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Enroll in a new course for Fall 2018 -- VPA 5300: The Arts as (Big!) Data

In the analysis of artworks, scholars often eschew explicit statistical methods in favor of qualitative descriptions derived from empirical observation. But with the drive toward digitization now in full swing, statistical methods provide powerful analytic tools, enabling the testing of a priori hypotheses for corpora that often far exceed the capacities of one scholarly lifetime. Faced with a digitized corpus of Elizabethan comedies, the instrumental repertories of the Viennese masters, or the frescoes of the Italian Renaissance, how might computers help us to discover the stylistic features that distinguish Shakespeare from Marlowe, Mozart from Haydn, or Giotto from Raphael?

VPA 5300: The Arts as (Big!) Data examines the emerging role played by corpus-driven methods in arts research. To that end, we will complete weekly readings drawn from interdisciplinary fields like systematic musicology, corpus linguistics, and the digital humanities, and students will receive training in corpus-based statistical methods. Assignments will include critical reading summaries and programming problems for toy datasets selected from various sources, but no prior background in statistics or programming is required. Finally, students will design and publish an online, annotated corpus catered to their backgrounds and interests, the purpose of which is to answer an empirical research question using quantitative methods.

Posted:
8/13/2018

Originator:
David Sears

Email:
david.sears@ttu.edu

Department:
Visual and Perform Arts


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