The Islamicate World 2.0: Studying Islamic Cultures through Computational Textual Analysis is a Global Classrooms course that will be offered for the first time in the fall of 2016 by the University of Maryland (College Park) and Universität Leipzig. In this exciting, new project-based course, students from both institutions will come together to learn the basics of computational textual analysis while participating as student researchers in the nascent project of exploring the vast and largely unexplored tomes of textual data about the Islamicate world. It will also introduce students to theoretical and methodological debates in the field of global digital humanities. Like the digital humanities field that inspires its approach, it will be a highly interdisciplinary course that studies texts from multiple genres (lyric poetry to historical chronicles, legal treatises to the Quran) and languages (Arabic, Persian) with the aid of computational textual analysis tools. There are no language prerequisites, but it is preferable if students at least have elementary knowledge of either Arabic, Persian, Turkish, or Urdu.

Course Syllabus

SLLC Special Topics in World Cultures 499I: A Global Classrooms Course

The Islamicate World 2.0: Studying Islamic Cultures through Computational Textual Analysis

Fall 2016 TuTh 1:00pm - 2:30pm JMZ 2117

Also offered as: HIST 429G, PERS 498W, ARAB 499W. Credit granted for: SLLC 499I, HIST 429G, PERS 498W or ARAB 499W.

Instructors

Dr. Matthew Thomas Miller
Office: JMZ 1220D
Office Hours: Tu-Th 2:30-3:30
E-mail: mtmiller@umd.edu
Roshan Institute for Persian Studies
University of Maryland, College Park

Dr. Maxim Romanov
Office: Neu Paulinum 618
Office Hours: By appointment.
Email: maxim.romanov@uni-leipzig.de
Alexander von Humboldt-Lehrstuhl für Digital Humanities
Institut für Informatik, Universität Leipzig

Course Description

In this Global Classrooms course, University of Maryland and Universität Leipzig students will come together to learn the basics of computational textual analysis while participating as student researchers in the nascent project of exploring the vast and largely unexplored tomes of textual data about the Islamicate world. It will also introduce students to theoretical and methodological debates in the field of global digital humanities. Like the digital humanities field that inspires its approach, it will be a highly interdisciplinary course that studies texts from multiple genres (lyric poetry to historical chronicles, legal treatises to the Quran) and languages (Arabic, Persian) with the aid of computational textual analysis tools. There are no language prerequisites, but it is preferable if students at least have elementary knowledge of either Arabic, Persian, Turkish, or Urdu.

NB: Keep in mind that semesters start and end at different periods at UMD and UL. For this reason, the course at UMD starts on August 30th, 2016 (room …); while at UL—on October 4th, 2016; the course will meet until December 12th, 2016; after that UL group will continue working on their projects until the end of the semester at UL (Room at UL: P402 @ Neu Paulinum). More information on the UL specifics….

Course Webpage

Available here

Required Texts and Technology

Arnold, Taylor and Lauren Tilton. Humanities Data in R: Exploring Networks, Geospatial Data, Images, and Text. Springer International Publishing: 2015. ISBN: 9783319207018. Book website.

Jockers, Matthew. Text Analysis with R for Students of Literature. Springer International Publishing: 2014. ISBN: 9783319031637. Book website.

NB: These books are available through UMD libraries and in e-book format.

Download R and R Studio (R is the actual programming language, while RStudio is a convenient interface for interacting with R; you need to download and install both — first R, then RStudio):
https://cran.r-project.org/
https://www.rstudio.com/

NB: Students must have or be able to borrow a laptop for classwork. This course requires extensive use of a computer.

Course Goals

By the end of this course students will have:
(1) become acquainted with the major debates and tools in computational textual studies;
(2) developed intermediate-level skills in the R programming language;
(3) gained extensive experience working in international teams (termed “collaboratories” here) to solve complex problems;
(4) produced a mini-research publication that will be published on the course site (with the student’s permission).

Expectations and Grading Procedures

The grade breakdown for this class is as follows (and see more details on each element in subsections below):
30% Class Participation (including, co-discussion leading)
20% Class Assignments
40% Final (Group) Project
10% Class (Group) Presentation

See undergraduate catalogue for description of grades—e.g., A+, A, A-, etc.— here.

Class Participation (30%)

We cannot stress enough how important your regular attendance and active participation in class discussion is for your grade (for attendance policy, see #1 in the “Course Procedures and Policies” section below). Regardless of whether we are discussing readings or engaging in collaborative in-class work, this class will primarily be student-driven and so it is imperative that you come to class having prepared the requisite materials and assignments well.
Additionally, you will be asked to serve as co-discussion leaders (alongside the instructors) on a rotating basis for the sessions in which we have specific assigned readings. You will be responsible for introducing and contextualizing the readings for the class and formulating class discussion questions based on the readings.

Class Assignments (20%)

Beginning in the fifth week of the semester, you will be assigned specific assignments to complete in R. Sometimes these will be the exercises in the Arnold/Tilton and Jockers introductions to R, other times they will be supplemental R practice exercises from other R tutorials, such as {Swirl} (see: http://swirlstats.com/). These assignments will be posted in ELMS and they must be turned in before class time in order to receive credit.

Final (Group) Project (40%) (and the Research Collaboratories)

This course is a project-based learning course. The final project, therefore, will occupy a substantial amount of our class time throughout the semester and will be a major component of your final grade. But, fear not! The instructors will work closely with each of you and your groups to construct a collaborative research project. You will spend much of the second half of the course working on this project during class time with your fellow group members in the “research collaboratory” groups that we will form in week 11. At the conclusion of each research collaboratory session, tasks will be assigned to each group member which must be completed before the next class period. They will also be reported to the instructors after class so they can keep track of each individual’s contributions to the project. These tasks will vary greatly on the basis of each group’s project: some students may be working on cleaning and/or reformatting texts, others on developing a R script, and still others may be tasked with doing traditional humanities research in order to properly contextualize the results of the group’s new computational textual analysis. We do not expect that you will have all of the answers when you begin work on your final project. You will need to play and experiment with the texts and different modes of textual analysis and visualization available to you in R, and you certainly will hit dead ends and completely fail (productively) at times too. In this process, however, you will learn a great deal, as the research on experiential and problem/project-based learning has shown. We will guide you throughout your work on the final project, making sure that it eventually comes together to form a micro-publication by the end of the course. You will present on and submit your final projects on the assigned exam day for this course, Monday, December 19, 1:30-3:30.

Class presentation (10%)

Your class presentation is an opportunity for you to present your group’s final project to the class. It should be between 20-30 minutes in length. You should provide an overview of your initial hypothesis, methods of analysis, problems you encountered in your research, and your research findings (including, how they corroborate or problematize the existing scholarly narratives). You will be graded on the quality of both your research and presentation of it.

Faculty-Student Communication

Faculty and advisors use email and ELMS to convey important information, and students are responsible for keeping their email address up to date, and must ensure that forwarding to another address functions properly. Failure to check email, errors in forwarding, and returned email are the responsibility of the student, and do not constitute an excuse for missing announcements or deadlines. In the modern digital world, it is a necessity that you check your email and other forms of digital communication (e.g., ELMS) at least a few times per day and respond promptly to messages. I would suggest checking messages in the morning and evening at the minimum.

Emergency Protocol

If the university is closed for an extended period of time, this course will be conducted via video conferencing.

Course Schedule

Week 1: Class Introduction and Computational Textual Analysis as a Method I

[NB: Keep in mind that dates below are given according to the American convention: Month/Day/Year]

8/30/2016 Thursday: Class Introduction

No reading prior to class.

9/1/2016 Thursday: Computational Textual Analysis as a Method I

Read Prior to Class:

Week 2: Computational Textual Analysis as a Method II

9/6/2016 Tuesday: Theorizing Computational Methods

Read Prior to Class:

  • Ramsay, Stephen. Reading Machines: Toward an Algorithmic Criticism. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2011. 1-17. [ELMS]
  • Underwood, Ted. “Theorizing Research Practices We Forgot to Theorize Twenty Years Ago.” Representations 127, no. 1 (Summer 2014): 64–72. [ELMS]

9/8/2016 Thursday: Modes of Reading

Read Prior to Class:

  • Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History. London: Verso, 2005, 1-34. [ELMS]
  • Wilkens, Matthew. “Canons, Close Reading, and the Evolution of Method.” In Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold (2012): http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/17

Monday, September 12, 2016: Last day to add/drop courses and change grading option

Week 3: History of Computational Textual Analysis I

9/13/2016 Tuesday: Genre

Read Prior to Class:

  • Hope, Jonathan, and Michael Witmore. “The Very Large Textual Object: A Prosthetic Reading of Shakespeare.” Early Modern Literary Studies 9, no. 3 (2004): 1–36. Link: http://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/09-3/hopewhit.htm
  • Hope, Jonathan, and M. Witmore. “The Hundredth Psalm to the Tune of ‘Green Sleeves’: Digital Approaches to the Language of Genre.” Shakespeare Quarterly 61, no. 3 (2010): 357–90.
  • “DocuScope: Computer-aided Rhetorical Analysis.” Available here: http://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/english/research/docuscope.html

9/15/2016 Thursday: Genre

Read Prior to Class:

In class:

Week 4: History of Computational Textual Analysis II

9/20/2016 Tuesday: Stylometry

Read Prior to Class:

  • Holmes, David I. “The Evolution of Stylometry in Humanities Scholarship” Literary & Linguistic Computing 13, no. 3 (1998): 111-117. [ELMS]
  • Koppel, M., Schler, J. and Argamon, S. “Computational methods in authorship attribution.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 60, no. 1 (2009): 9-26. [ELMS]

In class:

9/22/2016 Thursday: Stylometry in R

Read Prior to Class:

  • Maciej Eder, Jan Rybicki, and Mike Kestemont, “‘Stylo’: A Package for Stylometric Analyses.” Computational Stylistics Group, 2014.

In class:

  • 1st collaboratory assignment with ‘Stylo’ R Package (bring your computers!).

Week 5: History of Computational Textual Analysis in Islamic Studies

9/27/2016 Tuesday: Bulliet

Read Prior to Class:

  • David Joseph Wrisley. “Modeling the Transmission of al-Mubashshir Ibn Fātik’s Mukhtār al-Ḥikam in Medieval Europe: Some Initial Data-Driven Explorations” Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture 5, no 1 (2016): https://www.jrmdc.com/journal/article/view/81
  • Sadeghi, Behnam. “The Chronology of the Qur’ān: A Stylometric Research Program.” Arabica 58.3–4 (2011): 210-99. [ELMS]

In class:

  • 2nd collaboratory assignment with ‘Stylo’ R Package (bring your computers!).

9/29/2016 Thursday: Romanov and Savant

Read Prior to Class:

  • Romanov, Maxim. “Toward Abstract Models for Islamic History.” In The Digital Humanities + Islamic Middle Eastern Studies, edited by Elias Muhanna, 117–149. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016. [ELMS]
  • Savant, Sarah Bowen. “The History of Arabic books in the digital age.” British Academy Review Summer (2016): 42-45. [ELMS].
  • Also look at: Viral Texts Project: http://viraltexts.org/

In class:

  • 3rd collaboratory assignment with ‘Stylo’ R Package (bring your computers!).

Week 6: Inauguration of the UMD-UL Global Classroom and R Bootcamp I

10/4/2016 Tuesday: R Basics

Prepare for Class:

  • Chapter 1 in Arnold and Tilton and Chapter 1 in Jockers (there will be some overlap).
  • Lesson #1-6 in Swirl’s “R Programming Alt” programming tutorial (directions for installation are available here: https://github.com/swirldev/swirl_courses#swirl-courses. Please use “R Programming E” course by entering and executing the following commands in RStudio:
library(swirl)   
install_course_github("swirldev", "R_Programming_E")   
swirl()

In class:

10/6/2016 Thursday: R Basics

Prepare for Class:

  • Lesson #7-12 in Swirl’s “R Programming Alt” programming tutorial.

In class:

  • Introduction to using Github.

Week 7: R Bootcamp II

10/11/2016 Tuesday: R Basics

Prepare for Class:

  • Chapter 2 in Arnold and Tilton.

In class:

  • Introduction to Github (including pulling corpus of practive texts for class and submission of class assignments through Github).
  • “Sheykh Google” activity (bring your computers!).

10/13/2016 Thursday: Basics of Text Analysis in R

Submit before Class:

  • Practice exercises for chapter 2 in Arnold & Tilton, pages 183-186.

In class:

  • Jockers chapter 2 (bring your computers!). We hope you will be able to finish most of the Jockers’ exercises in class, but if not, please finish them up at home and submit them before the following class. Please submit your code (i.e., the R script file) and also any resulting visualizations (e.g., graphs, tables) or answers (in the form of a screenshot).

Week 8: R Bootcamp III

10/18/2016 Tuesday: R Basics

Prepare for Class:

  • Chapter 3 in Arnold and Tilton.

