Courses 2026-2027

TXTDS 401 A – Text Technologies: Prospects of World Literature
Offered jointly with GLITS 450/MELC 496
Credits: 5
GE: (A&H) Arts and Humanities, (SSc) Social Science
Instructor: Selim Kuru

Description: 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.

Course counts as a Core Course in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities Minor.

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TXTDS 401 B – Text Technologies: Maps and Narrative Cartographies
Credits: 5
GE: (A&H) Arts and Humanities, (SSc) Social Science
Instructor: Kate Clairmont

Description: 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, or as a designed, printed, illustrated object that makes arguments about space, knowledge, and belonging, we move from the earliest printed atlases through utopian and satirical cartography, childhood imaginative geographies, Victorian fictional worlds, and speculative fiction.

Course counts as a Core Course in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities Minor.

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TXTDS 403 A – Archives, Data, and Databases
Credits: 5
GE: (A&H) Arts and Humanities or (SSc) Social Science
Instructor: Eric Flores

Description: The most common question I get as an archivist is, “what does an archivist actually do?” It is easy to imagine an archivist as someone that sits in a quiet room all day reading historical texts. 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. The acceptance of a record into the archive all the way to presenting it in a stable condition is a long one. As we work through the archival process, we will hear from several professionals in the field as they discuss their areas of expertise. Throughout the class we will walk through that process while discussing the fundamental aspects of what constitutes an archive. Ultimately, by gaining a better understanding of the archival process and how archives function, we will become better researchers.

Course counts as a Core Course in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities Minor.

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TXTDS 413 A – Texts, Data, and Computation
Credits: 5
GE: (A&H) Arts and Humanities, (RSN) Reasoning

Description: Understand, organize, analyze, interpret and visualize cultural and literary texts as data using computational methods and tools. Emphasizes techniques in text analysis and text mining, data visualization, network analysis, algorithmic reading, programming and database building.

Course counts as a Core Course in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities Minor.

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TXTDS 221 A – Artificial Intelligence and Human Creativity in Historical Perspective
Credits: 5
GE: (A&H) Arts and Humanities or (SSc) Social Science
Instructor: Geoffrey Turnovsky

Description: Can chatbots write original poems or create art? Should generative AI output be protected by copyright? Or is generative AI, by definition, an infringement of copyright insofar as models are trained on massive amounts of in-copyright text without permission? How should we evaluate and engage with the text and images AI models create? The striking resemblance of this output to the “natural,” and even the “creative” expression of humans has sparked anxiety and euphoria, related at one level to dislocations AI technologies seem poised to introduce: into job markets, workflows, human relations (interpersonal and social), and education. At another level, these resemblances force us to question and re-articulate values and qualities we’ve long felt defined us in our humanity, including creativity and originality, as well as empathy and communicativeness. But conceptions of human creativity, originality, empathy and communicativeness, have always been shaped by changing technologies for writing, archiving, classifying, retrieving, and processing text, starting with the technology of writing itself. 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. These include technologies for replicating texts at scale such as the printing press and the photocopier, technologies for storing and classifying information (like reference works organized alphabetically), and technologies of automation, which date back centuries (see the “poet”!).

Course counts as an Elective in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities Minor.

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ASIAN 224 A – Confucius: Ideas That Shaped East Asia
Credits: 5
GE: Arts and Humanities (A&H), Social Sciences (SSc)
Instructor: Yunxiao Xiao

Description: Explores one of the most influential philosophers in world history, Confucius (551–479 BCE), who has shaped East Asian civilizations and remains influential today. Traces the intellectual strains from the time before Confucius down to the present day.

Course counts as an Elective in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities Minor.

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HSTAS 252 A – The Rise and Fall of the First Chinese Empire
Credits: 5
GE: Social Sciences (SSc)
Instructor: Yifan Zheng

Description: Follows Qin’s rise and fall, exploring law, administration, conquest, and everyday life. Covers how Qin forged China’s first unified empire in just fifteen years, creating institutions that shaped government for two millennia. Pairing archaeological materials with translated documents, students learn how historians build and revise stories of empire, and trace Qin’s cultural afterlives from Terracotta Warriors to video games.

Course counts as an Elective in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities Minor.

