information Systems: This course focuses on established principles and methods to design effective interfaces for information systems, emphasizing document retrieval, filtering, visualization, correlation, analysis, and research.
• ILS-Z581 Archives and Records Management: Introduces basic theories, methods, and significant problems in archives and records management. The course also discusses how archivists are responding to the challenge of managing and preserving electronic records.
• ILS-Z604 Topics in Library and Information Science: Study of specific topics in librarianship and information science. May be repeated for credit when topic varies. Example DH-related topics have included: introduction to moving image preservation, social media mining, digital curation, audio preservation principles and practice, information networks, information ethics, scholarly communication area will vary depending on topic
• ILS-Z634 Metadata: Metadata is essential in designing and developing effective knowledge systems; it facilitates resource discovery, database documentation, and recording digital documents’ textual and conceptual histories. This course introduces principles supporting the development and implementation of metadata schemes, focusing on issues of interoperability, internal and external standardization, and evaluation.
• ILS-Z635 Ontologies: An ontology is a common semantic conceptualization of reality that is shared by members of a knowledge domain; it supports exchange of knowledge among participants. This course explores formal specifications for ontology construction among systems applications and software agents.
• ILS-Z637 Information Visualization: Introduces information visualization, highlighting processes which produce effective visualizations. Topics include perceptual basis of information visualization, data analysis to extract relationships, and interaction techniques.
• ILS-Z641 Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis: Computer-mediated discourse analysis (CMDA), applies theories from linguistic discourse analysis, pragmatics, ethnomethodology, and semiotics in the analysis of discourse-language and language use in computer-mediated communication. This course provides hands-on experience in applying empirical analytical methods, and in interpreting the results.
• ILS-Z642 Content Analysis for the Web: Application of Content Analysis methods to web documents, interactivity features, and links.
• ILS-Z652 Digital Libraries: Examines the design and operation of digital libraries and related electronic publishing practices from a socio- technical perspective. Students develop understanding of major issues, concepts, and trends, enabling them to understand the sociotechnical character of digital libraries that can and will be effectively supported and used by various groups.
• *ILS-Z656 Digital Publishing Standards and Systems: This course will teach students to design and publish documents on the Web and for common eBook platforms such as iBook and Kindle. We will learn about XML-based document formats (such as TEI, DocBook, Office Open XML) and eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT), a special-purpose programming language for transforming XML documents into other XML and non-XML formats. We will also learn to develop publications in common eBook formats, including ePub (iBook, etc.), AZW (Amazon Kindle), and KF8/AZW3 (Amazon Kindle).
• ILS-Z661 Concepts and Contemporary Issues in Human-Computer Interaction: Examines and assesses theoretical approaches developed specifically for understanding the use, informing the design, and assessing the value of information technologies. The course also considers contemporary issues surrounding the situated use of information technologies, such as emotional, embodiment, interpersonal, and social aspects of interaction.
• ILS-Z662 Interface Design for Collaborative Information Spaces: Provides an overview of two dimensional and three- dimensional interface design. Topics covered include task and user analysis, interface goals and design methods, and empirical evaluation.
• ILS-Z764 Seminar in Information Science: A doctoral seminar in IS introduces students to topic areas within the domain of information science (e.g., social informatics, scientometrics, information retrieval, representation and organization of resources, philosophy of information, human computer interaction, visualization). It is a reading-and-writing intensive experience and emphasizes depth over breadth. Recent seminar topics include: Scholarly Communication, Information Networks, and Social Aspects of Information Technology. Area will vary depending on topic
• *LING-L555 Programming for Computational Linguistics: This course is geared towards students concentrating in Computational Linguistics with little or no experience in programming; Linguistics students are welcome, too. It will introduce the fundamentals of programming and computer science, aiming at attaining practical skills for text processing. While we will work with Python, the main focus is more on introducing basic concepts in programming such as loops or functions. In contrast to similar courses in Computer Science, we will concentrate on problems in Computational Linguistics, which generally involve managing text, searching in text, and extracting information from text. For this reason, one part of the course will concentrate on regular expression search. Through lectures, lab sessions, and (bi-)weekly assignments, students will learn the essentials of Python and how to apply these skills to natural language data
• *LING-L545 Computation & Linguistic Analysis: L545 is a graduate course in natural language processing and computational linguistics. The course is concerned with concepts, models and algorithms to interpret, generate, and learn natural languages, as well as applications of NLP. The goal of the course is for the students to be familiar with basic concepts in NLP, understand the algorithms and methods for NLP, and acquire the skills for developing NLP tools. We will look at the different levels of linguistic analysis, morphology, morpho-syntax, syntax, and lexical semantics. Additionally, we will cover machine translation. No prior programming experience is assumed, computer experience presupposed.