In class:

  • Jockers chapter 3 (bring your computers!). We hope you will be able to finish most of the Jockers’ exercises in class, but if not, please finish them up at home and submit them before the following class. Please submit your code (i.e., the R script file) and also any resulting visualizations (e.g., graphs, tables) or answers (in the form of a screenshot).

10/20/2016 Thursday: Basics of Text Analysis in R

Submit before Class:

  • Practice exercises for chapter 3 in Arnold & Tilton, pages 186-188.

In class:

  • Jockers chapter 4 (bring your computers!). We hope you will be able to finish most of the Jockers’ exercises in class, but if not, please finish them up at home and submit them before the following class. Please submit your code (i.e., the R script file) and also any resulting visualizations (e.g., graphs, tables) or answers (in the form of a screenshot).
  • First brainstorming session on final project topics.

Week 9: R Bootcamp IV

10/25/2016 Tuesday: R Basics

Prepare for Class:

  • Chapter 4 in Arnold and Tilton.

In class:

  • Jockers chapter 5. We hope you will be able to finish most of the Jockers’ exercises in class, but if not, please finish them up at home and submit them before the following class. Please submit your code (i.e., the R script file) and also any resulting visualizations (e.g., graphs, tables) or answers (in the form of a screenshot).

10/27/2016 Thursday: Basics of Text Analysis in R

Submit before Class:

  • Practice exercises for chapter 4 in Arnold & Tilton, pages 188-190.

In class:

  • Second brainstorming session on final project topics (by end of this class, we will set the text analysis groups and their respective assigned chapters for week 10 based your initial ideas for the final project).

Week 10: Learning Specific Forms of Text Analysis in R

11/1/2016 Tuesday: Text Analysis in R

Prepare for Class:

  • Task assigned to you by your research group in previous collaboratory:

John: One pager on R-shief.
Aysha: Prepare topic modeling chapters from Jockers and Arnold/Tilton books.
Jake: Finish newspaper Google spreadsheet.
Tobias: Continue scraping from websites in listed in Google spreadsheet.
Jonathon: Continue refining his scraping script in order to make the data available.
Sarosh: Look into methods of extracting information from data so that we can determine if certain verses آيات/آية or sura سور/سورة were considered significant to various Mufasiroon مفسرون and mathahab مذاهب.
Christian and Thomas: Prepare topic modeling chapters from Jockers and Arnold/Tilton books.

In class:

  • Research collaboratory focused on final project (bring your computers!).

11/3/2016 Thursday: Text Analysis in R

Prepare for Class:

  • Task assigned to you by your research group in previous collaboratory:

John: Explore MADAMIRA.
Aysha: Explore topic modeling options.
Jake: Finalize Arabic newspaper sources and their date ranges.
Tobias: Continue scrapping from sites on spreadsheet.
Thomas and saroosh: Write script to produce word counts.
Christoph and Franzi: Read about topic modeling and develop conceptional research questions related to tafsir and their authors.
Jonathan: Work on producing a virtual box so group can use Linux (and thus does not have to transliterate the Arabic texts into Latin characters) (to be done by 11/8).

In class:

  • Research collaboratory focused on final project (bring your computers!).
  • Research collaboratory groups finalized and first set of individualized assignments distributed in preparation for your research group’s first research collaboratory.

Week 11: Research Collaboratory I

11/8/2016 Tuesday: Research Collaboratory

Prepare for Class:

  • Task assigned to you by your research group in previous collaboratory:

John: work on MADAMIRA and sandbox tool.
Tobias: continue refining scraping.
Aysha: exploratory topic modeling and stemming.
Jake: exploratory topic modeling.
Sarosh & Thomas: Develop a R script to get data from the yaml files into one csv file.
Franzi: Develop ideas about which parts of the Quran and which Sects/Schools we should focus on.
Jonathan: Work on producing a virtual box so group can use Linux (and thus does not have to transliterate the Arabic texts into Latin characters) (to be done by 11/8).

In class:

  • Research collaboratory focused on final project (bring your computers!).

11/10/2016 Thursday: Research Collaboratory

Prepare for Class:

  • Task assigned to you by your research group in previous collaboratory:

Sarosh and Thom: Run different word frequency analyses as outlined in Jockers on tafaseer.
Jonathon: CSV file, stay gold.

In class:

  • Research collaboratory focused on final project (bring your computers!).

