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[Course is FULL] DH 299: Architectural Reconstructions on Broadway
Instructor:
Anthony Caldwell
Meeting Time & Location: Tuesdays 2:00-4:00 in the Scholarly Innovation Lab 11630L Charles E. Young Research Library
Instructors: Anthony Caldwell & Joy Guey
Description: The historic theaters in Downtown Los Angeles are part of a rich cultural legacy that provides insight into the architectural practices of the early 20th century. This project investigates how these monuments were constructed, decorated, and used through in-depth archival research, photogrammetric modeling, and a variety of interactive visualizations including virtual and augmented reality platforms. Students will identify a topic of interest and work in groups to produce an experience and documentation detailing their research, procedures, and process. Read more about Architectural Reconstruction on Broadway and see previous and ongoing projects.
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[Course is FULL] DH 299: Digital Forensics: Investigating a Sketchbook from Auschwitz using 3D models and Maps
Instructor:
Todd S. Presner
Meeting Time & Location: Wednesdays 10:30-11:45 in the Scholarly Innovation Lab, YRL
Description: In 1947, an anonymous sketchbook of images was discovered in a buried bottle in Auschwitz. To date, no one knows who made it or how the artist could have seen what he/she depicted. Using 3D models of the camp, digital maps, and other data, the class will try to figure out what the artist saw and where he/she moved.
Required Skills: None, but interest in 3D models and mapping, Photoshop
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[Course is Full] DH 299: User Experience Research Projects
Instructor: Sookyung Cho
Meeting Time & Location: Wednesdays 6:00-8:00pm in TBA
Description: In this course, students will conduct user experience design research by utilizing the concepts, theories, and skills of digital humanities. Students will learn how to independently and collaboratively design and execute an advanced user experience design project.
Required Skills: No specific technical skill required, but web documentation and interactive prototyping skills are helpful.
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DH 299: Analyzing Native American History Computationally
Instructor:
Ashley Sanders Garcia
Meeting Time: Monday 1:00-3:00
Location: Scholarly Innovation Lab, YRL
Tech Skills: Familiarity with Python. If you haven’t taken a course on Python, please complete one via Coursera, Udemy, DataCamp or Learn Python the Hard Way.
In this capstone, students will work with Dr. Ashley Sanders Garcia (Vice Chair, Digital Humanities Program) on text mining early Native American treaty council notes and other historical records to uncover the perspectives of Indigenous leaders and the ways in which their actions shaped the course of early American history. We will apply entity extraction, discourse analysis, and sentiment analysis methods to our primary sources and do some light reading to understand the historical context. Students will need to have some experience with Python prior to participating in this capstone. We will be exploring advanced text mining techniques that employ vector space models to turn qualitative text into quantitative entities that can be explored with machine learning (statistical techniques). Together, we will share the results of our collaborative research, visualizations, and methods on a website and prepare presentation materials.
**Graduate students are welcome to apply the methods taught in this course to their own project rather than to the Native & Early American corpora the undergraduates will be using.
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DH 299: Archaeological Data in Action
Instructor:
Willeke Wendrich
Meeting Time & Location: Tuesdays 1:00-3:00 in the Digital Archaeology Lab, Cotsen Institute
Instructors: Willeke Wendrich & Deidre Whitmore
Description: Archaeological field data requires processing and analysis before interpretations can be made. In this capstone students will learn about the entire life cycle of archaeological data and participate in entering data in the primary excavation database, and then work to answer research questions incorporating small data visualization projects using these data. Students will also learn how to prepare data for deposit into a long-term preservation repository. We will finish by discussing the entire data workflow, from recording to long-term preservation, as well as the pros and cons of the different visualizations.
Required Skills: None, but seeking students with an interest in working with data, data visualizations, and learning about preservation
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DH 299: Data Management in A Mixed-Type Platform
Instructor:
David Shorter
Meeting Time & Location: Tuesdays 5:45 to 7:30 every two weeks in 160 Kauffman Hall.
