Creativity in the face of annihilation, art in the absence of attention, activism to oppose apathy… culture from the point of invention.

Sensing a commercialization and trivialization of the music they loved, the originators of Hardcore Punk in the United States created a subversive art form that rebelled against and provided a commentary on both the music scene and the culture at large in the early 1980s. Through an improvised network made up of record labels, self-made publications and teenaged event promoters, hardcore punkers built both a community and an unconscious folk art movement whose impact continues to be felt thirty-five years later. This course traces the origins of this underground culture, following its growth throughout the country and showing the subversive and enduring cultural impact the Hardcore Punk scene has had on America since its inception in the early 1980’s. Course Site

This course asks how new technologies, changes in our approaches to data, new forms of social communication, and dramatic changes in the way we get our news have fundamentally changed the experience of being a citizen. Students read about the transition of old media to new and the change in journalistic practices and news consumption that have resulted. The course delves deeply into the positives and negatives of social media on the experience of the public sphere and political discourse and look at the power of online spaces to enable organization and political protest. It also closely considers how maps and polls both reveal political structures and become filters by which the experience of being a citizen is delineated. Course Site

In this course, students participate in the conceptualization and development of an exhibition on the history of the design of computer devices. Class visits from curators, conservators, technologists, and programmers are supplemented by readings on curation techniques and on the treatment computers as objects of cultural heritage.

We study the changes in the shape, design, and technological capacities of devices, the organization of the computer marketplace, and the cultural significance of computers. Readings by design thinkers such as Don Norman, Alan Kay, Bill Moggridge, and Brenda Laurel are balanced with critical theory from Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, and Bruno Latour, and media theory from Marshall McLuhan, Lisa Gitelman, and Stuart Hall. Course Site

The Information Age has provided us with both a flood of measurable data and a variety of new tools to analyze and present that data. This course considers how the analysis and visualization of information through digital technologies has significantly changed the way we look at our world both within the academic community and in society at large. The analysis portion of the class begins with an understanding of the ontologies of data and metadata and addresses analysis techniques such as distant reading, topic modeling, text encoding, and text analysis. The visualization portion of the class interrogates just what it means to visualize an argument and includes both a critique of and experimentation with timelines, maps, infographics, charts, and visual confections that are used as alternatives to textual explanation. Along with practical work with digital tools for analyzing and visualizing humanities data, such as AbbyFine, Voyant, Topic Modeling Tool, ArcGIS, and Agisoft Metashape, this course includes readings by authors such as Tara MacPherson, Johanna Drucker, Edward Tufte, Franco Moretti, Stephen Ramsay, David Staley, Todd Presner, and Anthony Grafton. Course Site

Two of the most important aspects of digital media are their capacity to allow for the organization of and creation of connections between data. Collecting and connecting technologies have enabled the development of complex information management and network creation systems, which are the foundations of everyday experience in the digital age. Because these systems play such a significant role in how we communicate with one another they are critical to understanding how new media can play a role in public discourse and scholarly conversations. This course considers how databases and networking tools allow us to organize the digital world and how different tools and platforms, such as WordPress, Omeka, Gephi, Twitter, and Instagram, allow us to curate the things in our world and share our experiences. It also considers how we can analyze these networks and collections to present intellectual arguments in new ways and tell more compelling stories. Along with practical work with digital tools, this course includes readings on network culture and digital curation by authors such as McLuhan, Gitelman, Castells, Shirky, Manovich, Cohen, Ramsay, and Galloway. Course Site

This course considers the centrality of media technologies in the experience of culture by assessing the impact of books, film, records, tapes, disks, and even architectural spaces such as cinemas, on cultural development. Along with readings, discussion, and presentations, students in the course tell the story of cultural change in media and materiality by working together to construct a web publication using the digital humanities platform Omeka. As such, this course is strongly project-based. Students play a role in the material studied and are responsible for designing and building the course’s publication. In the process of gathering materials and creating work for this publication, students practice a wide range of methods including object analysis, visualization, and chronography, and consider theoretical works from a variety of disciplines including media studies, material culture studies, sociology of culture, political economics, and the history of technology. Readings include work by Walter Benjamin, Marshall McLuhan, Bruno Latour, Lisa Gitelman, Pierre Bourdieu, etc. Project Site, Course Site

The course includes readings across a wide range of methodologies and fields relevant to digital humanities, visual design, and the history of gender and sexuality from authors such as Katz, Baudrillard, Butler, Carr, McLuhan, Phelan, Sedgewick, Traub, and Tufte. Through workshops and practical sessions, students work with a variety of materials in different media and gain experience with a range of accessible digital platforms, such as WordPress, Omeka, and Timeline JS. Furthermore, students are asked to develop prototypes for the site that expand its display possibilities and consider how the site can act as a digital archives for important documents from LGBTQ that aren’t housed in existing archives. Course projects include essays based on original research, the creation of timelines and other forms of visual chronographies, and collaboratively designed prototypes and information architectures for a redesign of OutHistory.org. Course Site

This class uses science fiction to explore how we understand ourselves in a perpetually shifting present and to look closely at how and why we cast ourselves into the future, into alternative contemporary realities, into variations on being. These conjurings suggest vastly different possibilities of what it means to be human — indeed, what it means to be sentient.

If the genre once suffered from a certain lack of respect when compared to “proper” literary forms, it has always enjoyed a devoted readership, and in recent years it has attracted serious attention from scholars in many disciplines. Using a combination of anthropological analysis and critical theory, we will study science fiction to consider the influences that inspired often radically inventive forms of liberation, repression, social organization, economic structure, linguistic variation, gender norms, political arrangement, and configurations of self, both human and otherwise. This, in turn, illuminates assumptions that marked some of the larger cultural contexts in which these texts were created while illustrating changes in specific manifestations of the imaginary.

The semester starts with history and definitions, explores in depth a particularly well-known classic, and consider culturally significant iterations of science fiction by focusing on distinct but overlapping themes. Course Site

As the digital medium has exploded over the last forty or so years, devices, data, networks, and new modes of visual expression have changed our perception of and ability to express our sense of where we are and how we perceive landscapes of experience. As a result, notions of space and place, and a desire to express the situatedness of lived experience and historical narratives, have come increasingly to the fore in humanities and the social sciences. At the same time, interdisciplinary fields such as geography and digital humanities have looked to provide new lenses on the worlds around us (both physical and virtual) and new tools with which to share our stories of traveling through different places.

These changes reflect our increasing capacity to capture and express geographical information through new tools for doing work in what has come to be called the “spatial humanities.” This course explores our new perceptions of space and place relative to data and data structures both creatively and critically, including questioning how the epistemological tendencies of specific tools–and geographic information systems (GIS) as a whole–impact our perception of the world. Immersing ourselves in contemporary geographical thought, including discussions of space and place in everyday life, and experimentation with new tools and practices, this course teach students to frame narratives through maps and other spatial visualization tools with a critical understanding that allows them to properly situates facts and stories in the digital landscape. Course Site

While methodology courses are found in many graduate programs, that practice faces challenges in the setting of an interdisciplinary studies program. Because the Center for Experimental Humanities is predicated on methodological experimentation and encourages the intermingling of methods from a diverse array of schools of thought, the traditional approach of defining a core set of methodologies is in some ways anathema to the program’s mission.

So we must ask then, “what is an interdisciplinary methodology?” This course does not seek to answer this question but persistently reposes the question over the course of a semester. Rather than being taught a series of established approaches and schema, students will explore how to understand the parameters of traditional disciplinary methodologies, how to deconstruct their functions and histories, and how to rethink their application and even develop their own methodological approaches to their work. Course Site