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Folio from al-Jazari's Book of Ingenious Mechanical Devices (1315): design for the Water Clock of the Peacocks.
Design for the Water Clock of the Peacocks, al-Jazari, 1315 CE. The Met, public domain.

Module II

Text as Data

What happens when text becomes data? Distant reading and computational analysis let us read at scales no individual could, but the question of whose texts are computer-readable in the first place is older than the methods. Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, and Turkish have had very different routes into the digital, and those routes still shape what shows up when you search.

2 class sessions

In this module · 3 sessions (1 cancelled)

Class 3 · Feb 11

What's text got to do with it?

Text as Data I

EventAttend NYCDH Week (Feb 8-11)

This session explores how text becomes data, from distant reading and topic modeling to sentiment analysis. What new questions become possible when you can read thousands of texts at once? What gets lost?

Required Readings & Resources

From the Session

Class 4 · Feb 18

No Class: Monday Schedule

No class. NYU follows the Monday schedule on this date.

Class 5 · Feb 25

What's text got to do with it?: Text as Data II

EventReport back from NYCDH Week workshop (write-up due April 1)

Continuing the exploration of text as data, this session digs into datasets, OCR, and the politics of mass digitization. What does it mean when Google digitizes millions of books? Who decides what gets scanned? Discussion of “DATASET” as concept.

Screenshot of NgramReader+ Lite for the Classical Arabic Corpus
NgramReader+ Lite for the Classical Arabic Corpus (OpenITI / Universität Hamburg). An in-class tool for distant reading across centuries of Arabic text.

Required Readings & Resources

Recommended