This class is an introduction to the unusual and strange in late imperial Chinese literature through digital analysis. We will focus on works that engage with the nature of evidence and reality: stories about crime and detection, ghosts, encounters with foxes, and other odd narratives. The stories we read, mostly written in the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties, are found across a wide array of textual genres popular in early modern China. Students will also learn to leverage a variety of digital methods to analyze these stories, covering approaches from textual analysis and mapping to network analysis and the public humanities.

This seminar is an introduction to leveraging the processing power of modern computers to study Chinese culture. This course will introduce you to a variety of newly developed digital tools, algorithms, and datasets that allow us to pursue new insights into traditional Chinese literature and culture. You will engage with new scholarship being published in the rapidly expanding field of the digital humanities and learn how to create digital research projects from scratch.

What are Digital Humanities? What does the library of the future look like? Will the single-author peer-reviewed article survive the DH storm that is coming? How will the DH impact the ways we do historical research? And what ethical and legal problems arise from the use of DH methods? In this course, we will familiarize ourselves and experiment with a variety of Digital Humanities tools, such as network analysis, geospatial mapping, text mining, and crowdsourcing, interrogating how the DH reshape the ways we approach textual and material culture, ask research questions, process data, publish, and store academic scholarship.

The Cairo Geniza is a cache of texts from an Egyptian synagogue including letters, lists and legal deeds from before 1500, when most Jews lived in the Islamic world. These are some of the best-documented people in pre-modern history and among the most mobile, crossing the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean to trade, study, apprentice and marry. Data science, neural network-based handwritten text recognition and other computational methods are now helping make sense of the texts on a large scale. Students will contribute to an evolving state of knowledge and gain an insider's view of what we can and can't know in premodern history.