Distance Learning Courses
Starting in 2012, the University of Florida will offer a series of online courses on research methods in cultural anthropology. The courses carry graduate credit and are open to upper division undergraduates, graduate students, and professionals. The emphasis in each course is on skills for collecting and analyzing the many kinds of data that anthropologists work with.
Two digital learning courses are offered in 2012. Each course has 12 hours of lecture and 33 hours of online, interactive instruction. Courses are limited to 18 participants.
Geospatial Analysis in Cultural Anthropology
May 14 – June 15, 2012
This intensive course introduces different components of geospatial analysis and their applications in Anthropology: Remote Sensing (RS), Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Global Positioning System (GPS), and their integration. The course covers basic concepts necessary to work with geospatial data. We pay particular attention to research set-up and design, and the use of specialized software, such as ArcGIS, Erdas Imagine, and Multispec via hands-on activities.
By the end of the course, participants should understand how to:
- add a geospatial component to traditional anthropological questions (ex. resource use, disparities, adaptation)
- understand how anthropologists can improve geospatial analysis research
- generate data (for example, change detection) using remotely sensed images
- integrate data sources from paper and electronic maps and tables
- analyze geospatial data
- create maps for presentation or field work
Text Analysis in Cultural Anthropology
May 28 – June 29, 2012
This graduate seminar surveys methods of text analysis. The focus of the course is on developing skills that students can use to do systematic analysis of textual data, including written texts, photos, and audio or video data. The course will explore a range of inductive and deductive approaches and will cover analytic skills that cut across traditions, including theme identification, code definition, and construction of codebooks, and teamwork in text analysis. Advanced topics covered will include schema analysis, grounded theory, classical content analysis, content dictionaries, word-based analysis, and semantic network analysis.
Students taking this course will:
- develop a working familiarity with a wide range of methods used to analyze text data
- be able to select appropriate methods for a variety of research questions
- acquire hands-on experience using analytic techniques
- apply these skills to their own independent projects.
For further details about cost, registration, and the scope of the courses, please visit the UF Distance Learning program.