Data Mining in the Humanities

About

01:090:101:18
Data Mining in the Humanities
Tuesdays, 2:00-3:20 p.m., Alexander Library, Room 413
Francesca Giannetti, Digital Humanities Librarian, Alexander Library
Office Hours: By appointment at https://libcal.rutgers.edu/appointments/francesca
Email: francesca.giannetti@rutgers.edu
Phone: 848-932-6097

Course Description: Popular media often portray “big data” as the exclusive province of information scientists, but data collection in the humanities can swiftly exceed the capacity of the human brain to analyze. Increasingly, humanists turn to digital tools to conduct research on literary and historical texts, websites, tweets, images, video and sound recordings, among other formats. How does one create or reuse a humanities dataset? What tools are used to store, manipulate and process those data? How does one begin to analyze humanities data and share findings? This course will explore methodologies of both qualitative and quantitative analysis in the humanities, using digital tools to yield insights into data that might otherwise be difficult to obtain. Through lectures, discussion, labs, and a digital final project, students will familiarize themselves with several tools of digital humanities scholarship. In doing so, they will learn about the process of doing research digitally, from data collection, to analysis, to the presentation and sharing of results.