Cultural Analytics

While often defined as “the computational study of culture”, cultural analytics might be best understood as a radical interdisciplinary experiment, one that seeks to understand cultures — socialties, histories, cognition, the literary — through empirical models and patterns, built on effective computational representations of relevant cultural constructs. This experiment calls for a unique skill set: one needs to be familiar with approaches in the interpretive humanities and computer/information science; one also needs to cultivate an interdisciplinary mindset: recognize and appreciate the affordances and limitations of both qualitative and quantitative traditions. This class is imagined as a possible point of departure for those who are so inclined.