Schedule

This week will introduce you to the digital humanities as a community of practice. We’ll explore some digital humanities projects and even try to reverse-engineer some. A key question we’ll ask is: what difference does the “digital” make in the digital humanities?

Meeting Times (Optional)

• DH Office Hours

Goals

• Introduce instructors and students to each other
• Gain a bird’s-eye view of the course
• Explore the concepts of the humanities and the digital humanities, and the differences between them
• Construct a brief history of the digital humanities
• Analyze a digital humanities project in order to understand both how it was made and why it was made digitally

Videos from the Instructors

• Teaching Staff Introductions (about 3.5 minutes)
• Overview of Week 1 (about 7 minutes)
• What are the humanities? What are the digital humanities? (about 4 minutes)

Required Readings and Videos

• Kathleen Fitzpatrick, “The Humanities, Done Digitally” from Debates in the Digital Humanities (2012)
• Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, and Jeffrey Schnapp, “Emerging Methods and Genres” from Digital_Humanities (2012), pages 27-60
• Miriam Posner, “How Did They Make That” (2014)
• Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein, “The Power Chapter” and “Collect, Analyze, Imagine, Teach” from Data Feminism (2020)

Supplemental Readings (Select One)

• John Unsworth, “Scholarly Primitives: what methods do humanities researchers have in common, and how might our tools reflect this?” (2000)
• Melissa Terras and Julianne Nyhan, “Father Busa’s Female Punch Card Operatives” from Debates in the Digital Humanities (2016)

Assignments

Comments on Readings (Due by end of day Tuesday, June 15):

• Using Hypothesis, leave one comment on Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s “The Humanities, Done Digitally.” Also leave at least two comments on the Data Feminism chapters. These comments can take several forms. You might ask a question about something you don’t understand, or make a counterpoint, or even make a connection to something beyond the reading (like connecting it to examples or experiences from your own life). 

Blog Post (Due by end of day Thursday, June 17): Opening Blog Post

• Analyze a digital humanities project.

Lab (Due by end of day Saturday, June 19): How Did They Make That and Why?

Further Discussion (Due by end of day Saturday, June 19):

• One hypothesis comment on another student’s blog post

Map Assignment (Optional but would ideally like by end of day Saturday, June 19)

• If you get us your location on Canvas, we can add you to the map over on the authors page!

This week we’ll explore campus digital collections and objects, pairing some examples for comparative analysis and seeing how they can be presented on Omeka. You’ll add an object to Omeka yourself. We’ll also begin considering what these collections have to do with social justice.

Meeting Times (Optional)

• DH Office Hours

Goals

• Explore, analyze, and debate issues in archiving and object representation
• Analyze and compare how objects are described across campus digital collections
• Evaluate the merits and shortcomings of object descriptions
• Compare and contrast objects from our campuses’ digital collections
• Familiarize yourself with your home institution’s digital collections, as well as those of other campuses
• Complete a comparative object analysis

Lecture Topics

• Introduction to Assignment
  • Video overview of Week 2’s topics, blog post, and lab
• Omeka
  • Refer to our short guide to using Omeka

Required Readings and Videos

• Jefferson Bailey, “Disrespect des Fonds: Rethinking Arrangement and Description in Born-Digital Archives,” Archive Journal (2013)
• Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein, “Data Feminism (Ethics of AI in Context), Centre for Ethics (2020), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnc5uElLQj8
• Jarrett M. Drake, “RadTech Meets RadArch: Towards A New Principle for Archives and Archival Description,” On Archivy (2016)
• Lauren F. Klein, “The Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemings,” American Literature 85, no. 4 (2013): 661–688. (Canvas)
• S. Graham, I. Milligan, & S. Weingart, “Why We’re All Digital Now,” in The Historian’s Macroscope: Big Digital History (2015)
• Tim Sherratt, ”It’s All about the Stuff: Collections, Interfaces, Power and People” (2011)
• Kate Theimer, “Gaps in the Past and Gaps in the Future: Archival Silences and Social Media,” ArchivesNext (2016)

Supplemental Readings (Select One)

• Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein, Data Feminism Reading Group Videos, Data Feminism (2020)
• Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein, “What Gets Counted Counts,” in Data Feminism (2020)

