This list is subject to change according to the interests of the group and the direction our conversations take.
BEARINGS
Wk. 01 | Jan 28 | Introductions; Platforms; AI
Introduction to the Center for Digital Humanities, our allied centers on campus, the class, the platforms we’ll use, and how the latest conversations on artificial intelligence intersect with humanities research. Briefly: distributional semantics, generative text, research infrastructures across industry & academia.
The history of science is a well-established field of research. What about the history of the humanities? This week we read accounts of the history of the humanities from antiquity to the present, and arguments for the distinct form of reasoning found in the humanities. Also: The idiographic and the nomothetic. The humanities’ relationship to truth claims. Pattern recognition across “the two cultures.”
Jerry A. Jacobs, In Defense of Disciplines: Interdisciplinarity and Specialization in the Research University (Chicago ; London: University Of Chicago Press, 2014).
🛠️ exercises
Review list of departments and programs classified as Humanities and as Social Sciences at Princeton.
Wk. 03 | Feb 11 | Histories of DH: From IBM to the Big Tent
How are DH scholars revising our understanding of DH’s history to include forgotten figures, war machines, and bulletin boards? What did analog, manual approaches to quantification look like in the past? What was the state of “Big Tent” DH c. 2012? As we read about the use of older computing technologies, we’ll learn how to use the Unix command line.
1990s: Claire Warwick, Digital Humanities and the Cyberspace Decade, 1990-2001: A World Elsewhere (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024), Chapters 1, 5, 6.
2000s: Michael Hancher, “Re: Search and Close Reading,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016 (University of Minnesota Press, 2016).
What is the state of the digital humanities today? How are institutions thinking about the intersection of data science with well-established DH methods? How do researchers from various disciplinary backgrounds construe “meaning” differently?
Rabea Kleymann et al., “Foreword to Special Issue on ‘Theorytellings: Epistemic Narratives in the Digital Humanities,’” Cultural Analytics 7, no. 4 (November 2022).
Plain text, hyperlinks, relational databases, personal knowledge management.
Wk. 05 | Feb 25 | Is “DH” Now Just “H”?
". . . studying culture with data is no longer a specialized practice. . . . It is something most scholars already do, consciously or not." How are scholars attempting to establish a new theoretical lingua franca? How has transdisciplinarity in digital humanities paved the way for these experiments? Then, data: tabular, tidy, structured, FAIR.
Read a chapter relevant to your field from one volume in the Debates in DH series (University of Minnesota Press). Come prepared to share a bit about what you’ve read.
Leif Weatherby, Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism (Univ. Minnesota Press, 2025)
Introduction: AI between Cognition and Culture
Chapter 4: Large Literary Machines
Chapter 5: Computational Meaning: For a General Poetics
Conclusion: Language as a Service, or the Return of Rhetoric
Wk. 06 | Mar 04 | Scraping & Curating Structured Data
Katie Rawson and Trevor Muñoz, “Against Cleaning,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019 (Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 2019).
🎤 Rachel
Henk Alkemade et al., “Datasheets for Digital Cultural Heritage Datasets,” Journal of Open Humanities Data 9, no. 1 (October 30, 2023): 17, https://doi.org/10.5334/johd.124.
C. Thi Nguyen (2024), “The Limits of Data,” Issues in Science and Technology 40, 2.
Recommended but not required
Jessica Marie Johnson, “Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads,” Social Text 36, no. 4 (137) (December 1, 2018): 57–79, https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-7145658.
Daniel Rosenberg, “Data Before the Fact,” in “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron, ed. Lisa Gitelman (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013), 15–40.
Marisa Elena Duarte and Miranda Belarde-Lewis, “Imagining: Creating Spaces for Indigenous Ontologies,” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 53, no. 5–6 (July 4, 2015): 677–702, https://doi.org/10.1080/01639374.2015.1018396
🛠️ exercises
Introduction to OpenRefine, a tool for working with messy data. Bryan Winston, Digital Scholarship Specialist, Princeton University Libraries
Qiaoyu Cai, “The Cultural Politics of Artificial Intelligence in China,” Theory, Culture & Society 42, no. 3 (2025): 21–40, https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764241304718.
Javier Cha & Ian M. Miller, “Digital Humanities and the Energetics of Big Data,” Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities, Debates in Digital Humanities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2026), 113-131.