Schedule

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.

🛝 slides

📖 readings

• Meredith Whittaker, “The Steep Cost of Capture,” Interactions 28, no. 6 (November 10, 2021): 50–55.
• Matthew Kirschenbaum, “The US of AI,” Public Draft, February 25, 2025.
• Lise Jaillant and Lingjia Zhao, “Introduction: When Data Turns into Archives: Making Digital Records More Accessible with AI,” AI & SOCIETY 40, no. 8 (2025): 5787–91.
• Optional
  • A.W. Prihandita, “Negative Scholarship on the Fifth State of Being,” Clarkesworld, Issue 218 (November 2024). Audio version.

HISTORIES

Wk. 02 | Feb 04 | Histories of the Humanities

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.”

🛝 slides

📖 readings

• Eric Hayot, Humanist Reason: A History. An Argument. A Plan (Columbia University Press, 2021), Chapters 1 & 4.
  • 🎤 Mileena
• Helen Small, The Value of the Humanities, (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2013). Introduction.
  • 🎤 Shreya
• Rens Bod, A New History of the Humanities (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2014), Introduction: “The Quest for Principles and Patterns.”
• Lindsay Thomas and Abigail Droge, “What We Learned About the Humanities from a Study of Thousands of Newspaper Articles,” Journal of Cultural Analytics, May 24, 2022.
• Recommended but not required
  • 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.

🛝 slides

📖 readings

• 1940s: Arun Jacob, “Punching Holes in the International Busa Machine Narrative,” in Alternative Historiographies of the Digital Humanities, ed. Dorothy Kim and Adeline Koh (Punctum Books, 2021), 121–44.
• 1950s: Brad Pasanek, “Extreme Reading: Josephine Miles and the Scale of the Pre-Digital Digital Humanities,” ELH 86, no. 2 (2019): 355–85.
• 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).
• Recommended but not required
  • Melissa M. Terras, “For Ada Lovelace Day—Father Busa’s Female Punch Card Operatives,” Melissa Terras’ Blog, October 15, 2013.
  • Jerome McGann, “Philology in a New Key,” Critical Inquiry 39.2 (Winter 2013): 327-46.
  • Chris Alen Sula and Heather V. Hill, “The Early History of Digital Humanities: An Analysis of Computers and the Humanities (1966–2004) and Literary and Linguistic Computing (1986–2004),” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 34, Supplement 1 (December 2019): 190–206.
  • Sharon M. Leon, “Complicating a ‘Great Man’ Narrative of Digital History,” in Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and Digital Humanities, (Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 2018), 344-68.

🛠️ exercises

• Intro to the Command Line
• Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) guide for Windows users
• Resources
  • Command Line Cheat Sheet
  • Explain Shell: Full explanation of any command

DH TODAY

Wk. 04 | Feb 18 | DH Today: Meaning & Signal

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? Then, new tools for old ideas: hypertext, personal knowledge management, research notes, and Obsidian.

🛝 slides

📖 readings

• Lauren Klein et al., “Provocations from the Humanities for Generative AI Research,” preprint, arXiv, February 26, 2025.
• Lauren Tilton et al., “What Gets Counted: Computational Humanities under Revision,” in Computational Humanities, Debates in the Digital Humanities (University Of Minnesota Press, 2024).
• Alan Liu, “Data Science and the Post-Liberal Arts University,” Critical Inquiry 51, no. 4 (2025): 597–618, https://doi.org/10.1086/735621.
  • 🎤 Annie & Amber
• Olivia Guest et al., “Against the Uncritical Adoption of ‘AI’ Technologies in Academia,” preprint, Zenodo, September 5, 2025.
• Tom Scheinfeldt, “Meet AcadiMeet; or, Adventures in Vibe Coding,” Found History, October 20, 2025, https://foundhistory.org/meet-acadimeet-or-adventures-in-vibe-coding/.
• Marisa Parham, “.break .dance.”, archipelagos journal, no. 3 (July 2019).
• Recommended but not required
  • Rabea Kleymann et al., “Foreword to Special Issue on ‘Theorytellings: Epistemic Narratives in the Digital Humanities,’” Cultural Analytics 7, no. 4 (November 2022).
  • Antonija Primorac et al., “Distant Reading Two Decades On: Reflections on the Digital Turn in the Study of Literature,” Digital Studies / Le Champ Numérique 13, no. 1 (October 25, 2023).

