Patrick J. Burns

Associate Research Scholar, Digital Projects @ Institute for the Study of the Ancient World / NYU | Formerly Culture Cognition, and Coevolution Lab (Harvard) & Quantitative Criticism Lab (UT-Austin) | Fordham PhD, Classics | LatinCy developer

Introduction to Digital Literary Studies

Taught at Fordham University as part of the NYC Classics Consortium (CLAS 6535.1), Fall 2020. This graduate seminar met one (1) time per week in a 2-hour block.

Overview

This graduate seminar introduces students to the digital tools, resources, and methods used in producing publishable data-driven scholarship in classical philology and literary criticism. The course provides a forum for students to develop hands-on skills in computer programming for literary studies (using Python), focused primarily on string manipulation, text mining and analysis, and data visualization, and with a strong emphasis on research design, reproducibility and replicability, and changing modes of scholarly communication in the Humanities. The course culminates in a series of Digital Classics “case studies,” through which students will be invited to use the skills acquired in the course to reproduce landmark data-driven studies in Classics by N. A. Greenberg, D. Packard, D. Clayman, and the Tesserae Project, among others. The course has no prerequisites and is open to students with no prior programming experience. While the case studies will be drawn largely from scholarship in Classics, the training acquired in the class will be useful to any GSAS student at Fordham working with digitized corpora and textual data. Moreover, students will have the opportunity to work on material in Latin, Ancient Greek, English, and/or, with the permission of the instructor, another language of their own choosing.