(Meeting Dates: March 31st, April 14th, April 28th, May 12th, and May 26th)
Description: Using a preliminary sketch of the Data Management concerns for the Archive of Healing, students in this capstone would develop an actual policy for DM for the site. Secondly, the students will provide an action plan for the inclusion, review, and coding of new data submitted to the site that would take the form of answered questions on the site and wholly different data types such as bibliographies, working papers, websites, visual media, etc
Required Skills: The site is in Drupal so some familiarity would be useful but not necessary. Some CMS familiarity could be useful, but not necessarily. Also, the course would likely be more useful meeting every other week if that’s possible. A cap of four students would be preferred since a smaller team is easier to work with in terms of collaboration.
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DH 299: VR/AR Reconstructions of Native American Village DTLA
Instructor: Maja Manojlovic
Instructor: Maja Manojlovic
Meets: Monday, 3-5 @ 2118 Rolfe Learning Lab.
Tech Skills: None required, but interest in 3-D modeling, sound recording, VR/AR.
This project seeks to create an immersive experience of Yaangna, the largest Gabrieliño-Tongva village, with its center close to DTLA Union Station. Students will explore relevant archival materials, artworks, archeological sites, and oral histories to assemble information on the village’s built and natural environments, as well as cultural life. They will then have the opportunity to use 360-degree cameras, ambisonic sound recorders, photogrammetry, and 3-D modeling to create interactive, data-rich, VR/AR experiences of aspects of life in Yaangna, as it once might have been, or could have been today. Besides organizing the assembled data to create an interactive VR/AR experience, students will also forge relationships with Gabrieliño-Tongva community organizations.
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ELECTIVE: GER 261 – Comparative Media Studies
Instructor: Kalani Michell
Instructor: Kalani Michell
Meeting Time: Tuesdays, 2 – 4:50pm
To describe a course on media studies, the term “comparative” might seem both redundant and paradoxical. Redundant because, some might argue, media studies has always been comparative: The formative years of the discipline relied on a comparative tradition of intermediality, distinguishing between single medial forms implicated in “screen media” or weighing the consequences of analog content migrating to digital platforms, for example (see Schüttpelz and Gießmann 2015: 7). Paradoxical because, as others have noted, the act of comparing often assumes that the entities being compared are stable, whole and clearly demarcated: “To begin comparing, no doubt one must presuppose an essential knowledge of the general essence of the comparables” (Derrida [1979-80] 2008: 29-30). Rather than seeking to compare analog and digital media, or different national approaches to media studies, this course takes the framework of the comparative as a point of departure for investigating the presumed essence, stability and wholeness of both single medial forms and nationally-specific disciplinary traditions, such as the supposed ‘German’ technophilic approach to media studies and the ‘Anglo-American’ cultural studies influence (see Geoghegan 2013: 66). This course aims to understand the history of these ideas by tracing their genesis alongside various digital media, and it aims to trouble them. We will view, listen to and experience a wide range of audiovisual and digital media objects, exploring the complex relationships, for example, between women weavers and computer programmers, flowcharts and video games, library catalog systems and Twitter hashtags, television flows and podcast streams, 1920s cat experiments and cochlear implants, and painterly abstraction and YouTube compression techniques. Theoretical texts in media studies from Anglo-American and European traditions will inform each session, and we will think critically through and about these approaches. One could ask, for instance, why works by Harun Farocki, who was supposedly “discovered” as “Germany’s best-known important filmmaker” by a US-American audience, are repeatedly described in terms of cinema, or even a metacinema, when they are clearly interested in medial forms beyond the cinematic (Elsaesser 2002). “Why has the career of Farocki, our big poster boy who made it, often been stylized in almost religious terms as a journey from the darkness of television to the light of the contemporary art museum?” (Hüser 2019) What are the media hierarchies, histories of transatlantic cultural exports and disciplinary trends that inform such value distinctions?
