A new course offered this semester, Gateway to the Digital Humanities, is the College’s first foray into the interdisciplinary Digital and Computational Studies Initiative (DCSI). Taught by Eric Chown and Pamela Fletcher, the heads of the computer science and art history departments respectively, the class was developed as a way to introduce humanitites students to the big data and computation that are becoming more prevalent every day.
Chown and Fletcher are the DCSI’s co-directors, while Director of the Quantitative Reasoning Program and Lecturer in Mathematics Eric Gaze, New Media and Data Visualization Specialist Jack Gieseking, and Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities Crystal Hall will teach DCSI courses next semester.
According to Gateway’s syllabus, the course “will explore the possibilities, limitations, and implications of using computation to study the humanities. What sorts of questions can be asked and answered using computational methods? How do these methods complement and sometimes challenge traditional methodologies in the humanities? What are the primary tools and methods currently being used in the digital humanities?”
Chown said he is excited to see these new crossover offerings at the College.
“Computers are changing the world in many different ways—what they can do, how they connect people together, how we do research, how we communicate,” he said. “Every aspect of society, every aspect of academia, is being impacted in some way. The Digital and Computational Studies Initiative is a response to that and the idea that Bowdoin, as a responsible academic institution, should be teaching the stuff not just to computer scientists but to people across the curriculum.”
The class teaches text analysis, image analysis and geographic information systems (GIS) mapping, and aims to examine “methods, tools, and projects in the Digital Humanities” before teaching students how to use these tools in their culminating self-designed projects.
Michael Yang ’14, a government major with a concentration in political theory and who is in the course, originally hadn’t considered taking these types of classes at Bowdoin.
“I was interested in computer science but hadn’t taken any classes,” he said. “Because I thought it’s a practical skill, I can just go out and learn it, [so] why do I need to be at Bowdoin to learn it?”
And though he had heard of the digital initiative, he didn’t realize it would even be an option while he was here.
“I thought it was happening years down the road,” he said.
Classmate Dana Hopkins ’14 is involved in the technical side of many theatrical productions at Bowdoin and she has brought her enthusiasm for the arts to the class—especially to the final project she is collaborating on with Ian Lee ’13.
“We’re looking at the history of the arts at Bowdoin and how to create—hopefully—a website in the end that mixes different histories of the arts at Bowdoin. Both the spatial—the expansion and then contraction of actual physical spaces for art—but also the administrative view of it with the courses and curricula offered and faculty and student perspectives,” Lee said.
“We’re looking at different ways to create an immersive experience online,” said Hopkins. Other projects, she said, include a history of coffee, poetry analysis and work with colors.
Next semester will feature two new DCSI courses. Data Driven Societies—taught by Gaze and Gieseking—will evaluate the value of computers in studying economics, politics and society. The Rhetoric of Big Data: Copernicus to Climate Change—taught by Hall—will set parameters for how big data can reshape worldviews.
After Round One of course registration on Polaris closed yesterday evening, Data Driven Societies had 23 pending registration requests and The Rhetoric of Big Data had five.