Courses

Join us in an exciting exploration of world literature’s intersection with contemporary society, while learning practical skills like academic writing and oral presentations for any student seeking a multifaceted understanding of literature’s role in shaping our world and ourselves, drawing interest from diverse disciplines such as History, Mathematics, and Informatics.

Where does a real place end and an imagined one begin? This course takes setting as its central concern and asks how literary texts and cartographic objects speak to each other. We will examine how maps generate fiction, how fiction generates maps, and what happens when the world being mapped doesn’t fully exist. Treating the map as a text technology, we move from the earliest printed atlases through utopian and satirical cartography, childhood imaginative geographies, Victorian fictional worlds, and speculative fiction.

The most common question I get as an archivist is, “what does an archivist actually do?” The reality is that the preservation of history requires foresight, planning, a little chemistry, and a lot of organization. We take data in all its forms and manipulate it to make it discoverable to our patrons.

Can chatbots write original poems or create art? Should generative AI output be protected by copyright? In order to better understand the current AI moment, we’ll explore how writing techniques and tools and information technologies have, for centuries and millennia, impacted and reflected evolving conceptions of human ability, creativity, originality, and inter-connectedness.

Explores one of the most influential philosophers in world history, Confucius (551–479 BCE), who has shaped East Asian civilizations and remains influential today.

Follows Qin’s rise and fall, exploring law, administration, conquest, and everyday life. Pairing archaeological materials with translated documents, students learn how historians build and revise stories of empire.

Icelandic sagas and poetry about Vikings in the context of thirteenth-century society.

Exploration of the human record, from oral cultures to the digital age: personal, identity, and family records; oral cultures; the development of writing, history, and evolution of books and scholarly communications; institutional records; and the Internet.

Bridges and intersects two interdisciplinary fields — black studies and digital humanities. Attention to knowledge production. Role of archives, collections, research centers, the black press, and digital technology.

Editing technical, business, government, and scientific reports through the manipulation of documents, project management, and contemporary production processes.

Introduction to making art using machine learning and Big Data. Combines technical instruction in Python with discussion of ethical, aesthetic, and creative possibilities of data science.

Join us in an exciting exploration of world literature’s intersection with contemporary society, while learning practical skills like academic writing and oral presentations for any student seeking a multifaceted understanding of literature’s role in shaping our world and ourselves, drawing interest from diverse disciplines such as History, Mathematics, and Informatics.

Where does a real place end and an imagined one begin? This course takes setting as its central concern and asks how literary texts and cartographic objects speak to each other. We will examine how maps generate fiction, how fiction generates maps, and what happens when the world being mapped doesn’t fully exist. Treating the map as a text technology, we move from the earliest printed atlases through utopian and satirical cartography, childhood imaginative geographies, Victorian fictional worlds, and speculative fiction.

The most common question I get as an archivist is, “what does an archivist actually do?” The reality is that the preservation of history requires foresight, planning, a little chemistry, and a lot of organization. We take data in all its forms and manipulate it to make it discoverable to our patrons.

Textual archives and databases; their historical construction and role as mediators to the past. Digitization of archives and repositories. Transformation of historical texts into data, which can be searched, processed, and analyzed in new ways. Techniques for building, organizing, and analyzing archives and databases.

The most common question I get as an archivist is, “what does an archivist actually do?” The reality is that the preservation of history requires foresight, planning, a little chemistry, and a lot of organization. We take data in all its forms and manipulate it to make it discoverable to our patrons.

Can chatbots write original poems or create art? Should generative AI output be protected by copyright? In order to better understand the current AI moment, we’ll explore how writing techniques and tools and information technologies have, for centuries and millennia, impacted and reflected evolving conceptions of human ability, creativity, originality, and inter-connectedness. This is a section for grad students. We’ll meet for an additional hour once a week to discuss further readings and/or student projects.

This course explores the powerful blend of verbal and visual expression in graphic novels and animations focused on the Middle East. Through close readings, discussions, and creative exercises, you’ll dive into how images and words interact to tell complex stories.

The Iberian Peninsula has, throughout its history, been the stage for encounters and clashes of a long list of cultures, a province of empires, and the origin of empires. As a crossroads, it has also been a privileged setting for textual encounters, a unique stage for the production and storage of documents.

