The DSAM Seminar is designed to prepare students to undertake independent digital projects in scholarly or creative modes, with applications to each student's own home fields in the humanities and allied social sciences. Each week, we'll divide time between reflective discussion informed by assigned readings and hands-on practice with digital tools and platforms. In addition to smaller skill-building exercises, students will iteratively develop a more sustained project of their own choosing – with feedback from the professor and peers to help keep the scope both tractable and compelling. No prior experience in digital research is necessary.
Students in this course can expect to...
- respond orally and in writing to the ideas and strategies in both fellow students’ and assigned texts, engaging in critical generosity and generous criticality
- reflect frequently, including in writing, on your work and the feedback it receives from its audiences, examining processes as well as products
- appreciate the human subjectivity involved in parsing real-world phenomena to make them tractable by computers
- understand basic programming concepts, even if you’ve never programmed before
- propose, design, iterate, and present an original investigation in your own scholarly domain whose construction relies on the use of digital technologies
- reflect frequently, including in writing, on the larger implications of the theories and tools we study as a class
Students in this course can expect their professor to…
- respond orally and in writing to the ideas and writing strategies in both students’ and assigned texts, engaging in critical generosity and generous criticality
- provide example arguments of the kind he asks students to produce, and lead discussion of their organizational and rhetorical features
- provide theoretical frameworks for understanding and/or generating questions about digital studies and methods
- discuss rationales for what each exercise is designed to do, and why it ought to work
- encourage students to retry earlier exercises in later contexts, to support the development of expertise
- share and reflect on his own work, subject to the same principles of critical generosity and generous criticality that will govern peer review in the class
- encourage collaboration in both formal and informal learning projects throughout the course
- build flexibility into per-class and semester-long schedules, with extension activities and fallback options, to be responsive to the different speeds and competing pressures students bring to bear on the work of the course