• *LING-L645 Advanced Natural Language Processing: In recent years, statistical methods have become the standard in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). This course gives an introduction to statistical models and machine learning paradigms in NLP. Such methods are helpful for the following goals: reaching wide coverage, reducing ambiguity, automatic learning, increasing robustness, etc. In this course, we will cover basic notions in statistics, focused on the concepts needed for NLP. Then we will discuss (Hidden) Markov Models, exemplified by an approach to POS tagging. The following sessions will be dedicated to probabilistic approaches to parsing. In the second half of the course, we will cover semantic and discourse annotation, and in the final part, we will look at applications, such as machine translation, sentiment analysis, and dialogue systems.
• LING-L615 Corpus Linguistics: Advances in computer technology have revolutionized the ways linguists can approach their data. By using computers, we can access large bodies of text (corpora) and search for the phenomena in which we are interested. Corpora give us a chance to uncover complexities in naturally-occurring data and explore issues related to frequency of usage. In this course, we will approach the following questions such as the following: What exactly is a corpus, and what isn't? What corpora exist? How are corpora developed? What is XML, and why do we need it? How do we find a specific phenomenon in a large corpus? What is a concordancer? Do we need part-of-speech, syntactic, or semantic annotation? Are there programs that do the annotation for me? Are there tools that help me search in linguistically annotated corpora? No programming experience is assumed, familiarity with computers is presupposed.
• MSCH-T580 Interactive Storytelling and Computer Games: This course will approach storytelling and game design from the perspective that, in design, there is no hierarchy of theory and practice: Making is thinking and thinking is making. The course will be structured like a design workshop and encourage an open context for collaboration. We will focus on design concepts and prototypes that explore the intersections of story, interface, networks, games, and both persistent and mobile platforms in contemporary interactive media. Course work will include reading, writing, design concepts, design documents and prototypes. No previous technical knowledge is required. T580 is about the exploration and development of ideas. Students should finish this course with an entirely new set of thoughts, plans, and goals related to their work as a new or continuing graduate student.
• MSCH-C792 Advanced Seminar in Media Theory, Topic: Between Casual and Complicated: Bridging Qualitative and Computational Approaches to Digital Media Studies. Communication and Media Studies scholarship has long struggled with when and how to best weave together quantitative and qualitative approaches to lines of inquiry. Even when they could be used to complement each other, computational and critical methodological tools are often positioned as "at odds" with or epistemologically antithetical to each other. While methodologies always hinge on the research question at hand, no question about the social, political, or personal implications or meaning of emerging media can ignore the need to consider the role of "big data" or presence of digitally-mediated social networks as artifacts of everyday media engagements. Rather than assume that causal inference and qualitative, critical interpretation are epistemological chasms, what could it look like to bridge computational and qualitative divides? Can we identify ways to study Tweets, Likes, and other social media exhaust that integrate rather than polarize robust, quantitative and nuanced, qualitative techniques? This course examines strategies for investigating media rich, data-intensive problems that require sifting and sorting through massive amounts of material generated through engagement with social networks, data sensors, or other disparate, mediated archives. We examine ways to effectively and rigorous extract, interpret, and learn from very large datasets that require a new generation of scalable tools as well as new data management technologies, and interpretative frames.
• MSCH-C 620: Media, Politics and Power, Topic: Digital Media Access. “Access” and “openness” have become ubiquitous ways of describing digital media’s potential benefits. In this course, we will investigate many of the meanings of “access” and “openness,” particularly in relation to digital media. We will look to histories of common carriage and universal service, as well as literature concerning the public sphere, and a range of demographic and theoretical understandings of the Digital Divide. Readings will include material on a range of digital media types, uses, and users, and throughout, we will look to differences in identity such as disability, race, gender, age, and geography. Students are encouraged to bring alternate understandings of access or openness to the class for discussion, as well. In addition to theoretical and critical analysis of these phenomena, this class will consider how digital texts, tools, and other services might best be made available and usable to various audiences via particular design and coding strategies. Although the standard assessments include a short “access analysis” of a particular digital media example and a final research paper of roughly 7000 words, alternate forms of evaluation are possible at student request, including video essays, podcasts, or community-based projects.
• THTR-608 Advanced Flat Patterning: The course objective is to manipulate flat patterns through a variety of methods, including digitizing them and using the program Optitex to adjust them. The ability to see the flat pattern 13 on a 3D rendered model allows the visualization of movement, weight, texture and type of fabric. Optitex works seamlessly between the 2D flat pattern and the 3D digital model allowing for a back and forth that expands the patternmaker's ability to drape and pattern for a designer.
• THTR-347 Intro to Sound Design and THTR 447 Sound Design I: Both courses are almost entirely computer-based, and use digital systems for recording, editing, creating sound effects and music that is to be used in theatre, film, multimedia and dance productions. The playback systems we use are now digital in terms of controlling and manipulating the sounds effects, recorded music and controlling and manipulating live actors and musicians. These courses focus heavily on the interactions between sound, music, technology and other art forms.