Introduction to varieties of literary and cultural theory used in the analysis of literary texts and other cultural artefacts.

The concept of a network—a connected graph consisting of nodes and edges—is a powerful heuristic useful for thinking about cultural phenomena, particularly in the realms of criticism, artistic production and circulation, and the works of art themselves, be they literary or visual. The application of networks to rich data from the humanities and humanistic social sciences is often hampered in multiple ways. The access to or creation of networks from information that is not inherently structured as such can be a daunting problem. Even after one has created a network(ed) representation of a research corpus, the next steps can be somewhat opaque. Finally, the analysis and visualization of such networks can be difficult. This course aims to bring the techniques of network creation, analysis and visualization to a broad audience of graduate students in the Humanities and humanistic Social Sciences. The course will take students from early discussions about networks and their usefulness to model complex Humanities research corpora, to a final project focused on a student’s own research questions. Students will learn how to: (a) create networks from a range of Humanities resources, (b) general features of different types of networks, (c) standard network statistics and metrics, (d) the analysis of subgraphs and network motifs, (e) dynamic representations of time varying data, and (f) network visualization. In the first half of the course, weekly readings will be coupled with in-class hands-on sessions. The second half of the course will focus on project-based work. At the end of the course, students will be able to start incorporating network analysis into their own research. While some familiarity with computing in the Humanities may be helpful, it is not necessary and all students are welcome. .

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.