This course's outcome is to create a digital humanities project. It functions as a workshop in which theory (corpus selection, AI in humanities research, quantitative analysis, etc.) follows practice: conceptual questions will arise from, and feed back into, hands-on work on our shared project. Our preliminary project idea: creating an interactive platform that collects and displays the opening lines of hundreds of novels, bridging distant and close reading. The project is scalable and potentially multilingual: we will begin with a French- and English-language corpus and design the platform so that novels in other languages can be added. No prior programming experience is required. I will guide you through the acquisition of relevant technical tools as the project demands them. The course is suitable for students in literature departments curious about computational methods, and for students in technical fields curious about literary questions.
3-5 units · Letter or Credit/No Credit
This course's outcome is to create a digital humanities project. It functions as a workshop in which theory (corpus selection, AI in humanities research, quantitative analysis, etc.) follows practice: conceptual questions will arise from, and feed back into, hands-on work on our shared project. Our preliminary project idea: creating an interactive platform that collects and displays the opening lines of hundreds of novels, bridging distant and close reading. The project is scalable and potentially multilingual: we will begin with a French- and English-language corpus and design the platform so that novels in other languages can be added. No prior programming experience is required. I will guide you through the acquisition of relevant technical tools as the project demands them. The course is suitable for students in literature departments curious about computational methods, and for students in technical fields curious about literary questions.
Offered in Winter 2027 at Stanford University.