This course aims to trace the path of some episodes of this history. From the lush Caliphate of Cordoba to the cultural project of Alfonso X. From the establishment of the Archivo de Indias, where the first European movements in America are recorded, to the project of Hernando Colón, the son of Christopher Columbus, to build the largest library of his time.

Sometimes, the paths lead to the United States. How is it that we find extensive collections of parchment and medieval Iberian documents in its universities? Other times, the archives vanish in smoke or in the stomachs of rats and worms, reflecting the dire consequences of the Napoleonic occupation or collateral damage from the desamortización process undertaken in the 1800s with the intention of modernizing Spain.

This course surveys the changing material forms of books during the period of print’s industrialization. We’ll work with artifacts in UW Special Collections as we investigate how developments in printing technologies affected the appearance and construction of books. We’ll focus on the British and American print markets from the eighteenth century to the turn of the twentieth century as we explore how book objects’ mutations intersect with changes to print cultures and practices of reading. Over the quarter, we’ll cover topics such as the transition from manual to mechanized printing, the introduction of steam power, inventions in paper making, book binding, decoration, and more.

Course explores the present and future of authorship and publishing. Explores how authorship has been shaped throughout history by evolving technologies, from writing to the printing press to typewriters and word processors, and by the business models and social changes these technologies introduced (from patronage to speculative markets).

Focus on skills useful today for better understanding and having control over writing in the digital age and the age of data, when text is binary data and publishing mediated by computational processes, including now AI. This includes working with mark-up languages, digital publishing pipelines, addressing challenges of sustainability, interoperability, and discoverability, as well as understanding copyright law, licenses, and how to select between proprietary and open source tools.

This course considers computational approaches to the study of literary and cultural texts. It covers a range of text analysis skills in the programming language Python, including string manipulation, text processing, corpus building, data visualization, and topic modeling.

A theoretical-practical course exploring art made using information, algorithms, patterns, datasets, searches, and metadata. Combines technical instruction in Python with discussion of the ethical aesthetic and creative possibilities of data science.

Major characteristics, terms, and methods of Western and non-Western manuscript production. Key questions about visual and literary cultures, handwriting history and techniques, multilingualism, and the social history of the book.

Examines artificial intelligence technologies in the context of literary and cultural histories of text reuse. Explores concepts including intellectual property, authorship, parody, and adaptation.

Introduces Shakespeare’s career as dramatist, with study of representative comedies, tragedies, romances, and history plays.

Milton’s early poems and the prose; Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes, with attention to the religious, intellectual, and literary contexts.

Traces the development of Chinese civilization from earliest times through the Song dynasty. Examines social, cultural, political, and economic history.

This course explores the powerful blend of verbal and visual expression in graphic novels and animations focused on the Middle East. Through close readings, discussions, and creative exercises, you’ll dive into how images and words interact to tell complex stories.

The Iberian Peninsula has, throughout its history, been the stage for encounters and clashes of a long list of cultures, a province of empires, and the origin of empires. As a crossroads, it has also been a privileged setting for textual encounters, a unique stage for the production and storage of documents.

This course aims to trace the path of some episodes of this history. From the lush Caliphate of Cordoba to the cultural project of Alfonso X. From the establishment of the Archivo de Indias, where the first European movements in America are recorded, to the project of Hernando Colón, the son of Christopher Columbus, to build the largest library of his time.

Sometimes, the paths lead to the United States. How is it that we find extensive collections of parchment and medieval Iberian documents in its universities? Other times, the archives vanish in smoke or in the stomachs of rats and worms, reflecting the dire consequences of the Napoleonic occupation or collateral damage from the desamortización process undertaken in the 1800s with the intention of modernizing Spain.

This course surveys the changing material forms of books during the period of print’s industrialization. We’ll work with artifacts in UW Special Collections as we investigate how developments in printing technologies affected the appearance and construction of books. We’ll focus on the British and American print markets from the eighteenth century to the turn of the twentieth century as we explore how book objects’ mutations intersect with changes to print cultures and practices of reading. Over the quarter, we’ll cover topics such as the transition from manual to mechanized printing, the introduction of steam power, inventions in paper making, book binding, decoration, and more.

