Digital Humanities Across Borders (DLCL 204)

Quinn DombrowskiNovember 28, 2022
Digital Humanities Across Borders (DLCL 204)

Digital Humanities Across Borders (DLCL 204, CompLit 204A) will be offered winter 2023, Mon/Wed 1:30-2:50. If you're interested in exploring computational methods for humanities research -- anything from digitizing text and turning it into data, to transcribing manuscripts, to searching for phrases across text corpora, to using different metrics for text similarity, to visualizing networks of people or places -- and you work with a language other than English, this class will give you the skills you need to use these methods with your language.

A reading knowledge of at least one non-English language (modern or historical) is required, but no prior technical or coding experience is needed.

In previous years, students have brought the following languages, but new languages are always welcome!

  • Arabic
  • Chinese (+ Cantonese)
  • French
  • Greek
  • Italian
  • Japanese
  • Latin
  • Malay
  • Ottoman Turkish
  • Portuguese
  • Russian
  • Spanish

Here's some examples of final projects students have done in past years:

Courtney Hodrick, German: "From Plato to Hitler: A Computational Approach to Hannah Arendt's Histories" (2020)

view poster (PDF)

This project explores whether Hannah Arendt’s political histories can be computationally distinguished from her intellectual histories by examining the figures mentioned. It explores the disciplinary boundaries often taken for granted in humanities scholarship by looking at the actors and the actions undertaken.

Didi Chang-Park, Spanish: "How to Read a Poem: Networks in “Muerte de Narciso”" (2019)

view poster (PDF)

What does it mean to read a network representation of a poem?

Michaela Coleman, Spanish: "Juárez Revisited: Comparative Analysis of Violence Against Women in 2666 and Huesos en el Desierto" (2019)

view poster (PDF)

This project aims to examine the representations of the 90’s era femicides in Juárez, Mexico from both fictional novel perspectives and investigative journalistic approaches.

Quinn Dombrowski, Russian: "The Magical Word Vectors of Harry Potter and Tanya Grotter" (2019)

view poster (PDF)

The Harry Potter series is a global phenomenon, having been translated in over 70 languages. Two years after Harry Potter was officially translated into Russian, Dmitry Yemets released the first book in the Tanya Grotter series. While the first book in the series mirrors tropes found in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (a mistreated orphan living with relatives is whisked away to a school for magicians), the choices to use a female protagonist and antagonist, locate the story in Russia, and draw secondary characters from Slavic and Greek mythology result in a distinctly different story. Time Warner sought to obtain a cease and desist order in the Netherlands, where the first translation of Tanya Grotter was to be published, after being rebuffed in Russian courts. Yemets and his publisher argued that Tanya Grotter was a parody, a protected class of derivative works, and that Harry Potter itself drew heavily on folklore. Nonetheless, Time Warner won the case, preventing the official translation and distribution of the Tanya Grotter series outside of Russia. Can computational text analysis bring a new perspective to the question of how to quantify the similarity between the magical worlds of Harry Potter and Tanya Grotter? This project uses word vectors as way of comparing these fictional worlds.

Melissa Hosek, Chinese: "Locating Lu Xun: A Spatial Analysis of his Short Stories"

view poster (PDF)

Lu Xun, the father of modern Chinese literature, is known for using a dual-narrator and first-person perspective of an “outsider” to create the critical lens through which his short stories are composed. While scholars have taken interest in this narrative form, few have questioned where these intradiegetic narrators come from and what kind of place they recount experiences from. This project rises to the challenge of introducing spatial analysis to the corpus of Lu Xun research. I ask whether there are any meaningful patterns to be observed in the selection of setting locations and movement of characters across the short stories. If so, do they contribute to the exploration of “wandering” (彷徨, lit. “to walk back and forth, undecided--the central theme of his second collection of works? The project as it stands today reflects my initial findings after looking at three of Lu Xun’s most notable stories: “A Madman’s Diary,” “Kung I-chi,” and “My Old Home.” I use R, Cytoscape, and Palladio to visualize the who, what, where, and when of characters’ movement.

Ricky Huang, Chinese: "熊仔: Taiwanese Rap Music"

Jupyter notebook for counting repeated tones

Tones are such an integral element of the Chinese language, and although they seem to melt into the flow of the music when the words are sung, I have been curious about how they might indirectly affect the flow itself. Therefore, I have run a tone analyzer on a couple of Taiwanese lyrics texts to identify patterns with more than two consecutive words in the same tone, in hopes that I can detect some noticeable correlation between the tone-patterns of the lyrics and the pitches in which the words are sung. Throughout the process, I have found that rap music offers more flexibility than other forms of music for singers to play around with the tones, and that the rap artist 熊仔 really takes advantage of this linguistic feature. In his songs, he would often adjust his flow to the tone groupings of his lyrics, not essentially to mimic the tones with musical pitches, but to build upon the musicality of the Chinese language. These findings have opened my eyes to a novel aspect of Chinese-language music that I hope to continue examining.