🛠️ exercises

• Use Obsidian to discuss plain text, hypertext, relational databases, personal knowledge management. Download starter vault.

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.

🛝 slides

📖 readings

• 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.
• Matthew Wilkens, “What Instagram and Community Colleges Tell Us about the Future of Digital Humanities,” American Literary History 37, no. 4 (2025): 1095–103.
• Leif Weatherby, Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism (Univ. Minnesota Press, 2025), Introduction & Conclusion.
• Underwood, McGrath, So, & Wellmon, “Culture, Theory, Data: An Introduction” to special issue, New Literary History 53, no. 4 (Winter 2023).
• Recommended but not required
  • Steven Ruggles, “The Revival of Quantification: Reflections on Old New Histories,” Social Science History 45, no. 1 (2021): 1–25.

🛠️ exercises

Find a dataset in your discipline (preferably a .CSV) by browsing the following collections:

• Responsible Datasets in Context, eds. Fernandez, Posner, Preus, Singh, & Walsh
• Post45 Data Collective, eds. Walsh, Manshel, Porter
• Amanda Wyatt Visconti. “Interesting digital humanities data sources,” UVA Scholars Lab Blog, (August 26, 2025).
• Matt Lavin’s Humanities Data
• Journal of Open Humanities Data
• Jeremy Singer-Vine’s Data Is Plural archive
• The Pudding’s data repository
• CDH-curated list of humanities datasets

WHAT IS DATA

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.
  • 🎤 Olga
• 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
• Review and discuss final project options.

🏝️ Spring Break 🏝️

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Wk. 07 | Mar 18 | The Sociocultural Context of AI

• Kate Crawford & Vladan Joler, “Calculating Empires” & “Anatomy of an AI System”
• Emily Bender et al., “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?,” FAccT ’21, March 3, 2021.
  • 🎤 Emery
• 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.
• Madhumita Murgia, “Generative AI exists because of the transformer: this is how it works,” Financial Times (September 2023).

Wk. 08 | Mar 25 | AI as a Paradigm Shift

• Henry Farrell, Alison Gopnik, Cosma Shalizi and James Evans (2025), “Large AI Models are Cultural and Social Technologies,” Science.
• Arvind Narayanan & Sayash Kapoor (2025), AI as Normal Technology (Knight Foundation).
  • 🎤 Tina
• Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, Power and Progress: Our 1,000-Year Struggle Over Technology & Prosperity (Public Affairs, 2023), mini comic version.

Wk. 09 | Apr 01 | DH and the Environment

🎤 Amy

• Photini Vrikki and Güneş Tavmen, “Rewiring Digital Humanities through an Ethics of Ecological Care,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 019, no. 3 (2025).
• 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.
• James O’Sullivan and Mark Kelly, “Environmental Contradictions of Large Language Models in Higher Education,” UNESCO IdeasLAB, December 16, 2025.
• Tianqi Xiao et al., “Environmental Impact and Net-Zero Pathways for Sustainable Artificial Intelligence Servers in the USA,” Nature Sustainability 8, no. 12 (2025): 1541–53.
• Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI (Penguin Press, 2025). Chapter 12: Plundered Earth.

Wk. 10 | Apr 08 | Knowledge Work, Automation, and Scholarship

• On automated text recognition (ATR) and vision language models (VLMs)
  • Mark Humphries, “Gemini 3 Solves Handwriting Recognition and it’s a Bitter Lesson,” Generative History (Substack)
    • 🎤 Nat
  • Dan Cohen, “The Writing is on the Wall for Handwriting Recognition,” Humane Ingenuity (Buttondown)
    • 🎤 Kaylee
• Colin Milburn and Rita Raley, “Inappropriate AI,” Foundry: University of California Humanities Research Institute, December 2025.
• Matteo Pasquinelli, “How a Machine Learns and Fails: A Grammar of Error for Artificial Intelligence,” Spheres 5 (2019): 1–17.

Wk. 11 | Apr 15 | The Politics of Tools

• Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?,” Daedalus 109, no. 1 (1980): 121–36.
• Karin van Es, “Unpacking Tool Criticism as Practice, in Practice,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 17, no. 2 (2023).

PROJECTS

Wk. 12 | Apr 22 | Project Proposal Presentations

• Prepare and discuss, in this closing week, your final projects.
• Potential discussion of computational portion of dissertation in preparation for Graduate Certificate in DH.