time	1833
year	1639
people	1256
way	1108
man	1003
day	940
thing	776

child		710
Mr		673
government	670
work		653
life		645
woman		631
system		619

The computer has revolutionized the practice of every humanities discipline. As society in general becomes more reliant on computing technology, and as the forms of human social interaction begin to presuppose computer-readability, all humanities scholars will benefit from being familiar with the many ways to read and write with a computer. The immediate availability of millions of digital texts, at Amazon, Google, and elsewhere, has already begun to transform our basic concepts of reading, scholarship, and reference. Jerome McGann forecasts that “in the next 50 years, the entirety of our inherited archive of cultural works will have to be re-edited within a network of digital storage, access, and dissemination.” Will we be ready to do the job?

This course will introduce students to basic concepts in linguistic and literary computing, and to several tools useful for researching, producing, and delivering electronic text.  Students will learn how to plan and create a corpus of electronic text from written or oral sources, use Wordsmith Tools to find, analyze, and display information about a text, mark up a text with XML tags to facilitate finding desirable information, and use some of the text and tool archives already available on the World Wide Web, including the Whitman and Dickinson Archives, the Rossetti Archive, the British Library’s Shakespeare in Quarto, the Proceedings of the Old Baily (criminal trials in London from 1674-1834), and on-line concordances for many authors and publications. We will also examine the practices involved with doing Humanities research in the computer age and aks how these practices might be redefining the Humanities as an academic discipline.

Words and Phrases, by Michael Stubbs (Blackwell, 2001) ISBN: 0-613-20833-X
A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. (http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/)
Corpus-Based Language Studies: An Advanced Resource Book, by Anthony McEnery, Richard Xiao, and Yukio Tono (Routledge 2005) ISBN: 978-0-415-28623-7
Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History by Franco Moretti. (Verso, 2005). ISBN: 978-1844671854
Also, all students will need to have their university computer account ID and password.

The tests will be take-home exercise sets.  The projects will be your own design, and may deal with any type of corpus you want to work with. Some possibilities  include literary, web-based, child language, historical, documentary (such as legal or legislative proceedings), comprehensive, or self-created.  Graduate students will be encouraged to create and work with corpora that can serve as the basis for their dissertation study.

Go to Clai's Home Page