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SCAND 270 A – Sagas of the Vikings
Credits: 5
GE: (A&H) Arts and Humanities
Instructor: Timothy Bourns

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

Course counts as an Elective in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities Minor.

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INFO 357 A – The Record of Us All
Credits: 5
GE: (DIV) Diversity, (SSc) Social Science
Instructor: Joseph Janes

Description: 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. Potential futures of the human record and implications for individuals, organizations, and societies.

Course counts as an Elective in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities Minor.

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AFRAM 360 A – Black Digital Studies
Credits: 5
GE: (DIV) Diversity, (SSc) Social Science
Instructor: LaShawnDa Pittmann

Description: 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. Ideas related to power, memory, resistance, perspective and respectability politics in storytelling and control of the vehicles used to do so.

Course counts as an Elective in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities Minor.

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DXARTS 480 A – Introduction to Data Driven Arts: Data-Oriented Art
Credits: 5
GE: (A&H) Arts and Humanities
Instructor: Cristina Brambila

Description: In contemporary digital culture, diverse media can be understood as data – from text and images, to recorded sound and speech. Introduces tools for collecting, processing, and organizing archives of multimedia. Establishes a foundation for artistic experimentation with machine learning and artificial intelligence systems. Involves working creatively with data from text and images, recorded sound and speech.

Course counts as an Elective in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities Minor.

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TXTDS 503 A – Archives, Data, and Databases
Offered jointly with ENGL 504
Credits: 5
Instructor: Anna Preus

Description: Textual archives and databases; their historical construction and role as mediators to the past, bringing light to and obscuring/reshaping 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.

Course counts as a Core Course in Graduate Certificate in Textual and Digital Studies.

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TXTDS 503 B – Archives, Data, and Databases
Credits: 5
Instructor: Eric Flores

Description: The most common question I get as an archivist is, “what does an archivist actually do?” It is easy to imagine an archivist as someone that sits in a quiet room all day reading historical texts. 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. The acceptance of a record into the archive all the way to presenting it in a stable condition is a long one. As we work through the archival process, we will hear from several professionals in the field as they discuss their areas of expertise. Throughout the class we will walk through that process while discussing the fundamental aspects of what constitutes an archive. Ultimately, by gaining a better understanding of the archival process and how archives function, we will become better researchers.

Course counts as a Core Course in Graduate Certificate in Textual and Digital Studies.

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TXTDS 401 Text Technologies: Middle East Illustrated
Offered jointly with MELC 386/GLITS 214
Credits: 5
GE: (A&H) Arts and Humanities, (SSc) Social Science
Instructor: Selim Kuru

Description: 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. We’ll examine diversity in the Middle East, a region divided by borders but rich in cultural variety, while considering how issues like Orientalism, stock imagery, and different ways of seeing shape our understanding. Along the way, you’ll learn about both the history and modern realities of Middle Eastern cultures. You’ll also develop skills in visual and verbal literacy—key tools in today’s media-driven world. While the focus is on graphic novels and animation, you’re encouraged to include films, video games, and anime in your projects and portfolios. Get ready to think creatively and critically as we explore the art of graphic novel: this particular way of storytelling!

Course counts as a Core Course in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities Minor.

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TXTDS 413 Texts, Data, and Computation
Offered jointly with ENGL 413
Credits: 5
GE: (A&H) Arts and Humanities, (RSN) Reasoning
Instructor: Anna Preus

Description: Understand, organize, analyze, interpret and visualize cultural and literary texts as data using computational methods and tools. Emphasizes techniques in text analysis and text mining, data visualization, network analysis, algorithmic reading, programming and database building.

Course counts as a Core Course in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities Minor.

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TXTDS 413 Texts, Data, and Computation: Data-Oriented Art
Offered jointly with DXARTS 481
Credits: 5
GE: (A&H) Arts and Humanities, (RSN) Reasoning
Instructor: Laura Luna Castillo

Description: This is a theoretical-practical course exploring art made using information, algorithms, patterns, datasets, searches, and metadata. Media – images, video, sound, text – as data indexable, searchable, and part of larger systems. Implications and possibilities of artists using such systems, looking at dynamic, algorithmic based approaches to composing with highly distributed collections of data. This class combines technical instruction in Python with discussion of the ethical aesthetic and creative possibilities of data science. The format of the class is a mix of lectures and discussions overviewing concepts, theories and examples of data-driven artworks and processes. It also includes hands-on programming exercises, demos and archival research assignments. Students will work in small groups, pairs, or solo for in-class programming activities.

