Course syllabus
All course material (including an on-line version of this syllabus) is available on the course web site: https://neelsmith.github.io/papyrus_to_pixels/.
Embedded in the text of this syllabus are sentences identifying a two-word phrase summarizing one theme of the course. Please note that as part of your class preparation for Thursday, Jan, 25, you will be required to add a file with this phrase to your personal folder on the course Google drive.
Overview
“Papyrus to Pixels” is being offered in collaboration with Biology 199, “Change Through Time.” Throughout the semester, our Tuesday-Thursday classes will include a mix of joint meetings of the two courses (held in O’Neil 101) and separate meetings (in Fenwick 420). Together, the two courses will explore shared ideas about how the material that biologists and textual scholars study changes or evolves. Both Charles Darwin’s understanding of evolution and nineteenth-century scholars studying the history of texts shared the idea of a “family tree,” for exmaple, and viewed the variation that appeared over time as a series of branches, each forking from a single source. Today biologists and textual scholars are exploring more complex relationships. The genealogies and descent of both biological species and of texts show networks of connections not limited to a rigid tree structure.
“Papyrus to Pixels” will introduce some standard approaches to modeling and comparing digital corpora of texts, and consider how we can apply methods from disciplines like computational biology to reconstruct and interpret their transmission. Students will gain practical experience using computational methods to address important questions for anyone interested in understanding a digital corpus. How do we identify literary style? How do we isolate texts or sections of texts with particular subject matter? How do we recognize relations among many texts, or texts in different languages?