BA History and French

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Digital technology is transforming our world, creating both opportunity and inequality. This course introduces students to key debates around digital culture, allows them to explore inequality across digital technologies and media, and equips them with new tools that are transforming scholarship across the humanities. The module interrogates inequalities of gender, race, and sexuality through the lens of digital culture, media, and methods. Why are search engines and artificial intelligence often biased against people of color? How is gender (mis-)represented in digital media? Why is ‘data’ in the humanities rarely transparent or objective? These are just some of the questions we will be grappling with in this course.

Please note: no technical skills are required for this unit.

This course aims to:

• Introduce students to critical approaches to digital technology and media, new media that allow creative modes of expression, and key debates around the social and political implications of digital culture
• Offer an overview over the most important debates around (in)equality relating to race, gender and sexuality across the humanities
• Develop a critical understanding of the potentials and limitations of digital technology

By the end of this course students will be able to:

• Critically evaluate digital technologies, their role in the humanities, and how they affect contemporary societies at large
• Understand when and how digital technologies are useful for humanities scholarship, and when and how their use can be dangerous or limiting
• Interpret and analyse how digital technology can both remedy and entrench inequalities of gender, class, sexuality, and race
• Develop their powers of interpretation and argumentation, and of oral and written self-expression in English through seminar discussion, secondary reading, and essay writing

Introduction: Digital Cultures and Inequality

Critical Debates

Big Data

Biodata

Algorithms

Digital Practice

Circulation

Digital Intimacy

Influence Marketing

Design and Structure

Wage Inequality

Infrastructure

Preparing for Assessment

Open Week

Conclusion/Essay Workshop
 

This syllabus is indicative only

The course is taught through weekly lectures and seminars, which combine full class discussions, practical labs, and small group work. If the COVID situation allows it, the practical lab sessions will take place at the Centre for Digital Humanities. Alternatively, teaching will take place using Zoom and cloud software.

Students have access to two scheduled weekly consultation hours to meet individually with the course unit director to discuss their ideas and progress. All course material will be made available on Blackboard. All feedback will incorporate advice on improving future performance.

• Apply their analytical skills to assess and analyse the potential and limits of digital technologies, and render them meaningful in their various historic and social contexts
• Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of major academic debates around the digital humanities and digital culture
• Articulate and explain key concepts about the implications of the digital divide for race, gender, and sexuality
• Demonstrate an awareness of some of the main digital methods which can be applied to scholarship in the humanities

• Engage in independent reflection and enquiry
• Read, apply, and critically evaluate literature on structural inequality and the digital humanities 
• Engage in discussion and critical evaluation of various digital tools and decide when a digital tool can be useful

• Engage in oral and written debates
• Build argumentative frameworks for the analysis of inequality and digital culture
• Use analogue and digital research resources
• Follow correct citation procedure for the professional presentation of academic writing
• Carry out individual research and select material judiciously

• Present information, ideas and arguments, orally and in writing, with due regard to the target audience
• Participate constructively in group activities (e.g. class discussions)
• Assess the relevance and importance of the ideas of others
• Demonstrate powers of analysis
• Demonstrate critical skills regarding the deployment of digital technology in the humanities

Ahnert, Ruth, Sebastian E. Ahnert, Catherine Nicole Coleman, and Scott B. Weingart. The Network Turn: Changing Perspectives in the Humanities. Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Broussard, Meredith. Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2018.

Drucker, Johanna. Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2014.

Eve, Martin Paul. Close Reading with Computers: Textual Scholarship, Computational Formalism, and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. Stanford University Press, 2019.

Kaiser, Brittany. Targeted: My Inside Story of Cambridge Analytica and How Trump, Brexit, and Facebook Broke Democracy (2019)

D'Ignazio, Catherine and Lauren F. Klein, Data Feminism (2020).

Knowles, Anne Kelly, Tim Cole, Alberto Giordano, and Eric B Steiner. Geographies of the Holocaust. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014.

Loukissas, Yanni Alexander. All Data Are Local: Thinking Critically in a Data- Driven Society. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2019

Morrissette, Jess. “Glory to Arstotzka: Morality, Rationality, and the Iron Cage of Bureaucracy in Papers, Please.” Game Studies 17/1 (2017).

Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York, NYU Press, 2018

O’Neil, Cathy. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. Crown/Archetype, 2016

Pederson, Isabel and Andrew Iliadis (eds), Embodied Computing: Wearables, Implantables, Embeddables, Ingestibles (2020)

Picard, Rosalind W. Affective Computing (1997)

Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for the Future at the New Frontier of Power. London: Profile Books, 2019.