Course counts as a Core Course in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities Minor.

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TXTDS 220 Making Manuscripts: Manuscript and Handwriting Technologies from the Antiquity to Today
Credits: 5
GE: (SSc) Social Science or (A&H) Arts and Humanities
Instructor: Beatrice Arduini

Description: 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, including reading and transmission, libraries, the modern book trade, and describing and cataloguing manuscripts.

Course counts as an Elective in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities Minor.

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TXTDS 224 Histories and Futures of the Book, Texts and Reading: the Gothic
Credits: 5
GE: (A&H) Arts and Humanities or (SSc) Social Science
Instructor: Kate Clairmont

Description: From medieval manuscripts to commercially printed books to today’s rapidly recycled digital content, explores how changing forms have shaped the ways texts have been read and understood, how the spread of printing technology impacted the modern world, how the book-form became dominant, and how a new media revolution (the mass digitization of texts) is again reshaping access to and understanding of the past.

Course counts as a Core Course in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities Minor.

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TXTDS 267 Data Science and the Humanities
Offered jointly with ASIAN 207
Credits: 5
GE: (A&H) Arts and Humanities
Instructor: Gian Duri Rominger

Description: Applications of concepts and methods in data science to the study of the literary and cultural texts and to the study of language. Also explores humanistic perspectives on the role of data and data science in society.

Course counts as a Core Course in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities Minor.

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TXTDS 321 Artificial Intelligence, Text Reuse, and the Art of Stealing
Offered jointly with INFO 498
Credits: 5
GE: (A&H) Arts and Humanities
Instructor: Melanie Walsh

Description: Examines artificial intelligence technologies in the context of literary and cultural histories of text reuse. Explores concepts including intellectual property, authorship, parody, and adaptation, drawing on approaches from literary studies and data science. Considers impacts of data and computation on textual production and analysis.

Course counts as an Elective in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities Minor.

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ENGL 225 Shakespeare
Credits: 5
GE: (A&H) Arts and Humanities
Instructor: Rhema Hokama

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

Course counts as an Elective in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities Minor.

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ENGL 326 Milton
Credits: 5
GE: (A&H) Arts and Humanities
Instructor: Rhema Hokama

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

Course counts as an Elective in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities Minor.

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HSTAS 452 Chinese History from Earliest Times to 1276
Credits: 5
GE: (SSc) Social Science
Instructor: Yifan Zheng

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

Course counts as an Elective in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities Minor.

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LIS 508 History of Recorded Information
Credits: 5
Instructor: Julie Tanaka

Description: Explores the global history of recorded information, analyzing diverse formats and cultural contexts from preliterate to digital eras. Equips students with ethical, nuanced approaches to acquiring, preserving, and sharing information by understanding its creation, impact, and significance beyond Western narratives.

Course counts as a Core Course in Graduate Certificate in Textual and Digital Studies.

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LIS 529 Digital Humanities Librarianship
Credits: 5
Instructor: Melanie Walsh

Description: 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.

Course counts as a Core Course in Graduate Certificate in Textual and Digital Studies.

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TXTDS 401 Text Technologies: Books Before Print
Offered jointly with HSTAS 465/ASIAN 498
Credits: 5
GE: (A&H) Arts and Humanities, (SSc) Social Science
Instructor: Yunxiao Xiao

Description: 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. Impacts of digitization and textual data on reading and on repositories and institutions, such as libraries.

Course counts as a Core Course in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities Minor.

