Join me to take a “field trip” to the Digital Hub, the College of Liberal Arts new Center for Digital Humanities. As soon as we have a group gathered, we can walk over to the Digital Hub and talk about its mission and its resources.

To paraphrase Shakespeare in the digital age, a for loop in any other language would iterate as well. From the perspective of Distant Reading (Moretti), today’s digitally literate scholars and students need to be able to understand some basic coding (indeed, what is a for loop, anyway??). Python is a great place to start! This session will look at one example of writing and applying a Python script to a text file to highlight and track references to targeted key words (perhaps, “rose” and “sweet”). We can then graph these keywords using some of Python’s libraries. The coding will be very basic, but the insights will hopefully prove very valuable.

George Steiner once wrote the intellectual is the person who reads with a pen in hand. Today, however, we need to rephrase this idea and say: The intellectual is the person who reads with a spreadsheet in view. Felienne Hermans has argued for the relevance of spreadsheets for coders. I am interested in exploring the potential for teaching the humanities with spreadsheets. I will review one case-study carried out with students in my advanced Spanish Culture course. While studying the medieval pilgrimage route in northern Spain, the Camino de Santiago, we leveraged Google’s fusion tables to create interactive maps (kms files) for identifying the locations of cultural exchange. Using the same spreadsheets, we could develop network analysis visualizations on which the stages of the pilgrimage are nodes and the student’s engagement with this culture are edges. Join me to discuss this example and share your ideas on other use cases for teaching the humanities with a spreadsheet.