Assignments

Comment on Reading (Due by end of day Tuesday, June 22):

• One (or more if you’d like) hypothesis comment on one of the readings

Blog Post (Due by end of day Thursday, June 24): Objects and Descriptions

• Look at some seed objects and compare the descriptions on their respective pages

Lab (Due by end of day Saturday, June 26): Comparison of Objects from Multiple Institutional Collections

Further Discussion (Due by end of day Saturday, June 26):

• One hypothesis comment on another student’s blog post

In Week 3, we’ll explore data-driven approaches to the Digital Humanities. We’ll consider the interpretive act of collecting, manipulating, and analyzing data; learn about tools that enable us to work with large datasets; and consider the kinds of research questions that we can ask of humanities data.

Meeting Times (Optional)

• DH Office Hours

Goals

• Understand the creation of humanities and all data as an interpretive act
• Understand possibilities of working with primary sources as data
• Build awareness of tradeoffs of data-driven approaches
• Gain familiarity with tools that are helpful in making sense of and working with humanities datasets

Lecture Topics

• Video introduction to the week
  • Data as interpretation
  • Tradeoffs of data-driven approaches to the humanities

Required Readings and Videos

• D’Ignazio and Klein. “The Numbers Don’t Speak for Themselves” in Data Feminism (2020)
• Owens, Trevor. Defining Data for Humanists: Text, Artifact, Information or Evidence? (2011)
• Posner, Miriam, “Humanities Data: A Necessary Contradiction” (2015)
• Schoch, Christof. “Big? Smart? Clean? Messy? Data in the Humanities” (2013)

Supplemental Readings (Select One)

• Lincoln, Matthew. Tidy Data for the Humanities (2020) (including the 16-minute podcast featured in this article)
• Muñoz, Trevor and Katie Rawson, “Against Cleaning” (2016)

Assignments

Comment on Reading (Due by end of day Tuesday, June 29):

• One (or more if you’d like) hypothesis comment on one of the readings

Blog Post (Due by end of day Thursday, July 1): Week 3 Blog Post

• Analyze a data-driven approach to the Humanities

Lab (Due by end of day Saturday, July 3): Working with Data

Further Discussion (Due by end of day Saturday, July 3):

• One hypothesis comment on another student’s blog post

This week will introduce you to ways of how to use the computer, and the voyant tool, to read and analyze texts.

The material in this section was adapted (with kind blessing, permission, and support) from the “Text Analysis” section designed and written by Mackenzie Brooks, Associated Professor, Digital Humanities Librarian at Washington and Lee University.

Meeting Times (Optional)

• DH Office Hours

Goals

• Learn about and work with Voyant tools, a simple web-based tool that allows for digital analysis of patterns in text documents.
• Develop critical reading and analysis skills with Voyant.
• Consider reading a text from a different perspective (i.e. Voyant) that the human eye, reading along, is unable to do.
• Viewing the patterns in a text or collection of texts through a different lens, Voyant.
• Learn about “distant reading”—the use of a computer to back away from close-up analysis so as to “read” a book or story through the lens of a computer.
• Learn to create, read, and analyze for patterns such as word frequency, relationships between words, and other textual details.

Lecture Topics

• How to do Digital Humanities with texts? How to read closely?
• Spotlight on Voyant
• Activity and what did you read?

Videos from the Instructor

• Instructor Video~ Brief Welcome and Kind Reminders (3.12)
• Instructor Video~ Week #4 and Text Analysis (25.14)

Required Readings and Videos

• Youtube: Text-Analysis
• Youtube: How to Use Voyant Tools
• Rockwell, Geoffrey. What is Text Analysis, Really?, Literary and Linguistic Computing, Volume 18, Issue 2, June 2003, Pages 209–219, https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/18.2.209
• Houston, Natalie. Text Analysis
• Hoover, David L. “Textual Analysis.” Literary Studies in the Digital Age: An Evolving Anthology, Modern Language Association, dlsanthology.mla.hcommons.org/textual-analysis/.
• Ciula, Arianna. “The New Edition of the Letters of Vincent van Gogh on the Web.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 4, no. 2 (2010).
• Meeks, Elijah. “The Digital Humanities Contribution to Topic Modeling.” Journal of Digital Humanities, April 9, 2013.

