Digital Humanities Trailer (Script and Editing)

Digital Humanities Trailer Script (Original)

From the printing press to the typewriter, there is a long history of scholars adapting to new technologies. We're used to dealing with change in the humanities.  In the last forty or fifty years, the most significant advance in our field has been the digitization of books. We now have whole libraries -- whole centuries of history and literature and philosophy -- available right here, on the laptop in front of you.. This new access is a wonderful benefit, but it’s also a challenge. With a bit of elementary code, you can study all of these books at once, and derive new sorts of insights. What can you do with books now that we couldn’t before? Can the insights we derive with the help of computers help to make us better, more attentive readers? Given that you have hundreds of thousands of books available to you in an instant, where do you even start?  

 You can use tools from data science to explore the record of human culture in ways that just wouldn’t have been possible before. You might find new ways of answering old questions, like, who wrote in a style similar to Jane Austen's, with her precise eye for social distinctions, and her vicious satirical edge? Who wields a larger vocabulary in their rhymes: Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson or … Kendrick Lamar? 

 Computation is changing the very nature of how we do research in the humanities. We're more likely to reach out to others, to work across disciplines, and to assemble teams. Whether you're a student wanting to expand your skillset, a librarian supporting new modes of research, or a journalist who has just received a massive cache of leaked e-mails, this course will show you how to draw insights from thousands of documents at once. You will learn how, with a few simple lines of code, to make use of the metadata – the information about our objects of study – to zero in on what matters most, and visualize your results so that you can understand them at a glance.

 By the end of the course, you will be able to apply what you learn to what interests you most, be it contemporary speeches, journalism, caselaw, and even art objects. This course will analyze samples of 18th-century literature as the basis analysis, showing you how these methods can be applied to philosophical works, religious texts, political and historical records – material from across the spectrum of humanistic inquiry.