This is a core course that surveys key texts in Media Studies. The course takes a historical approach to the development of the field, but also surveys the various developments in the social sciences, the humanities, and film studies relevant to the interdisciplinary study of media.
MUSI 7559 is about circulation, media, memory, and performance across time, rather than a single historical moment. It begins with the eighteenth-century collection of Naval Documents of the American Revolution, hosted by the Center for Digital Editing at UVA. Since the course follows the afterlives and modern reinterpretations of these songs, and welcomes projects shaped by students’ own interests and disciplinary backgrounds, it opens naturally onto fields like popular culture, global studies, performance studies, archives, and public humanities.
Students will create digital exhibits or annotated archival editions, with opportunities for spatial or geospatial work by tracing how songs, ships, and stories moved across oceans and empires.
Combined undergraduate/graduate research seminar with workshop components, archival work, listening, discussion, and project development.
No prior musical training or language expertise required. Students with musical, linguistic, or archival experience are encouraged to bring those skills into the course.
This course explores the relationship of Venice to its lagoon and the mainland through the mapping and analysis of the urban and ecological systems. The research will inform the studio and independent research, and will vary in its specific focus in accordance with each year's program research goals.
This course explores classical Tibetan literature and religious systems through a variety of genres in the original Tibetan texts.
This seminar will examine the changing dynamic of everyday religious practice with a focus on later medieval England through the material culture and architecture of the parish church. We will explore ordinary people’s experience of religion in the pre-Reformation period. Classes will be discussion based and each student will undertake a major research project on a topic developed in consultation with the instructor.
This course is taught by an experienced digital humanist and member of the DH Certificate Faculty Advisory Committee. Students may undertake a DH project rather than a paper.
How can scholars use computational and digital methods to advance their research without sacrificing the interpretive, nuanced, and contextually situated stance of the humanities and humanistic social sciences? The DH Practicum course challenges students to think of their humanities research materials as data without reducing them to data. In this course, the digital humanities are framed as a set of various intellectual pursuits rather than a unified field; each student is encouraged to work within the norms of their particular discipline, using technical methods to generate insights that advance their individual humanistic goals.
Our class will typically draws students from at least six or seven departments, reflecting the expansive multidisciplinary appeal of the digital humanities; course objectives must thus reflect students' individual scholarly goals and their departments' expectations. One student may build an online database and archive; another may explore manuscript digitization enabled by AI-powered optical character recognition; while a third may pursue large-corpus text analytics using advanced computational tools. In addition to identifying and justifying technical methods that advance their scholarly goals, students will gain the skills to manage humanities data, develop technical workflows, and transfer technical skills to others.
We'll organize our twice-weekly class schedule by alternating between theory and practice: we will have lectures and discuss readings in seminar format on Mondays, then undertake into our technological explorations in studio sessions on Wednesdays. Within the first two weeks of class, student are expected to assemble a set of research materials which may be explored using digital and/or computational approaches.
Readings will be drawn from general DH studies and from specific disciplinary essays on the uses of technology for research. We will also engage with information theory, science and technology studies, and selected recent writings on the theory and practice of AI. The reading load is deliberately moderate, because students are expected to devote significant time to exploring and practicing new technical skills.
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