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Undergraduate DH Courses, Fall 2016

COMP 111: History of Computing
Instructor: Robert Yacobellis
Information Commons:230 (Lake Shore) Tuesday, Thursday 01:00PM-02:15

This course will provide a venue for students to learn about history through the evolution of number systems and arithmetic, calculating and computing machines, and advanced communication technology via the Internet. Students who take this course will attain a degree of technological literacy while studying core historical concepts. Students who complete this course will learn the key vocabulary of the computing discipline, which is playing a significant role in modern human though and new media communications. The History of Computing will be organized around the historical perspective. The relationships between social organization, intellectual climate, and technology will be examined and stressed.

COMM 280:Evolution in Communication Technology
Instructor: Meghan Dougherty
T/R 230-345p SOC 015

Communication technologies shape our experience of language, reality, time, memory and knowledge. Learn how the telegraph, telephone, radio, tv, computers and social media embody the assumptions of those who build and use them, and the complex relationships that arise between people and their tools.

HIST 300: Digital History: Foodways and the Forking of History
Instructor: Elizabeth Hopwood
MW 6-7:15 pm

From the histories of sugar plantation slavery in the Caribbean cane fields, to President Lincoln’s proclamation of Thanksgiving as a national holiday, to Quaker Oats’ introduction of the Aunt Jemima character to sell pancake mix, to Upton Sinclair’s unsettling novelistic portrayal of Chicago’s meatpacking industry, to the more recent controversy surrounding the publication of the Thug Kitchen Cookbook in 2014, food has played a consistent yet complicated role in the shaping of national histories, social relations, and personal experience. In this course, students will examine the relationship between food and the textual histories of race, gender, and class in North America and the Caribbean from pre-national era to the present. This interdisciplinary course will introduce students to leading theories and methods from the fields of food studies, history, textual studies, new media, and the digital humanities. Students will consider both the history of food writing and food writing history across a range of genres and medias, such as newspapers, visual advertisements, cookbooks, novels, film and TV. Students will also participate in the remixing and rewriting (“forking”) of these histories through in-class discussion, archival research, and collaborative project building while also learning digital tools and methods including xml markup, digital curation and exhibit building, and data analysis.