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DH 299: Analyzing Native American Councils Computationally
Instructor:
Ashley Sanders Garcia
Wednesdays 10:00-12:00 in the Scholarly Innovation Lab (SIL) in YRL
In this capstone, students will work with Dr. Garcia on text mining early Native American treaty council notes 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 participating in this capstone. We will use the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) for Python and SpaCy, a new Python library that allows users to create custom information extraction systems, as well as user-friendly text analysis platforms, including Recogito, Voyant Tools, and Lexos. Together, we will share the results of our collaborative research, timeline and map visualizations on a website and prepare presentation materials.
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DH 299: Architectural Reconstructions on Broadway
Instructor: Anthony Caldwell & Deidre Whitmore
Thursdays 2:00-4:00 in the Scholarly Innovation Lab (YRL) – concurrent with Prof. López’s DH 199.
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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DH 299: Boris Yarkho’s Quantitative Formalist Methods for the Study of European Drama and Their Significance for the Digital Humanities
Instructor: Igor Pilshchikov
In the 1930s, Boris Yarkho, a Russian forerunner of contemporary quantitative formalism and the digital humanities, traced the evolution of West European and Russian five-act tragedies from the mid-1600s to mid-1800s. His calculations enabled him to demonstrate that the history of the tragedy can be divided into four periods and that it is possible to determine the boundaries between these periods, using formal quantifiable parameters. At the same time, he compared two contrasting genres — tragedies and comedies — which co-exist at a given period in time. He established quantifiable features which distinguish one genre from another and calculate the proportions of their combinations in various texts. The aim of this course is to enrich Yarkho’s data using electronic texts and computer-aided research methods. The main focus will be French five-act comedies in verse composed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Knowledge of either French or Russian is not required.
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DH 299: Visualizing 19th Century Mexican Los Angeles
Instructor: Marissa López (mklopez@ucla.edu)
Thursdays, 2:00-4:00 in the Scholarly Innovation Lab (YRL)
Students in this 199 will come in on the very ground floor of a project to build an app that will use geo-data to display images of 19th century Mexican California relevant to a user’s location. All levels welcome, and students with mapping skills will have the chance to use those in unique ways with plenty of creative flexibility. This 199 is organized around three core questions: 1) How can we find, collect, and make available archival material that’s not well catalogued or easily accessible?; 2) What stories can we tell by spatially arranging that material in various ways?; and 3) Can we design an app that tells those stories in engaging ways while also inviting users in as storytellers in their own right?
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DH 299: Visualizing the Shape of Roman History
Instructor:
Chris Johanson
Meeting time: Biweekly, Wednesday 1-3 + independent lab time
Big data and family networks in the Roman world. This capstone seminar will explore the history of the Roman Republic through an analysis of the most complete database of ancient persons available. We will simultaneously harness the affordances of this extant rdf database while we subvert the existing data model to make new and unexpected connections. Students who take this capstone will have the opportunity to explore visualization techniques via D3 (a javascript library), the Google Visualization API, and Unity3D. In addition, students interested in designing a graphical language and creating digital assets for data visualization projects are encouraged to enroll. This DH capstone is affiliated with the UCLA RomeLab working group.
