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
