Preliminary Class Business

1. Course Concept

Course is a graduate-level introduction to the "digital humanities" ("DH"). The antecedents of DH include: "humanities computing" in allegiance with archival/curatorial/editorial/linguistic work. Antecedents also, to various degrees:

In the last 5-10 years, DH has become both a self-aware field and a field that the humanities at large is aware of.

DH uses digital and networked information technology to curate and study humanities subjects such as literature, history, art, etc.
DH uses information technology to study the humanities in new ways not previously possible.
But DH also makes information technology itself an object of study from a humanities perspective.
DH is both theoretical and practical ("yack" and "hack").
DH links the contemporary study of literature, history, art, etc., with scientific and social-science disciplines that share an interest in information technology and often use the same kinds of digital tools.
But DH is also (or can be) uniquely and deeply humanistic.

Focal Question What kind of "human" subject do the digital humanities speak from, to, for?

Plato, from Phaedrus (the myth of Theuth and the invention of writing)
Hippolyte Taine, "Introduction" to History of English Literature (1863) [online in sequential sections: I | II | III | IV | V | VI | VII | VIII]
Marshall McLuhan, excerpts from Understanding Media (1964) (read excerpts from "Introduction" and "The Medium is the Message")
N. Katherine Hayles, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (2012), read pp. 27-31 on "Scale Matters" [PDF] (Google Books version)
Drew S. Burk, "Living Network Ecologies: A Triptych on the Universe of Fernand Deligny -- Part 1" (2013)

What is the relation of media to being human? (with variant questions that can be asked by substituting "information," "communication," "computation," and "technology" for "media")