Week 12: Research Collaboratory II

11/15/2016 Tuesday: Research Collaboratory

Prepare for Class:

  • Task assigned to you by your research group in previous collaboratory:

Maryam: investigating correlation with antconc and overview of authors’ time and space coordinates.
Jonathon: run first round of topic modeling and figure out how much computing power different things need.
Thom: run most frequent word frequencies.
Franziska: background research, overview; talk to Prof. Ebert regarding current discussions in the field.
John: literature review and Linux set-up/Months.
Aysha: find archive links for each newspaper.
Jacob: search Middle Eastern Studies databases for literature review on Arab Spring.
Tobias: continue scraping and working with csv files.

In class:

  • Research collaboratory focused on final project (bring your computers!).

11/17/2016 Thursday: Research Collaboratory

Prepare for Class:

  • Task assigned to you by your research group in previous collaboratory:

Jonathon: Work on ToPan with Thomas.
Thom & Sarosh: Topic Modeling using script from Matthew Miller; MFW.
Maryam: Research and prepare options for Topic Modeling Visualization.
John: MFW counts for each newspaper.
Aysha: scrape 2012 data from almasri alyom and prepare options for Topic Modeling Visualization.
Jacob: scrape 2013 data from almasri alyom and prepare options for Topic Modeling Visualization.
Tobias: continue scraping 2010-11 data and send John arabic stemmer and MFW script.

In class:

  • Research collaboratory focused on final project (bring your computers!).

Week 13: Research Collaboratory III

11/22/2016 Tuesday: Research Collaboratory

Prepare for Class:

  • By today’s class, all groups need to submit a final project proposal to the instructors. This proposal should include three parts: (1) a 1-page overview of the topic on which you are proposing to work; (2) a timeline for the completion of each phase of the work (which the instructors will need to approve); and (3) a detailed list of tasks for which each group member will be responsible. After you have submitted these, the instructors will review them together and send you our feedback, recommendations, and expectations for your final project, and we will discuss all of this in class on Tuesday, Nov. 29th.
  • Task assigned to you by your research group in previous collaboratory:

Thom and Sarosh: continue exploratory data analysis with topic modeling and stylo.
Jonathan: Be on call for tech support.
Franzi: work on author identification, style, etc. for the introduction for the paper.
Aysha: Remove extra years from scraped csv data.
John: Continue trying to get the mfw analyses to work.
Jake: Work on project overview for proposal + follow up on topan issues
Tobias: Keep working with Matt’s topic modeling script.

In class:

  • Research collaboratory focused on final project (bring your computers!).

11/24/2016 Thursday: No Class, Thanksgiving Recess

Week 14: Research Collaboratory IV

11/29/2016 Tuesday: Research Collaboratory

Prepare for Class:

  • Task assigned to you by your research group in previous collaboratory:

Sarosh: Researching about additional useful methods that are good to use for arabic texts

Thom: TM again as well with his topics

Jonathan: To-Pan work

Franzi: clean data (excel), gather information about Tabari and Ibn Kathir, al-Razi and his connections.
All in Tafsir group: research text re-use, madhhabs and their effect on tafsir quality and erudition, and the proposal.
John: complete MFWs, histogram for each paper, and transliteration scheme and refine wordclouds.
Aysha: work on lit review (introduction to Arab Spring and Arab media and similar studies outside of Arabic).
Jacob: work on ToPan, provide feedback on visualizations, and help with lit review.
Tobias: work on formatting issues (missing lines) and finding a way to compare topic modeling visualizations between papers.

In class:

  • Research collaboratory focused on final project (bring your computers!).

12/1/2016 Thursday: Research Collaboratory

Prepare for Class:

  • Task assigned to you by your research group in previous collaboratory:

John: create word clouds and histograms with relative frequencies and work on excel topic sheets.
Aysha: complete literature review and review paper draft.
Jacob: complete literature review and work on excel topic sheets.
Tobias: re-organize spreadsheets based on topics of interest.
Thom: work on visualization of topic modeling and Stylo analyses with character n-grams.
Sarosh: produce character count per verse relative to Tafsir length for each author in Corpus.

In class:

  • Research collaboratory focused on final project (bring your computers!).

Week 15: Research Collaboratory V

12/6/2016 Tuesday: Research Collaboratory

Prepare for Class:

  • Task assigned to you by your research group in previous collaboratory:

John: close reading of relevant articles from topics in AlmasriAlyoum and Alwatan and write 1 page brief.
Jacob: close reading of relevant articles from topics in Hespress and Tharwa and 1 page brief.
Aysha: ranking of topic relevancy for each newspaper and revise literature review.
Tobias: code documentation.
Thom: write literature review.
Sarosh: topic modeling.
Jonathan: document code.

