Autumn 2021 Syllabus for Computing Cultural Heritage (CSE 590T / LIS 598A)

This document is the syllabus for Computing Cultural Heritage, a graduate seminar created and taught by Benjamin Charles Germain Lee at the University of Washington during the Autumn Quarter of 2021, offered in the course catalog in Computer Science & Engineering and Library & Information Science (CSE 590T / LIS 598A). 

Couse Description: From large-scale systems for searching the web to the datasets that machine learning practitioners utilize to train their models, our collective cultural heritage is in many ways the substrate of computer science. Indeed, cultural heritage practitioners including humanists, librarians, and archivists have been influential in shaping the discourse surrounding the sociotechnical implications of computing. This course explores various topics within computer science through the lens of cultural heritage: data visualization, human-AI interaction, search & discovery, crowdsourcing, web archiving, design & UX, and classification. The goals of this course are two-fold: first, to survey these topics in computer science, and second, to explore how they manifest within the context of cultural heritage. We will cover one topic every week, with the first meeting devoted to the CS-oriented literature for the topic, and the second meeting devoted to the sociotechnical implications of the topic in practice. During these second meetings, we will speak with cultural heritage practitioners at institutions across the country to learn about the roles of computing in their work, research, and stewardship.