Digital Humanities

The course focuses on unconventional historical sources and approaches including oral, spatial, computational, and digital history. Conventional written sources typically reflect the biases of a small elite. Oral history can be used to recapture the history of individuals, groups, and phenomena that written sources have erased. Spatial history (through the use of Geographic Information Systems or GIS), digital history, and computational history greatly enrich the study of the past by adding new types of data and by offering platforms to integrate a great variety of sources in new multi-dimensional, multi-media, and interactive formats.

A period, problem, or theme in ancient history or religion with critical attention to the ancient sources and modern discussions. The topic and instructor vary from year to year. Format will change each time, depending on enrollment.

Are robots racist? Is software sexist? Are neural networks neutral? From everyday apps to complex algorithms, technology has the potential to hide, speed up, and even deepen discrimination. Using the Black Mirror TV series as a starting point, we will explore a range of emerging technologies that encode inequity in digital platforms and automated decisions systems, and develop a conceptual toolkit to decode tech promises with sociologically informed skepticism. Students will apply design justice principles in a collaborative project and learn to communicate course insights to tech practitioners, policy makers, and the broader public.