Описание:Russian 100/Data 100, Reading @Russia (in English), offered at the College of William & Mary (Virginia).
The goal of this course is to explore reading as a social practice and text as an evolving unit of knowledge. We use folk, literary and visual texts from and about Russia, on the one hand, to develop students’ analytical close reading skills, on the other hand, to familiarize the students with the concept and tools of distant reading. Students will get practice with computational tools of digital humanities to analyze datasets ranging from digitized copies of literary texts to sets drawn from social media.
When we perform a close reading, we reflect on a single text or a small group of texts, analyzing content, ideologies, and devices, based on our perceptions and prior knowledge. Using computational methods we move into the realm of what Franco Moretti calls distant reading, where thousands or tens of thousands of texts are processed, mined, and analyzed to provide a cross-sectional and comprehensive view. Are the outcomes of distant reading different from those performed through close reading? Does the size of the dataset dramatically alter the humanist scholar’s research questions and possible answers?
This course lies at the intersection of the humanities and the computational science in the realm of the digital humanities, with computer programming presented as an approachable tool for answering humanist and social science research questions beyond those involved in studying Russian culture.