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TXTDS 402 Book Arts
Offered jointly with Art H 422/Art H 520
Credits: 5
GE: (A&H) Arts and Humanities
Instructor: Juliet Sperling

Description: 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. In twice-weekly discussion-based meetings framed by key issues that these objects provoke, we will consider questions including: when and why is a book considered a work of art? How have books historically related to other art genres in terms of production, reception, and display? In what ways, from medieval manuscripts to illustrated anatomical treatises to contemporary zines, have artists turned to the form of the book to negotiate fundamental social and cultural ideas and concerns? Looking closely at the physical book allows us to think about themes central to both art history and textual studies with unusual focus, including practices of collecting, the circulation and reception of print, taxonomies of knowledge, materiality, and embodied viewing. This course emphasizes close study of objects in University of Washington Libraries special collections and conversation with specialists including curators, collectors, and artists. Examples will be drawn primarily from American and European contexts, but students are encouraged to bring objects from their diverse areas of interest into seminar discussion and written work.

Course counts as a Core Course in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities Minor.

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TXTDS 404 Texts, Publics and Publication
Credits: 5
GE: (SSc) Social Science, (A&H) Arts and Humanities
Instructor: Geoffrey Turnovsky

Description: 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. Digitization, transcription, text encoding, and web publication. Hosting, using a variety of platforms.

Course counts as a Core Course in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities Minor.

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TXTDS 200 Gateway to Textual Studies and Digital Humanities: Books Unbound
Credits: 3
Instructor: Geoffrey Turnovsky

Description: This course introduces you to the objects, methodologies, and techniques in the Interdisciplinary Minor of Textual Studies and Digital Humanities. We’ll explore the forms and technologies that have brought texts to life over history, from medieval manuscripts to letterpress print to the photographic and electronic technologies of the 20th century to today’s digital and computational tools. We’ll discover treasures of UW Special Collections as well as the Tateuchi East Asia Library (TEAL); we’ll learn the basics of letterpress printing and bookmaking; we’ll write letters on typewriters; and we’ll explore how to work computationally, to create digital editions and to work with databases.

Course counts as an Elective in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities Minor.

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TXTDS 320: Ancient Media
Offered jointly with MELC 396/GLITS 315
Credits: 5
Instructor: Kathryn Medill

Description: Explores how texts were recorded, stored, circulated and read in the ancient world.

Course counts as an Elective in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities Minor.

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ENGL 322 Medieval and Early Modern Literatures of Encounter
Credits: 5
GE: (A&H) Arts and Humanities, (DIV) Diversity
Instructor: Rhema Hokama

Description: This course focuses on cultural encounters across medieval and early modern worlds. We will explore medieval and early modern travel writing and the dramatic and poetic responses to these tales of global travel–focusing especially on European travels to Asia and the Americas. In our readings of writers like William Shakespeare, John Fletcher, Thomas More, John Donne, Luís de Camões, and Marco Polo, we’ll reflect on how European discourses about race, religion, and geopolitical power were shaped by the global exchange of goods and ideas.

Course counts as an Elective in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities Minor.

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TXTDS 322: Textual Translation, Adaptation and Travels
Offered jointly with ITAL 390
Credits: 5
Instructor: Beatrice Arduini

Description: Allows students to think about how texts travel across space, time, formats and, above all, languages.

Course counts as an Elective in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities Minor.

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DXARTS 482 Data-Driven Art II
Credits: 5
GE: (A&H) Arts and Humanities
Instructor: Laura Luna Castillo

Description: 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. Topics include histories of data-driven art, technical applications using NLP, GANs, Classification Systems, Datasets, and hands-on systems-based art projects.

Course counts as an Elective in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities Minor.

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TXTDS 501 Text Technologies
Offered jointly with MELC 596
Credits: 5
Instructor: Kathryn Medill

Description: 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. Impacts of digitization and textual data on reading and on repositories and institutions, such as libraries.

Course counts as a Core Course in Graduate Certificate in Textual and Digital Studies.

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TXTDS 503 Archives, Data, and Databases: Intro to Data Science
Offered jointly with LIS 572
Credits: 5
Instructor: Melanie Walsh

Description: Textual archives and databases; their historical construction and role as mediators to the past, bringing light to and obscuring/reshaping 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.

Course counts as a Core Course in Graduate Certificate in Textual and Digital Studies.

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TXTDS 504 Texts, Publics and Publication
Credits: 5
Instructor: Geoffrey Turnovsky

Description: 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. Digitization, transcription, text encoding, and web publication. Hosting, using a variety of platforms.

Course counts as a Core Course in Graduate Certificate in Textual and Digital Studies.

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