Repository for spring term 2022 Computational Comparative Literature course.
Dartmouth College
Spring 2022
Laura A. Chapot
laura.chapot@dartmouth.edu
There are around 7,000 languages spoken across the world, yet only 500 of these are used in the digital world and even fewer are supported by fundamental digital infrastructures. Computational methods for analyzing language are being implemented across a growing range of domains, but do those methods work equally well for all languages? How transferrable are computational text analysis methods across languages and contexts? In this course, we will apply insights from cultural studies and comparative literature to investigate how history, language and culture shape our digital practices. In addition, we will consider the new possibilities and specific challenges of working with digitized texts and computational methods to analyze modern languages and literatures.
Here you can find the notebooks accompanying the Computational Comparative Literature course, taught at Dartmouth College in spring 2022.
Week 1: Introduction
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T 03/29 Diversity in the Digital Humanities
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. “The danger of a single story” TedGlobal (2009)
Hoyt Long. “Culture at Global Scale” in Cultural Analytics (2021)
Roopika Risam. “Other Worlds, Other DHs: Notes towards a DH Accent” in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Volume 32, Issue 2, June 2017, Pages 377–384
Paola Ricaurte. “Geopolitics of Knowledge and Digital Humanities” in RedHD (2014)
In-class activity: Computers in the media: comparing stories on computation
Th 03/31 Imperialism and Language
Linda Tuhiwai Smith. “Chapter 1. Imperialism, History, Writing and Theory” in Decolonizing Methodologies. Research and Indigenous People. Zed Books (1999, second ed. 2012) pp. 19-25.
Rodney H. Jones. Alice Chick. Christoph Hafner. “Introduction: Discourse Analysis and Digital Practices” in Discourse and Digital Practices. Doing Discourse Analysis in the Digital Age. London: Routledge, 2015 pp. 1-17.
Norman Fairclough. “The ‘Third Way’ in New Labour, New Language? (London and New York: Routledge) 2000, pp. 19-34 [read up until. p. 25]
Alan Liu. “Is Digital Humanities a Field? An Answer from the Point of View of Language” in Journal of Siberian Federal University. Humanities & Social Sciences 7, 9, (2016) pp. 1546-1552
In-class activity: Comparative analysis of Digital Humanities manifestos
Week 2: Global Digital Culture
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T 04/05 Digital Imperialism
Domenico Fiormonte. “Towards a Cultural Critique of the Digital Humanities” in Historical Social Research, Vol. 37 No. 3, 2012, pp. 59-76.
Thomas S. Mullaney. "Shift CTRL: Computing and New Media as Global, Cultural, Sociopolitical, and Ecological” in Technology and Culture, Volume 59, Number 4 Supplement, October 2018, pp. 1-6.
Alex Gil. “Interview with Ernesto Oroza” in Digital Debates in the Humanities 2016 (2016).
In-class activity: Practicing contextual analysis: Actor-Network Theory and New Historicism
Th 04/07 Intersectional Feminist Approaches to Digital Culture
Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein. “Introduction: Why Data Science Needs Feminism.’” in Data Feminism. MIT Press (2020)
Safiya Umoja Noble. “Towards a Critical Black Digital Humanities” in Debates in the Digital Humanities (2019)
Matthew L. Jockers “Revolution” and “Evidence” in Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History. Baltimore: University of Illinois Press (2013), pp. 1-10
In-class activity: Developing a critical praxis: constructing a theoretical framework
Assignment — Reflection 1
Sign-up for presentations and email me which project example you want to present in week 3.
Week 3: Histories and Cultural Criticism of Digital Culture
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T 04/12 Histories of Digital Culture
Thomas S. Mullaney. “1. Incompatible with Modernity” in The Chinese Typewriter: A History. Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press (2017), pp. 35-63
Simone Müller. “Introduction: actors of globalization and the wiring of the world “ in Wiring the World The Social and Cultural Creation of Global Telegraph Networks. Columbia University Press (2016), pp. 1-18
Karen Scott. “Laws governing undersea cables have hardly changes since 1884” in The Conversation (January 2022)
In-class activity: Discussing examples of digital projects and comparative research
Th 04/14 Critical Cultural Approaches to Computation
D. Fox Harrell. “Cultural Roots for Computing: The Case of African Diasporic Orature and Computational Narrative in the GRIOT System” in The Fibreculture Journal, Issue 11 (2008)
Tara McPherson. “Why Are the Digital Humanities So White? or Thinking the Histories of Race and Computation” in Debates in the Digital Humanities (2012)
In-class activity: Discussing examples of digital projects and comparative research
Week 4: Corpus Building I
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T 04/19 The Politics of Digitization
Lisa Gitelman and Virginia Jackson. "Introduction" in Raw Data is an Oxymoron. MIT Press (2013), pp. 1-14
Daniel Rosenberg. "Data as Word" in Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, Vol. 48, Num 5, pp. 557-567
In-class activity: Data Criticism: what questions should we ask of our sources?
T 04/21 The (In)visible Labor of Digitization
Lauren Klein. “The Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemings” in American Literature 85:4 (2013), pp. 661-88
Andrea Zeffiro. “Digitizing Labor in the Google Books Project: Gloved Fingertips and Severed Hands” in Humans at Work in the Digital Age. Forms of Digital Textual Labor. Shawna Ross and Andrew Pilsch (eds.) London, New York: Routlege (2019)
Andrew Norman Wilson’s art installations “ScanOps” and “Workers Leaving the Googleplex”
In-class activity: Discussing examples of corpora
F 04/22 X Hour (Optional): Set up: Introduction to Jupyter Notebooks and Python
Assignment — Reflection 2
Week 5: Corpus Building II
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Th 04/26 Search and Selection
Emily Drabinski,“Queering the Catalog: Queer Theory and the Politics of Correction” in Library Quarterly 83:2 (2013), pp. 94-111.
