Course Schedule — Spring 2020#
What Is Cultural Analytics?#
Tues 1/21 — Introductions#
Introductions
Th 1/23 — First Computational Analysis#
Read “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Prepare for in-class: The Command Line
Homework Due: HW 1 by Friday 5pm
Cultural Data + Python Fundamentals#
Tues 1/28 — “What Gets Counted Counts”#
Read “What Gets Counted Counts,” Data Feminism, Lauren Klein and Catherine D’Ignazio
Read and work through How To Use Jupyter Notebooks, Anatomy of a Python Script
Prepare for in-class: Variables
Homework Due: HW 1.5 by today 9am
Th 1/30 — “I Can Text You A Pile of Poo, But I Can’t Write My Name”#
Read “I Can Text You A Pile of Poo, But I Can’t Write My Name,” Aditya Mukerjee
Prepare for in-class: Data Types, Files and Character Encoding
Homework Due: HW 2 by Sunday 5pm
Tues 2/4 — “(Re)Humanizing Data”#
Read “(Re)Humanizing Data: Digitally Navigating the Bellevue Almshouse” Anelise Hanson Shrout
Review String Methods
Prepare for in-class: Conditionals & Comparisons
Th 2/6 — “Data Biographies”#
Read “Data Biographies,” Heather Krause
Prepare for in-class: Lists & Loops
Homework Due: HW 3 (Part I & II) by Friday 5pm
Tues 2/11 — “Markup Bodies”#
Review More Lists & Loops
Explore Slave Voyages
Read “Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads” Jessica Marie Johnson
Prepare for in-class: Dictionaries
Th 2/13 — “Markup Bodies”#
Review “Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads”Jessica Marie Johnson
Prepare for in-class: Pandas Basics
Homework Due: HW 4 by Tuesday 9am
Tues 2/18 — “How many movies are actually about men?”#
Read “Film Dialogue from 2,000 screenplays, Broken Down by Gender and Age”, Hannah Anderson and Matt Daniels
Prepare for in-class Functions & Pandas Basics — Part 2
Th 2/20 — “Wait, but let’s talk about gender. How do you know the monster in Monsters Inc. is a boy!”#
Read Film Dialogue FAQ
Prepare for in-class: Pandas Basics — Part 3
Homework Due: HW 5 by Thursday 9am
Tues 2/25#
February Break
Collecting Cultural Data#
Th 2/27 — Web Scraping and Missy Elliott#
Read “The Largest Vocabulary in Hip-Hop,”, Matt Daniels
Prepare for in-class: Web Scraping — Part 1
Tues 3/3 — Web Scraping and the End of Privacy#
Read “The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It” Kashmir Hill
Prepare for in-class: Web Scraping — Part 2
Th 3/5 — APIs#
Read Install Git; A Dead Simple Intro to GitHub for the Non-Technical
Read APIs
Work through Twitter API Set Up
Homework Due: HW 6 by Tuesday 9am
Tues 3/10 — #GirlsLikeUs#
Read “#GirlsLikeUs: Trans advocacy and community building online,” Sarah J Jackson, Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles
Prepare for in-class: Twitter Data Collection
Th 3/12 — Twitter Trolls#
Read “How China Unleashed Twitter Trolls to Discredit Hong Kong’s Protesters,” Raymond Zhong, Steven Lee Myers and Jin Wu
Prepare for in-class: Twitter Data Analysis
Homework Due: HW 7 by April 7 9am
Tues 3/17-Th 3/26 — No Class / COVID Interruption#
Tues 3/31-Th 4/2 — Spring Break#
Recommended Reading: “The Transformation of Gender in English-Language Fiction,” Ted Underwood, David Bamman, and Sabrina Lee
Tues 4/7 — Twitter and the Right to Be Forgotten#
Discuss The Path Forward
Recommended Reading: No Robots, Spiders, or Scrapers: Legal and Ethical Regulation of Data Collection Methods in Social Media Terms of Service, Casey Fiesler, Nathan Beard, Brian C. Keegan
Text Analysis#
Th 4/9 — Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency#
Prepare for in-class: TF-IDF
Homework Due: HW 8 by Friday
Tues 4/14 — Topic Modeling#
Read “Narrative Paths and Negotiation of Power in Birth Stories,” Maria Antoniak, David Mimno, and Karen Levy
Prepare for in-class: Topic Modeling
Th 4/16 — Topic Modeling#
Homework Due: HW 9 + Discussion Post by Friday
Tues 4/21 — Named Entity Recognition#
Read excerpts, Lost in the City , Edward P. Jones
Prepare for in-class: Named Entity Recognition
Th 4/23 — Part-of-Speech Tagging#
Read and explore “Introduction,” “A Multimedia Literary Analysis,” (Sections 1-3),
Lost in the City: An Exploration of Edward P. Jones’s Short Fiction, Kenton Rambsy and Peace Ossom-WilliamsonPrepare for in-class: Part-of-Speech Tagging
Homework Due: HW 10 + Discussion Post by Friday
Network Analysis#
Tues 4/28 — Networks and Game of Thrones#
Read “Demystifying Networks”, Scott Weingart
Read “Network of Thrones,” Andrew Beveridge and Jie Shan
Read “Mathematicians mapped out every Game of Thrones relationship to find the main character,” Adam Epstein
Prepare for in-class: Network Analysis
Mapping#
Th 4/30 — Torn Apart / Separados#
Explore Torn Apart / Separados, Manan Ahmed, Alex Gil, Moacir P. de Sá Pereira,
Roopika Risam, Maira E. Álvarez, Sylvia A. Fernández, Linda Rodriguez, and Merisa MartinezRead ‘ICE Is Everywhere’: Using Library Science to Map the Separation Crisis, Emily Dreyfuss
Read “How an internet mapping glitch turned a random Kansas farm into a digital hell,” Kashmir Hill
Prepare for in-class: Mapping
Homework Due: Discussion Post by Friday