Course explores the present and future of authorship and publishing. Explores how authorship has been shaped throughout history by evolving technologies, from writing to the printing press to typewriters and word processors, and by the business models and social changes these technologies introduced (from patronage to speculative markets).

Focus on skills useful today for better understanding and having control over writing in the digital age and the age of data, when text is binary data and publishing mediated by computational processes, including now AI. This includes working with mark-up languages, digital publishing pipelines, addressing challenges of sustainability, interoperability, and discoverability, as well as understanding copyright law, licenses, and how to select between proprietary and open source tools.

This course considers computational approaches to the study of literary and cultural texts. It covers a range of text analysis skills in the programming language Python, including string manipulation, text processing, corpus building, data visualization, and topic modeling.

A theoretical-practical course exploring art made using information, algorithms, patterns, datasets, searches, and metadata. Combines technical instruction in Python with discussion of the ethical aesthetic and creative possibilities of data science.

Texts as public documents and the outcome of editorial and publication processes. Historical perspectives on editing and on factors shaping access to and circulation of texts, including politics, religion, censorship, copyright, technology, and commerce. Digital editing and publishing.

Explores the global history of recorded information, analyzing diverse formats and cultural contexts from preliterate to digital eras.

Investigates the intersections between content and technology in humanities librarianship with a focus on information problems and resources in the fields of philosophy, religion, the arts, language, and literature.

What shapes a fairy tale? This course explores literary fairy tales through texts, traditions, and transformations, probing how fairy tales are presented across media and shaped by their format. Alongside the stories themselves, we will examine the paratextual materials that influence their reception, including first editions, title pages, prefaces, editors’ notes, anthologies, and illustrations. We will consider how illustrated editions reframe fairy tales for different audiences, and how the textual apparatus surrounding these stories participates in their meaning across cultures and centuries. Readings will include Italian, French, German, Scandinavian, and British examples (in English translation), featuring Straparola, d’Aulnoy, Perrault, the Grimms, and Andersen, among others. Their diverging framings will guide our close readings and comparative analyses of themes such as social critique, power, magic, the fantastic, and the melding of the real with the supernatural. We will also experiment with digital humanities tools to consider how methods of visualization and data analysis can open new perspectives on fairy tale traditions.

One of history’s most enduring artistic forms, books are containers of human experience, freezing in time decisions made by printers, illuminators, publishers, artists, owners, and readers. This course emphasizes close study of objects in University of Washington Libraries special collections.

In this course, we will read and discuss how translators have sought to translate and adapt texts to new times and new cultural environments, and how later poets and artists have been inspired by those translations. We will introduce what adaptation is and what it entails, and examine questions of textual mobility in a global context from an interdisciplinary approach, by highlighting the process of new meaning creation.

Further develops skills and concepts required to make art using machine learning and Big Data. Combines technical instruction in Python with discussion of ethical, aesthetic, and creative possibilities of data science.

What shapes a fairy tale? This course explores literary fairy tales through texts, traditions, and transformations, probing how fairy tales are presented across media and shaped by their format. Alongside the stories themselves, we will examine the paratextual materials that influence their reception, including first editions, title pages, prefaces, editors’ notes, anthologies, and illustrations. We will consider how illustrated editions reframe fairy tales for different audiences, and how the textual apparatus surrounding these stories participates in their meaning across cultures and centuries. Readings will include Italian, French, German, Scandinavian, and British examples (in English translation), featuring Straparola, d’Aulnoy, Perrault, the Grimms, and Andersen, among others. Their diverging framings will guide our close readings and comparative analyses of themes such as social critique, power, magic, the fantastic, and the melding of the real with the supernatural. We will also experiment with digital humanities tools to consider how methods of visualization and data analysis can open new perspectives on fairy tale traditions.

One of history’s most enduring artistic forms, books are containers of human experience, freezing in time decisions made by printers, illuminators, publishers, artists, owners, and readers. This course emphasizes close study of objects in University of Washington Libraries special collections.

Historical, conceptual, theoretical, and critical perspectives on world texts from antiquity to the digital age. Manuscript circulation of texts in the Middle Ages and modern times; global histories of the rise and spread of print technologies; preservation, access, reuse, and recycling of text.

Textual archives and databases; their historical construction and role as mediators to the past. Digitization of archives and repositories. Transformation of historical texts into data, which can be searched, processed, and analyzed in new ways.