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.

The digital revolution has changed the way we interact with the world, with other people, and with our culture. This course will investigate the ways in which technological change has affected the study of human beings. Our goal will be to look critically at how technological media (and the various forms of mediation they involve) condition the kinds of questions we ask as humanistic scholars. However, we will also study how technology alters the very way human beings think.

Describing the dynamic interaction of places, times, languages, identities, cultural formats, dominant and marginal narratives that characterize diasporic culture appears to require a multidimensionality that the “map” metaphor seems to elude.