Assignment 01
Placing the humanities
| Assigned | Due | Submit |
|---|---|---|
Jan 20, 2026 |
Feb 10, 2026 |
Where are the humanities?
At a museum. In the classroom. At your job. On the train. As an ad. On the couch. On a walk. On your phone. Our lives are suffused by the humanities, no doubt—but how does their placement affect the way we experience them? And how do contemporary changes in the landscape of the humanities, from funding recissions to digital technology, shape those experiences?
In this assignment, you must respond creatively to the following prompt: Where are the humanities?
The prompt is intentionally open-ended. You can approach it however you like. Make use of your own unique talents, experiences, and observations to develop an answer. Not that you needed it, but you have my permission to be weird—in fact, the weirder, the better.
Stuff you should read
You’ve already skimmed and/or read these:
To further sharpen your sense of the contemporary humanities landscape, read these two short news articles:
Also, read this piece which critically assesses the digital humanities:
- Allington, Daniel et al. (2016)
Finally, for reference, you can check out a bunch of digital humanities projects at the bottom of this page.
Responding to the prompt
Suitable responses could include, but are not limited to:
- Digital or hand-drawn maps1
- Creative computation/creative coding
- Collages/zines
- Short videos
- Audio media, such as music or short podcasts
- Digital or physical art
- Creative writing, such as poetry, a short story, creative nonfiction, etc.
Along with your creative response to the prompt, you should submit a statement of purpose—basically an artist’s statement—of 250-500 words. This statement should reference at least two readings, labs, activities, or other materials from this class (such as the ones listed above). Alternatively, you may cite a scholarly source that seems related to our coursework, but which we haven’t read.
Submission details
- Your submission may take any form, but you must submit some version of your assignment via Canvas by the due date to provide evidence of its timely completion. If you aren’t sure what to submit, let me know and we can figure something out.
- Your statement of purpose should be submitted in
.docor.pdfformat.
| Assigned | Due | Submit |
|---|---|---|
Jan 20, 2026 |
Feb 10, 2026 |
Some digital and geospatial humanities projects
- Queer map quilt
- Trevor Paglen’s Sites Unseen
- Anti-eviction mapping project
- Library of Congress ships logs
- PalOpenMaps
- Reading digital sources: a case study in ship’s logs
- Borders and Mapping Borders
- American Panorama, e.g.,
- Mapping Prejudice
- NativeLand
- Spread of slavery in the US
- Enchanting the desert
- Mapping the Dakota pipeline
- Queering the map
- Atlascope
- Landownership Inequality in Georgia, Past and Present
- InsideAirbnb
- Conspiracy of Cartographers
- The Decolonial Atlas
- Palestine Open Maps
- Ptolemy’s Geography
- Femicide in Mexico
- Library of Congress story maps
- Open History Archive
References
Footnotes
Duh.↩︎