ENGL 586

Fall 2021 Part of Term 1

Part of Term 1
Aug 23-Dec 8

Topics in Digital Studies

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Credit: 4 hours.

Inquiry into theory and research in one or more areas of digital scholarship, including new media studies, digital humanities, social media studies, and/or critical code studies.

Same as CI 586. 4 graduate hours. No professional credit. May be repeated in separate terms up to 8 hours, if topics vary.

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ENGL 586 class schedule data for fall 2021
	CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
	74462	Lecture-Discussion	G	3:00PM -5:20PM	M	Foreign Languages Building	Underwood, W	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/23/21-12/08/21 Section Info: ENGL 586. Topics in Digital Studies. Section G, Ted Underwood. Computers and Cultural Theory. It may not be news, in 2021, that the risks and opportunities of computing have become a central topic for cultural theory. Correcting naïve models of culture associated with Silicon Valley is now a prominent public function of the humanities; meanwhile, other humanists try to understand culture using computational models. Sparks are certainly flying, but where is this conversation headed? This course will propose that the role of computing in cultural theory is a bigger question, with more accumulated momentum, than we can grasp purely through recent debates about the internet and digital humanities. Our twenty-first century conflicts are just the latest twist in a story running back to the 1950s, when structuralist anthropologists and Annales-school historians developed a love-hate relationship with the new field of information theory—at once resisting and imitating the ambitious generality of its mathematical models. To understand how those divided impulses guided the subsequent development of cultural theory, we will read Claude Shannon, Alan Turing, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Fernand Braudel, Michel Foucault, N. Katherine Hayles, Donna Haraway, Andrew Abbott, Bernard Geoghegan, Anita Chan, Andrew Piper, and Safiya Noble. We will also read several recent papers in computer science, because developments in the field of deep learning suggest that this story has more twists coming.