CS 4999: Computing and the Humanities

Prof. Kathleen R. McKeown

Spring 1998; Tues & Thurs 4:10-5:25

Newsgroup: columbia.spring.cs4999

Office Hours

About the Course

Prerequisites

Assignments and Grading

Submitting Assignments

Office Hours

Prof. Kathleen R. McKeown
Tuesday 5:30 - 6:30 in 720 CEPSR
Thursday 11:00 - 12:00 in 450 CS Building

TA: Carl Sable
Monday 1:30 - 2:30 in 724 CEPSR
Wednesday 1:30 - 2:30 in 724 CEPSR

About the course

This course provides a broad introduction to the information age. We will cover principles, software, tools, and analytic methods for humanities computing. This includes research using electronic texts of all types, ranging from on-line newspaper text to transcripts and recordings of speech. We will cover the encoding of electronic texts using various forms of markup languages, the fundamentals of information retrieval and tools for statistical analysis of electronic texts.

In addition to electronic texts, we will also look a the use of of other forms of data in humanities computing, including images, video, and databases.

We will study the use and analysis of these different media in a variety of humanities applications, including:

identification of authorship and style
computer aided instruction and software for education
history and law: recording and reasoning about facts and cases
Online art: modelling, verifying, and accessing online images

Prerequisites

For CS students: CS 3139 (Data Structures) For Humanities majors: CS1001 (Intro to Computers) There will be different expectations for CS students and Humanities students in terms of the programming projects (see below). However, Humanities students will be expected to know how to use the computer as a tool. While instruction will be given on how to use the software packages given for assignments, students are expected to be familiar with general use of computers, including email, editors, word processors, internet access and basic unix commands.

Assignments and Grading

To accommodate students with different types of background and experience, there will be 3 types of assignments. Homework assignments, final projects, and exams will typically (not always) include the 3 categories listed below. Students will have some freedom in choosing topics and types of assignments, but all students will be required to turn in assignments of at least 2 of the 3 types listed here. Thus, humanities students may choose not to do programming assignments, but would have to do both data analyses and essays; cs students may choose not to do essays, but would have to do data analyses in addition to programming tasks. CS students will be required to do at least one programming project and Humanities students will be required to do at least one extensive essay.

essays on general topics pertaining to humanties computing
analysis of data, e.g., using a software tool covered in class
programming project, e.g., building a piece of software for use in humanities computing, or modifying existing software to facilitate humanities computing

There will be:

4 homework assignments: to see topics and due dates, click here.
mid-term
a class project consisting of an initial proposal 1/3 into the course; a progress report 2/3 into the course; a ten-minute presentation of the complete project at the end of the course

Class project. Each student will be responsible for designing and completing a research project that demonstrates the ability to use concepts from the class in addressing a practical problem for humanities computing. A significant part of the final grade will depend on the three project assignments. Students will need to submit a project proposal, a progress report, and the project itself. Students can elect to do a project on an assigned topic, or to select a topic of their own.

The final version of the project will be put on the World Wide Web, and will be defended in front of the class at the end of the semester. In some cases, students may be allowed to work in pairs, e.g., a CS student might pair with a humanities student to collaborate on a larger project.

Click here to get to the class resources directory (not available yet).

Syllabus

Introduction

Jan. 20th

What is Computing and the Humanities?
Computing and Humanities applications
Introduction to electronic texts

Creating/using electronic text data-bases

Jan. 22nd

Collections
Online books
Text access

Fundamentals of information retrieval

Jan. 27 - 29

indexing, search, regular expression languages, retrieval
evaluation

Online encoding of words and phrases

Feb. 3 - 5

written representations: SGML, HTML, the TEI
morphology, collocations, etc.

Literary analysis

Feb. 10 - Mar. 5

ETS, text processing software
Concordance analyzers
Wordnet and other online dictionaries
Statistics for Humanities computing: simple tests, packages
Use of statistics for lexicography, stylistics, content analysis
Authorship and style
Other applications: machine translation

Analyzing Speech

Mar. 10 - Mar. 12

spoken representations
Analyzing and tagging speech

Midterm

Mar. 24

Computer Aided Instruction

Mar. 26 - Apr. 2

Goal-oriented learning: museum curator, weather prediction, medical curriculum, foreign language learning
Methodology: interaction with psychology
User interfaces for CAI

Images and art

Apr. 7 - 16

Applications: art humanities, architecture
Searching for images
User interfaces for a library of images
Statistical analysis of images

History, Law, and Legal Reasoning

Apr. 21 - 23

Lexis/Nexis
Legal and historical databases
Representation and reasoning by cases

Issues for Digital Libraries

Apr. 28 - 30

Student Presentations

May 4

Readings

Readings will consist of various book chapters, journal articles, WWW pages, and so on. Materials that are not on line or in library reserve will be distributed in class, or can be picked up during office hours. Click here to see a list of readings, which will be updated as the class progresses.