The Digital Humanities Computing Seminar (DHCS) brought together twenty-five members of the University community with the stated goal of generating a syllabus for a graduate course in knowledge representation for humanists. The working group included faculty, graduate students, and staff from the College of Arts and Sciences, the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, the Libraries, and other units of the University. Additional expertise was provided by six outside visitors who shared their experiences applying and teaching the principles outlined in our plans for the knowledge representation course. For a list of participants and visitors see Appendix A.
Each member of the working group was responsible for developing a presentation on a topic. Components of the presentations included recommended readings, project ideas, and approaches to the subject. Discussion was lively and the sense of intellectual stakes was high - as was the commitment to the common goal. The result of that work is this syllabus draft for Knowledge Representation I and II.
The syllabus reflects our collaborative efforts and is meant as a reference document for faculty who might teach this course in the near future at the University of Virginia or elsewhere. As often happens in a project of this kind, our intellectual ambitions and enthusiasm outstrip the available time and space in the syllabus. Our focus has been to design a class that might actually be implemented; therefore, the syllabus reflects a subset of our interests, passions and commitments. We present here a sequence of topics and a list of readings, both of which are selective rather than exhaustive. Convinced that long bibliographies and extensive lists are less useful than subject-specific and annotated lists, we've structured the bibliography accordingly.
Seminar discussions also made apparent the need for preliminary plans for our Humanities Information Systems course. Tom Horton, a member of the Computer Science department and a potential instructor for this course, has developed a skeletal syllabus for this course. This course in conjunction with a more conventional programming course will provide the technical skill-set for the program. An auxiliary goal of the seminar, a schematic draft of this syllabus is presented in Appendix C.
We welcome any feedback on this syllabus draft. We also encourage its widespread circulation and use. Please do let us know if you make use of the syllabus as we hope this draft will provide a useful service to the field.
Johanna Drucker and John Unsworth, Seminar Directors
Andrea Laue, Seminar Coordinator, scribe, and author of the synthesized syllabus
This page was created on 10 August 2002.