Supplemental Readings (Select One)

• McPherson, Tara. “Why Are the Digital Humanities So White? or Thinking the Histories of Race and Computation.” In Debates in the Digital Humanities, open access ed., edited by Matthew K. Gold. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/29.
• Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. “The Humanities, Done Digitally” from Debates in the Digital Humanities (2012) ** You’ve already read this selection in week #1. Perhaps return to Dr. Fitzpatrick’s important piece and see if you read it differently now.
• Burrows, John. “Textual Analysis.” In Companion to Digital Humanities (Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture), edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Professional, 2004.
• Cummings, James. “The Text Encoding Initiative and the Study of Literature.” In Companion to Digital Literary Studies (Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture), edited by Susan Schreibman and Ray Siemens.. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Professional, 2008.
• Hoover, David L. “Quantitative Analysis and Literary Studies.” In Companion to Digital Literary Studies (Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture), edited by Susan Schreibman and Ray Siemens. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Professional, 2008. [Credo Reference version]

Assignments

Comment on Reading (Due by end of day Tuesday, July 6):

• One (or more if you’d like) hypothesis comment on one of the readings

Blog Post (Due by end of day Thursday, July 8): What is Text Analysis?

• What did you see? What surprised you?

Lab (Due by end of day Saturday, July 10): Text Analysis

Further Discussion (Due by end of day Saturday, July 10):

• One hypothesis comment on another student’s blog post

Project:Team Formation

This week we will focus on spatial humanities and digital mapping. We’ll learn when to map, and when NOT to map, consider the varieties of maps that can be made and when each is appropriate, and begin to explore how humanists can leverage existing digital mapping tools to make new arguments while pushing against those tools’ technical and epistemological limitations.

Meeting Times (Optional)

• DH Office Hours

Goals

• Explore the benefits and drawbacks of digital mapping for humanists
• Understand when spatial humanities approaches are appropriate
• Compare spatial data collection and cleaning with other types of data
• Gain familiarity with different tools for creating maps
• Construct sample maps to both show patterns and tell stories

Lecture Topics

• Spatial Humanities (questions) and Digital Mapping (methods)
• Instructor Videos
  • Final Project Components due in Week 5 (4.16)
  • Spatial Humanities and Digital Mapping w/Lab Instructions — Part 1 (14:36)
  • Spatial Humanities and Digital Mapping w/Lab Instructions — Part 2 (7:44)

Required Readings and Videos

• Humanizing Maps: An Interview with Johanna Drucker
• Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein, “Unicorns, Janitors, Ninjas, Wizards, and Rock Stars” from Data Feminism (2020)
• Jen Jack Gieseking, “Where Are We? The Method of Mapping with GIS in Digital Humanities,” American Quarterly 70, no. 3 (2018): 641–48, https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2018.0047.
• Chapter 7, Map Your Data, in Hands-On Data Visualization: Interactive Storytelling from Spreadsheets to Code, by Jack Dougherty and Ilya Ilyankou

Supplemental Readings (Select One)

• A Question of Borders, by Victor Temprano at the Native Land project
• David J. Bodenhamer, “Beyond GIS: Geospatial Technologies and the Future of History,” in History and GIS: Epistemologies, Considerations and Reflections, ed. Alexander von Lünen and Charles Travis (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2013), 1–13, http://link.springer.com/10.1007/978-94-007-5009-8.
• Denis Wood, “Mapping Deeply,” Humanities 4, no. 3 (August 6, 2015): 304–18, https://doi.org/10.3390/h4030304.

Assignments

Project (Due by end of day Tuesday, July 13): Team Charter

Comment on Reading (Due by end of day Tuesday, July 13):

• One (or more if you’d like) hypothesis comment on one of the readings

Blog Post (Due by end of day Thursday, July 15): The Varieties of Maps

• Explore and compare three map projects to become familiar with a variety of maps and mapping projects.

Lab (Due by end of day Saturday, July 17): Spatial Analysis

Further Discussion (Due by end of day Saturday, July 17):

• One hypothesis comment on another student’s blog post

Project (Due by end of day Saturday, July 17): Project Pitch