David Wrisley

This course asks what it means to be a curator of content online: What is an author? a collection? In what ways were collections made before the digital age? Who is our audience? Examining popular forms of curation, from historical examples to social media (Snapchat, Tumblr, playlists), students examine trends in digitization and open cultural data as they explore what makes a digital object and what constitutes a web-based collection. Surveying a variety of open-content management systems used in the museum and academic sector, students will use, and critique, a common technology for academic curation - omeka.org and neatline.org - and will reflect on digital citizenship through their own social media practices. Students are encouraged to be creative, co-creating new content, remixing, and building upon the "vast and growing digital creative commons." The course is useful for any student interested in information sciences, content creation, and the GLAM sector (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) but is open to all. Student work includes open, reflective blog writing about curation and web-based exhibits in student web hosting.

Self-tracking. Biohacking. Personal informatics. Quantified self. The contemporary "quantified self" movement makes claims of "self-knowledge through numbers" and improving health and human welfare. There are clearly other elements to self-tracking culture that deserve critical investigation. What does the self become through the lens of data? What is the dark side of data that can be used against us, and without regard for social justice and equality? This multidisciplinary course takes both a theoretical and a practical look at the pressing issue of data aggregation about human beings. It looks to the past for historical forms of self-quantification and to the future of a rapidly expanding globalized landscape of app tracking and wearable technologies. With the question of human data in mind, the course examines the unsure futures of humanity in a variety of domains: medicine and aging, education, the arts, marketing, and the Internet of Things. Students will situate themselves critically within this increasingly dense data landscape by creating data about themselves that can be analyzed and interpreted using a variety of data visualization and storytelling frameworks.

Prerequisite: Must be an NYU Abu Dhabi student and have not completed the Core: Colloquium requirement.

How do computers "read" text, and how can computer-assisted analysis of texts give us new access to information about ourselves and the cultural legacies we have inherited? This course explores quantitative methods for discovering and analyzing diverse texts of the human record. It also offers a glimpse into possible futures of reading. Students will both discuss, and put into practice, forms of computer-assisted textual analysis that have revolutionized research in humanities and social science fields in recent years. They will also take a critical look at the "ubiquitous analytics" and the "ubiquitous virtuality" of everyday life. By engaging with the idea of data in the humanities, the course encourages students to reconsider our common-place assumptions about how reading works. Course materials, discussions, and classroom exercises will push students to examine how basic ideas about a text such as author, subject, setting, character or even style might look different when a non-human is involved in the interpretation. The course assumes no prior computer or coding skills, but a willingness to explore new technologies is essential for success.

Societies have traditionally used maps to represent, even construct, the spaces in which we live as well as the territories over which we assert control. But what has become of the map in the (post-)digital age? Has our relationship to human space changed in our data-rich world? Are we unknowingly map-makers by virtue of walking around with our devices? This course explores the specific role that technology can play in our understanding of both historical and contemporary map making. Through regional and global examples of urban culture mapping, the course’s focus on data discovery extends beyond working with official data to creating our own data within familiar environments. In addition to seminar discussion of readings and audiovisual materials, the course will host guest speakers. It also has a lab component with two main assignments. First, we focus on the larger Arabian Gulf region through the eyes of historical cartographers and colonial geographers. Second, we will turn to the city of Abu Dhabi itself to see how (and why) we might map some of its spaces of human culture using simple technology. The course assumes no prior computer skills.

What happens when the arts and humanities are represented in digital form? What kind of new insights can we have when by looking at the data of the humanities? This course will look at intersections between computers and the humanities, a form of inquiry known as "digital humanities." The course is structured around a broad examination of concepts important in today's society (computational thinking, digital identity, text as data, dataset, pattern, algorithm, network, location). Students will discuss these concepts critically, explore real-life examples and put them into practice in hands-on activities. Examples of such hands on work might include, but are not limited to, creating accessible web design, analyzing text digitally, building and visualizing a dataset, curating an open bibliography, thinking about art as data, building a Twitter bot, teaching a computer to recognize human handwriting, visualizing social networks or making digital maps. The course assumes no prior technical skills, but a willingness to explore new technologies is essential for success.