Lara Putnam, “The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast” in The American Historical Review, Volume 121, Issue 2, (April 2016), pp. 377–402.
In-class activity: Discussing examples of corpora
Th 04/28 Machine-Readable Text
OCR workshop at Jones Media Centre
Optional recommended reading: Ryan Cordell. “"Q i-jtb the Raven": Taking Dirty OCR Seriously” in Book History, Vol. 20, 2017, pp.188-225
Ian Milligan. "Illusionary Order: Online Databases, Optical Character Recognition, and Canadian History, 1997–2010" in The Canadian Historical Review,Vol. 94, Num. 4, December 2013, pp. 540-569
David A. Smith and Ryan Cordell. A Research Agenda for Historical and Multilingual Optical Character Recognition. (2018)
F 04/29 X hour (Optional): Corpus Clinic: support for any issues in corpus search, selection and digitization
Midterm Assignment — Midterm Project: Corpus Building
Week 6: Reading and Interpretation
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T 05/03 Linguistic Imperialism in Digital Culture
Mark C. Marino. “Reading Culture through Code” in The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities, London, New York: Routledge (2018) pp. 472-482
David Golumbia.“Monolingualism and the World Wide Web” in “Chapter 5. Linguistic Computationalism” The Cultural Logic of Computation. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press (2009) pp. 119-125
Thomas S. Mullaney. “Introduction: There Is No Alphabet Here” in The Chinese Typewriter: A History. Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press (2017), pp. 9-34
Nasser, Ramsey. “قلب” (2013) (Alb): Arabic Programming Language Project and “Artist’s Notebook: Ramsey Nasser”
Th 05/05 Deformative Reading: Combining Modes of Reading
Trevor Owens, "Defining Data for Humanists: Text, Artifact, Information or Evidence?" in Journal of Digital Humanities, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2011
Stephen Ramsay. "Potential Readings" in Reading Machines. University of Illinois Press, 2011, pp. 32-57
In-class activity: Analyzing Kafka’s Metamorphosis
Week 7: Language and Computational Methods
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T 05/10 Reckonings: How is computation changing approaches to language
Michael Gavin. "Is there a text in my data? (Part 1) on counting words" in Journal of Cultural Analytics (2019)
Andrew Piper. “There Will be Numbers” in Cultural Analytics, Vol 1, Iss 1, (2016)
Lisa Marie Rhody. “Why I Dig: Feminist Approaches to Text Analysis” in Debates in the Digital Humanities (2016)
In-class activity: Conceptualization and Operationalization: “How Kafkaesque are Kafka’s short stories?”
Th 05/12 Methods Archeologies and Text Preprocessing
Daniel Rosenberg, "Stop, Words" in Representations, Vol. 127, No. 1 (2014), pp. 83-92
Tanya E. Clement, "The Ground Truth of DH Text Mining" in Debates in the Digital Humanities (2016)
Karin van Es, Maranke Wieringa and Mirko Tobias Schäfer. "Tool Criticism. From Digital Methods to Digital Methodology" in International conference on Web Studies (WS.2 2018), October 3–5, 2018, Paris, France.
Josh Honn. "Never Neutral: Critical Approaches to Digital Tools and Culture in the Humanities" (2013) [skip section "Digital Humanities" from p. 4-6]
Optional reading: analyzing punctuation Andrew Piper, "Punctuation" in Enumerations. Data and Literary Study (2018), pp. 22-41
In-class activity: Methods Archaeology and Tool Criticism
Week 8: Analyzing Unstable Objects I
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T 05/17 Spatial Models of Meaning
Michael Gavin, et al. "Spaces of Meaning: Conceptual History, Vector Semantics, and Close Reading" in Debates in the Digital Humanities (2019)
Ted Underwood and Richard Jean So. "Can We Map Culture?" in Journal of Cultural Analytics, Vol. 6 (2021), pp. 32-51
In-class activity: Text analysis: vector space and similarity measures
Th 05/19 Keywords and Concepts
Stephen Ramsay. “An Algorithmic Criticism” in Reaching Machines, University of Illinois Press (2011) pp. 1-17 [read from p. 10 (last paragraph “If text analysis is to participate in literary critical endeavor…”) to end]
Jesse Egbert and Doug Biber. “Incorporating text dispersion into keywords analyses” in Corpora, Vol. 14, Num. 1 (2019), pp. 77-104 [read until p. 85 (Methods section) and the Conclusion p. 99 to end]
Optional readings: Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler. “Keywords: An Introduction” in Keywords for American Cultural Studies, New York University Press (2020) pp. vii-xiii
Leo Marx. “Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept” in Technology and Culture, Vol. 51, Num. 3 (2010), pp. 561-577
In-class activity: Text analysis: word frequency, ngrams, keywords in context, TF-IDF
F 05/20 X hour (optional): Text Preparation and Text Analysis Clinic
Week 9: Analyzing Unstable Objects II
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T 05/24 Patterns and Sentiments
Hoyt Long and Richard Jean So. “Literary Pattern Recognition: Modernism Between Close Reading and Machine Learning” in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 42, Num 2,(Winter 2016), pp. 235-266
Jeffrey M. Binder. “Alien Reading: Text Mining, Language Standardization, and the Humanities” in Debates in the Digital Humanities (2016)
In-class activity: Text analysis: Topic modeling
Th 05/26 Peer-Review session of Final Project
In-class activity: Review of what we’ve learnt and peer-review of Final Projects
F 05/2 X Hour (Optional): Text Analysis Clinic
Assignment — Reflection 3
Week 10: Conclusion
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T 05/31 Final feedback and study session
Final Assignment — Final Project paper