This semester I asked my undergraduates at NYU Abu Dhabi to individualize their learning about topics related to digital humanities by building a Zotero bibliography in my Introduction to DH class. This Spring semester I reorganized the course around themes important in today’s society: computational thinking, digital identity, text as data, dataset, pattern, algorithm, network, location, with different experiments that allowed us to explore these concepts along a spectrum of more human- or more algorithm-centered activity. The Zotero library was an opportunity for them to connect learning in the larger theoretical issues with specific topics of interest to them. The students came from a variety of majors: Computer Science, Interactive Media, Arab Crossroads, Art History, Economics, Music, Social Science, and undecided freshmen. Our Digital Scholarship head Beth Russell came into the class to introduce Zotero as a citation management system in the first weeks of the semester. By week 3 students had picked a general topic that corresponded to their own interests. Over the course of the term they refined the topic, curating 25 bibliographic entries, tagged and organized in foldesr. We got some very interesting Zotero group libraries. Feel free to build on their open knowledge! Here are the topics that emerged from student interest in IM-UH 1511 in the Spring 2019 semester: Generative Digital Art Applications of Digital Art History Emotional AI / Affective Computing Human Matchmaking Algorithms 3d Printing Ethics The Biometric Industry & Facial Recognition AI and DH Dark Skin and Facial Recognition in Photography, Cinematography, and Technology Machine Learning Popularization Big Data Analytics and Data Wrangling Generative Adversarial Networks and Fake Faces Digital Humanities and Education
DHIB 2019: Quantified Self
I offered a 10-hour workshop at the Digital Humanities Institute Beirut (DHIB), 4-5 May 2019. It is a miniature version of a course I will be teaching at NYU Abu Dhabi in Fall 2019. The slides are ava