This course provides a foundation in the history, concepts, methodologies, and tools of digital humanities research. Students learn to critically evaluate and incorporate computational and data-driven methods into their research, as well as achieve a baseline fluency in accessing, filtering, and analyzing humanities datasets. No prerequisites or preexisting technical skills are required. Students working with texts, images, and artifacts are welcome.

Data and data-empowered algorithms shape our professional, personal, and political realities. They also increasingly shape how we are able to access and tell stories about the past. This course introduces students to the history of data practices so as to better understand the future we are building together as scholars, scientists, and citizens. In covering the history of the human use of data, we will learn how data are used to reveal insight and support decisions, how data-driven practices make historical and literary arguments, and how data and culture are fundamentally intertwined.

How did the introduction of new text technologies impact premodern culture? What motivated or delayed the adoption of the codex or the various types of print? Did these technologies encourage new practices or suppress old ones? And how does the story change when we turn from European to Near Eastern contexts? By learning about past text technologies, we'll gain a fuller understanding of how today's digital text technologies leave their mark on how we interact with texts and with the world. This course teaches relevant digital humanities methods for texts and reflects critically on both our current moment and premodern pasts.

This course trains graduate students to work directly with documents from the Cairo Geniza, one of the largest and most varied documentary corpora to have survived from the pre-Ottoman Middle East. Students learn to find and decipher published and unpublished Geniza documents relevant to their research interests and become familiar with a range of tools for interpreting them as historical evidence. Arabic proficiency is required.