In class:

  • Research collaboratory focused on final project (bring your computers!).

12/8/2016 Thursday: Research Collaboratory

Prepare for Class:

  • Task assigned to you by your research group in previous collaboratory.

All: work on final projects!

In class:

  • Research collaboratory focused on final project (bring your computers!).

Last Day of Classes: Monday, December 12th, 2016

Reading Day: Tuesday, December 13th, 2016

Course Procedures and Policies

1) Attendance and Absences: Students are expected to attend classes regularly. Consistent attendance offers students the most effective opportunity to gain command of course concepts and materials. After the 3rd unexcused absence, student’s class participation grade will be reduced by 10% for each subsequent absence up to the 6th unexcused absence. More than 6 unexcused absences will result in a failing grade for the course. Events that justify an excused absence include: religious observances; mandatory military obligation; illness of the student or illness of an immediate family member; participation in university activities at the request of university authorities; and compelling circumstances beyond the student’s control (e.g., death in the family, required court appearance). Absences stemming from work duties other than military obligation (e.g., unexpected changes in shift assignments) and traffic/transit problems do not typically qualify for excused absence. Students claiming an excused absence must notify the course instructor in a timely manner and provide appropriate documentation. The notification should be provided either prior to the absence or as soon afterwards as possible. In the case of religious observances, athletic events, and planned absences known at the beginning of the semester, the student must inform the instructor during the schedule adjustment period. All other absences must be reported as soon as is practical. The student must provide appropriate documentation of the absence. The documentation must be provided in writing to the instructor. The full university attendance/absence policy can be found here: http://www.ugst.umd.edu/courserelatedpolicies.html.

2) Academic Integrity: The UMD Honor Code prohibits students from cheating on exams, plagiarizing papers, submitting the same paper for credit in two courses without authorization, buying papers, submitting fraudulent documents and forging signatures. On every examination, paper or other academic exercise not exempted by the instructor, students must write by hand and sign the following pledge: “I pledge on my honor that I have not given or received any unauthorized assistance on this examination (or assignment).” Allegations of academic dishonesty will be reported directly to the Student Honor Council: http://www.shc.umd.edu. Students who engage in academic dishonesty in this course will receive no points for the assignment in question, and will be immediately reported to the Honor Council and Office of Judicial Programs for further action. There will be no warnings. Remember, cheating, plagiarism or other types of fabrication are never worth it. Definitions for plagiarism, fabrication, cheating, etc. can be found at: http://www.ugst.umd.edu/courserelatedpolicies.html.
3) Disability Support: Students with a documented disability should inform the instructors within the add-drop period if academic accommodations will be needed. NB: You are expected to meet with your instructor in person to provide them with a copy of the Accommodations Letter and to obtain your instructor’s signature on the Acknowledgement of Student Request form. You and your instructor will plan together how accommodations will be implemented throughout the semester. To obtain the required Accommodation Letter, please contact Disability Support Service (DSS) at 301-314-7682 or dissup@umd.edu.

4) Copyright Notice: Class lectures and other materials are protected by a Creative Commonons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA) license. Copyright infringements may be referred to the Office of Student Conduct.

5) Academic Accommodations for Students Who Experience Sexual Misconduct: The University of Maryland is committed to providing support and resources, including academic accommodations, for students who experience sexual or relationship violence as defined by the University’s Sexual Misconduct Policy. To report an incident and/or obtain an academic accommodation, contact the Office of Civil Rights and Sexual Misconduct at 301-405-1142. If you wish to speak confidentially, contact Campus Advocates Respond and Educate (CARE) to Stop Violence at 301-741-3555. As ‘responsible university employees’ faculty are required to report any disclosure of sexual misconduct, i.e., they may not hold such disclosures in confidence. For more information: http://www.umd.edu/ocrsm/” http://www.umd.edu/ocrsm/

6) Diversity: The University of Maryland values the diversity of its student body. Along with the University, the instructor(s) are committed to providing a classroom atmosphere that encourages the equitable participation of all students regardless of age, disability, ethnicity, gender, national origin, race, religion, or sexual orientation. Potential devaluation of students in the classroom that can occur by reference to demeaning stereotypes of any group and/or overlooking the contributions of a particular group to the topic under discussion is inappropriate and will not be tolerated.