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COURSES

The programme consists of four required courses in Humanities Computing, an additional five (a minimum of two of these must be from Humanities Computing options courses and a minimum of two from courses in the home department), and a final thesis.

Home departments will determine the number of required courses in an students' area of specialization (two or three courses is typical).

Required


Options


HUCO 500 — Survey of Humanities Computing

Sample Course Syllabus — 2004 (pdf)

This course will provide students with an overview of the discipline of Humanities Computing and its varied applications across the program's participating Departments. Topics covered will change according to movements and trends within the discipline but the course should enable students to situate their own research interests within the broader framework of Humanities Computing and to make informed choices about how they structure the rest of their program. Existing research methodologies and projects will be showcased and critiqued. Topics could include but are by no means limited to: digitization of text, sound, and image; hypertext design and delivery; databases; text-analysis; statistical methods and analysis; knowledge representation and markup languages; electronic publishing and dissemination; and computers and culture. Upon completion of the course students will be able to situate their own research interests within the larger context of humanities computing, evaluate existing methodologies and projects, consider the ability of computer systems to represent knowledge, and analyze the impact of technology on research in the humanities. HUCO-500 is designed to be accompanied by HUCO-520, a more technically oriented course.

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HUCO 510 — Theoretical Issues in Humanities Computing

Sample Course Syllabus — 2011 (pdf)

This seminar course will provide students with the opportunity to investigate the theories that underpin the relationship of computing methods to humanities research. Students will deepen their understanding of communications theory, information systems, knowledge representation, and related social questions. Humanities computing can be understood as having three main branches. In the first branch, computing is used to facilitate research on humanities questions, in some cases by providing better access to materials, in others by providing software tools through which the analytical processes used by humanities scholars can be supported. In the second branch, computing itself serves as the object of study, and the physical, cognitive, technological, interpersonal, and cultural aspects of computing are subjected to analysis. In the third branch, humanities computing is generative, and scholars produce and disseminate new materials in electronic forms. Topics for this course may be drawn from any of these three branches, and may therefore include but are not limited to such areas as the history and philosophy of science, epistemology, art and design, online education, interface design, text visualization, and cyberculture.

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HUCO 520 — Technical Concepts & Approaches in Humanities Computing

Sample Course Syllabus — 2007 (pdf)

This course will provide students with an understanding of the technical aspects of Humanities Computing and an introduction to underlying computer methods - it is the companion course of the more theoretical HUCO-500 course. Students will gain technical skills that allow them to assess the nature of research problems in the Humanities and learn either to address these problems themselves or to discuss design issues with computer specialists. Whereas HUCO-500 has readings associated with each week's meeting, HUCO-520 will have weekly assignments.

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HUCO 530 — Project Design & Management in Humanities Computing

Sample Course Syllabus — 2005 (pdf)

Humanities Computing research is unlike traditional humanities research in many respects: the scope of projects usually extends beyond the single-scholar research model, the computer tools needed for research are expensive and the technology changes rapidly, electronic publishing is a largely unknown and expensive undertaking rarely tackled by conventional print publishers, and electronic research requires updating and maintenance beyond project funding. This course will prepare students for the various aspects of designing, implementing, managing, and maintaining a Humanities Computing research project.

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HUCO 612 — Electronic Texts

This half-year course critically surveys the use, creation, and publication of electronic texts in the humanities. Students will interact directly with a variety of published electronic texts in addition to gaining the foundational scholarly and technical skills to create their own. To this end, class time will alternate between practice and discussion, building from a wide-ranging set of critical and theoretical readings that engage the methodological and intellectual challenges faced by the creators and users of humanities-based electronic resources. Topics to be addressed include, but are not limited to: genres and kinds of electronic texts; electronic texts and literary critical practice, including linguistic and thematic analysis; markup theory and technique, concentrating on XML; hypertext and hypertextuality; and electronic publishing.

While the course is largely focussed on electronic texts produced in and for humanities computing research projects, students will gain broadly applicable skills for assessing, manipulating, creating, and publishing electronic texts in a variety of academic and vocational settings.

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HUCO 614 — Knowledge Management and Analysis in the Humanities

Sample Course Syllabus — 2005 (pdf)

This seminar course will provide students with the opportunity to examine issues involved in knowledge management and analysis. Specifically, we will be talking about the creation and dissemination of online information, from the perspective of the phenomenological approach to interface design formulated almost twenty years ago by Winograd and Flores (1986). The principle identified here is that the user engages in the active creation of meaning in collaboration with the interface designers and the resulting system. Interfaces and the information systems they access can therefore be understood to exist in much the same way that language exists within a context of conversation. This course includes a Community Service Learning component.

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HUCO 616 — Multimedia in the Humanities

Course Syllabus — 2004 (pdf)

This course will explore the cultural, social and technical significance of multimedia as an expressive medium. The course will explore the range of media types: text, images, animation, sound, and video; digital imaging and design, encoding, compression, etc.; politics and economics of access to multimedia; computer gaming and on-line gaming communities; and multimedia research and teaching.

HUCO 617 — Posthumanism

(Not offered every year.)

This course will examine one of the rising topics in cyberculture studies: the future of humanity. While some scholars like Tizianna Terranova imagine an evolutionary path in which humans and technology merge seamlessly, others like Francis Fukuyama are concerned that current biotechnology not only subverts traditional human values but may actually signal the end of the human. Hans Moravec wants to download himself into a computer; Katherine Hayles argues that we are already posthuman. Our goal will be to map out these debates by contextualizing them against the concepts of Enlightenment humanism that had their early roots in the Renaissance.

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HUCO 620 — Research Methods in Humanities Computing

This seminar course will introduce students to the wide range of research methods being used in the humanities in general, and in humanities computing in particular. It is often the case that humanities computing research methods are an extension of traditional methods, although in some instances humanities computing also introduces new methods. For many research projects it is necessary to adopt more than one research method in order to obtain a satisfactory result.

In addition to the survey of research methods, students will also gain hands-on experience in conducting a literature review and writing an annotated bibliography. They will also go through the process of identifying and selecting an appropriate research method for a small project of their choice, usually related to their thesis, and carrying out the project.

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HUCO 618 — Directed Reading in Humanities Computing

Directed Reading courses are not automatically offered every term. If you're interested in a directed reading, you'll need to contact a professor who would be interested in leading it and then you'll develop a reading list in consultation with that professor.

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