This course examines the use of natural language processing as a set of methods for exploring and reasoning about text as data, focusing especially on the applied side of NLP — using existing NLP methods and libraries in Python in new and creative ways (rather than exploring the core algorithms underlying them; see Info 159/259 for that).
This class is about renaissance humanists and how we can use digital means, as well as traditional ones, to study them. Our particular focus is on the ways people were connected in the renaissance -- as patrons, as readers, as travelers, as correspondents. Students will gather data about the travels and connections of their individual humanists. Then, working in groups, they will form databases and use mapping and network analysis on their data to chart interconnections between these historical figures over time.
This course explores, from a philosophical perspective, ethical questions arising from collecting, drawing inferences from, and acting on data, especially when these activities are automated and on a large scale. Topics include: bias, fairness, discrimination, interpretability, privacy, paternalism, freedom of speech, and democracy.
Meets Philosophy & Values, L&S Breadth Requirement
This course explores possibilities and pitfalls of empathy in cinema and other audiovisual media. Focusing on cinematic framings of migration and visualizations of global connection, it analyzes how movement, borders, and settlement figure in different genres and formats.
When we organize and visualize data, we make it meaningful and communicative. But in so doing, we also give it a form—an aesthetic shape—that did not previously exist. In this course, we will consider aesthetics as a crucial, but often overlooked, component of data science. Our goal will be to develop the basic aesthetic literacy needed to critically consider the ways we present information. The course contains two interrelated units: first, we will study the vocabulary that 20th-century art critics developed to talk about the sensory, emotional, and political qualities of art.
“The true method of knowledge is experiment.” -William Blake
The data we collect both reflects our values and shapes them, constraining and defining the questions we ask about our society. This course will use a series of case studies from the history of American data to examine a wide array of political, economic, and cultural issues. We will explore the ways that categories, units of analysis, and practices of instruction and collection both reflect and reshape assumptions about race, gender, labor, and household structure.
An introduction to the increasingly diverse range of geospatial technologies and tools including but not limited to geographical information systems (GIS). Via a mix of lecture and lab-based instruction, students will develop knowledge and skills in web-mapping and GIS. How these tools are used to represent fundamental geographic concepts, and the wider socioeconomic context of these technologies will also be explored.
This graduate seminar will examine theories, narratives, and manifestations of electronic literature in Spanish, both as a particular type of born-digital expression meant to live on a computer, as well as a larger field of inquiry that takes advantages of the capabilities offered by these electronic machines.