Reading Like a Computer

Materials

The course learning materials are composed of interdisciplinary writing from the web, videos, digital projects in addition to traditional academic readings. There will be no books for purchase. Students will have access to ebook chapters available through NYU Libraries.

There will be installation of some software and/or signups in online platforms in order to complete the exercises for the hands-on labs. Students will be provided with tutorials for such installation.

For example

  • we will explore OpenStreetMap, for which an account is useful
  • we will make use of Visual Studio Code.
  • you will also be assigned access to Posit Cloud for computational notebooks within a few weeks. If you are familiar with RStudio and already have it downloaded, you can download the notebooks and use them on your own machine. For beginners, I recommend the cloud based version.
  • we will work with an older standalone software you can install on your own laptop, QGIS.
  • These resources are all at no cost to you.

Optional Background reading in (Geo)spatial) Humanities:

  • Acharya and Panda, Geographical Imaginations: Literature and the ‘Spatial Turn’
  • Bavaj et al, Doing Spatial History (Routledge, 2021).
  • Bodenhamer et al, Making Deep Maps (Routledge, 2022).
  • Bodenhamer et al, Deep Maps and Spatial Narratives.
  • Bodenhamer et al, The Spatial Humanities: GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship
  • Bodenhamer et al, Deep Maps and Spatial Narratives.
  • Brunn and Dodge, Mapping Across Academia
  • Burman et al., Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers
  • Bushell, Reading and Mapping Fiction: Spatialising the Literary Text
  • Cohen and Duggan, New directions in radical cartography: why the map is never the territory
  • Cooper, Literary Mapping in the Digital Age.
  • Crampton, Mapping: a critical introduction to cartography and GIS
  • Damman and Kremer (eds.), Geographical Research in the Digital Humanities (Bielefeld UP, 2024)
  • Fujikane, Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future Kanaka Maoli and Critical Settler Cartographies in Hawai’i
  • Graham and Dittus, Geographies of Digital Exclusion
  • Knowles, Geographies of the Holocaust.
  • Monmonier, How to Lie with Maps
  • Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History
  • Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel
  • Pickles, Cartographic Reason, Mapping and the Geo-Coded World
  • Rajani, Spatial Narratives of India’s Heritage: Integrating Geospatial Analysis in the Humanities
  • Sui et al., Crowdsourcing Geographic Knowledge: Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) in Theory and Practice
  • Travis, Abstract Machine: Humanities GIS (ESRI, 2015).
  • Turner, Introduction to Neogeography.
  • Westphal, Geocriticism. Real and Fictional Spaces.
  • Wood et al., The Natures of Maps: Cartographic Constructions of the Natural World

A Zotero library from the European Summer University in Digital Humanities has been curated here.

A reference guide for Digital Arts and Humanities has been prepared by the NYUAD library.

Supplementary learning materials available on the web: