Course schedule
Week 1: What is Digital Humanities?
Tuesday, January 21: Defining DH
- In class:
- Digital Humanities definitions and examples
- Go over the syllabus
Response due Thursday 1/23: Introduce yourself in the forum on moodle
Thursday, January 23: Digital humanities projects
- Readings:
- Miriam Posner, “How Did They Make That? Reverse-Engineering Digital Projects” (video) (40 min)
- Kirschenbaum, Matt “What Is Digital Humanities” (2011) (7 pages)
- Explore Digital Humanities definition generator definition generator
- In class:
- Project analysis activity and discussion
- Introduce project review assignment (due 1/31)
- Quick introduction to Markdown and GitHub
- Tasks:
- Sign up for a GitHub account and sign up for the Student Developer Pack
- Install VS Code text editor on your laptop
- Install git following these instructions
Week 2: Computational Thinking
Response due Monday 1/27: “Hello World” (see moodle forum)
Tuesday, January 28: The command line
- Readings:
- Meredith Broussard, “Hello, Reader”, and “Hello, World” from Artificial Unintelligence: how computers misunderstand the world (MIT: 2018). Broussard chapters on Moodle or access the book via Tripod
- Jane Austen, “Lady Susan”, Letters I-XIV - read on Project Gutenberg
- Command line workshop: read “Introduction to the Command Line” tutorial, through “Why is the command line Useful”
- Watch: 1968 “Mother of All Demos” video (6 min.)
- In class:
- Discussion
- Command Line Workshop: “The Command Line” from Introduction to Cultural Analytics by Melanie Walsh.
Thursday, January 30: Introduction to Python
- Readings:
- Jane Austen, “Lady Susan”, Letters XV - XXX
- A blog post on unicode/character encoding, either: - Kealan Parr, Unicode Characters - What Every Developer Should Know about Encoding - David C. Zentgraf, What every programmer absolutely, positively needs to know about encodings and character sets to work with text - stop at “Encodings and PHP”
- In class:
- Python workshop: “Programming in Python”, from Introduction to Cultural Analytics by Melanie Walsh
Project Review Assignment Due: Friday, January 31
Week 3: The Internet
Response due Monday 2/3
Tuesday, February 4: Hyper Text Markup Language
- Readings:
- Jane Austen, “Lady Susan,” Letters XXXI - Conclusion
- Sasha Constanza-Chock, “Design Values: Hard-Coding Liberation?”. Design Values (MIT: 2020)
- Listen: “Data Vampires: Going Hyperscale (Episode 1)” from Tech Won’t Save Us podcast
- In class:
- Discussion of readings
- Text Markup/HTML activity
- HTML + CSS workshop
Thursday, February 6: Design and Access
- Readings
- Jo Jung, “A Nostalgic Journey through the Evolution of Web Design”, The Conversation
- “Introduction to Web Accessibility”, WebAIM
- “How to build a low-tech website”, Low-tech Magazine 2018.
- Optional: “How to build a low-tech internet”
- Homework:
- Deploy your site using the File Manager on Domain of One’s Own or using GitHub Pages (include both HTML and CSS files in your upload)
- In class:
- Discussion: responsiveness and accessibility
- Web accessibility testing exercise
Week 4: DH, Activism, and Community Engagement
Response due Monday 2/10
Tuesday, February 11: Digital justice
- Reading
- Jessica Marie Johnson, “Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads.” Social Text, vol. 36, no. 4 (137), Dec. 2018, pp. 57–79. PDF on Moodle
- Homework:
- Continue working on your html/css practice site, and gather content and ideas for the simple website assignment
- In class:
- Discussion of the readings
- Workshop time for Website assignment
Thursday, February 13: Crowd-sourcing
- Readings:
- Explore the Colored Conventions Project: about, Project principles, other selections
- Roopika Risam, “Introduction: The Postcolonial Digital Cultural Record”, from New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy (Northwestern UP, 2019) PDF on Moodle
- In class:
- Discussion of the readings (Johnson, Risam, Colored Conventions, etc.)
- Homework:
- Participate in Douglass Day
- Find something fun to post for your response
Simple Website Assignment due February 14
Instructions for simple website
Week 5: Data basics
Response due Monday, February 17: Douglass Day show-and-tell - reflect on your experiences transcribing. Include a screenshot or quotation from material you worked on.
Tuesday, February 18: Data forms
- Readings
- Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein, “What gets Counted Counts”, from Data Feminism
- Optional: D’Ignazio & Klein, “The Power Chapter”, from Data Feminism (MIT 2020)
- Philadelphia African American Census 1847 - read the “About” page, look at the scans
- In class
- Data cleaning in OpenRefine workshop
Thursday, February 20: Data curation
- Readings
- Katie Rawson and Trevor Munoz, “Against Cleaning”” from Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019 (U Minnesota Press).
- In class
- Dataset curation activity
Week 6: Data visualization
Response due Monday: respond to the readings or share a data visualization that interests you and talk about why
Tuesday February 25: Data stories
- Readings
- Data Humanism: The Revolution will be Visualized, Giorgia Lupi
- “Introduction: A Counterhistory of Data Visualization”, from Data by Design, Klein, Sharma, et. al
- In class
- Discussion of readings; data visualization analysis exercise
Thursday, February 27: Visualizing data
- Readings
- Responsible Datasets in Context: National Park Visits
- Scott Weingart, Demystifying Networks
- Reading from Hands-on Data Visualization, Jack Dougherty & Ilya Ilyankou
- In class
- Data storytelling workshop
Statement of Interest due February 28
For students interested in the final project option A.
Week 7: Text analysis
Response due Monday
Tuesday, March 4: Computational humanities
- Readings
- Jo Guldi, from The dangerous art of text mining: a methodology for digital history, (Cambridge: 2023). (Moodle)
- Enumerations, Andrew Piper (Moodle)
- In class
- Discussion of readings, introduction to concepts and methods (Constellate tutorials)
Thursday, March 6: Methods of text mining
- Readings
- Ted Underwood: 7 Ways Humanists… internet archive version
- In class
- Voyant & Constellate tutorials
Week 8: Mapping
Response due Monday
Tuesday, March 18: Map forms
- Readings:
- R. White, “What Is Spatial History?”, Spatial History Lab (Stanford 2010)
- Tao Leigh Goffe, “Unmapping the Carribbean: Toward a Digital Praxis of Archipelagic Sounding”
- In class:
- Discussion of readings
Thursday, March 20: Web mapping
- Readings:
- “Anatomy of a Web Map”by Alan McConchie and Beth Schechter (click through slide show).
- In class:
- ArcMap tutorial: Cartographic creations - Customize a basemap (and, maybe) Make pop-ups and labels
#### Data story due March 21
Week 9: Digital Archives & Exhibits
Response due Monday
Tuesday, March 25: Digital Exhibits
- Readings:
- Explore: Queer Digital History Project
- Explore: “Genoa Indian School Digital Reconciliation Project”, DH Review link and Project link (NB: if you can’t access the site, instead):
- Explore: Digital Paxton, including the Ghost River project
- Explore: Digital Benin - look at objects, archival documents, project documentation, and Edo object vocabulary section
- In class
- Metadata & digital exhibit lecture
Thursday, March 27: CollectionBuilder
- Readings:
- CollectionBuilder documentation: “About CollectionBuilder”
- Explore CB examples: https://collectionbuilder.github.io/cb-examples/ - click through the pages of this site and look at one or more sites in the collection
- In class
- Collection Builder workshop
Data Story due March 28
Week 10: Linked Open Data
Response due Monday
Tuesday, April 1: Principles of LOD
- Readings:
- Editor’s Note: May 2024, Reviews in Digital Humanities issue on Linked open Data, Roopika Risam, Jennifer Guiliano, Kim Martin, and Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller
- Browse 5-Star Data principles
- Optional: Tim Berners-Lee, “Linked Data” (2006-07-27)
- Explore “Enslaved” project and read Review; explore 1-2 stories
- Review of “World Historical Gazeteer”: https://reviewsindh.pubpub.org/pub/world-historical-gazetteer/release/1
- In class
- Discussion of LOD principles, projects & readings
- SNAC project
- APIs
Thursday, April 3: Wikidata
- Readings:
- “Wikidata:Introduction”, wikidata.org
- In class:
- SPARQL Wikidata query workshop
- Maybe: Wikidata Query Service Tutorial by Wikimedia Israel
Visual Essay due April 4
Week 11: LLMs and Generative AI
Response due Monday
Tuesday, April 8: LLMs
- Readings:
- Madhumita Murgia and the Financial Times Visual Storytelling Team “Generative AI exists because of the transformer” Financial Times, Sept. 12, 2023.
- Bender, Emily M., et al. “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜.” Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, Association for Computing Machinery, 2021, pp. 610–23. ACM Digital Library, https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922.
- Lauren Goodlad, “Editor’s Introduction: Humanities in the Loop”, Critical AI 2023.
- In class
- Discussion of LLMs and AI readings
- Generative AI with Microsoft Copilot workshop
Thursday, April 10: Generative AI (with Luke Stark)
- Readings
- Find a recent article on AI and share with the team
- In class: Conversation with Luke Stark
Luke Stark talk: “Artificial Intelligence, Human Emotion, and Animated Agents”, 4:15-5:45 PM Dalton 300
Week 12: Critical Making & Creative Coding
Response due Monday
Tuesday, April 15: Critical making (with Bronwen Densmore)
- Reading:
- Thinking as Handwork: Critical Making with Humanistic Concerns by Gabby Resch, Dan Southwick, Isaac Record, and Matt Ratto
- In class: Critical Making workshop led by Makerspace Coordinator Bronwen Densmore
Thursday, April 17: Creative coding
- Reading:
- Explore Bitsy games: Under a Star Called Sun by Cecile Richard
- Select one other from this collection on itch.io
- In class
- Bitsy workshop
Visual Essay due Friday, April 18
Week 13: 3D Modeling
Response due Monday
Tuesday, April 22: 3D data
- Reading
- “Towards 3D Scholarly Editions” Papdopoulos, Costas, and Susan Schreibman. Digital Humanities Quarterly 2019.
Thursday, April 24: 3D models
- Reading
- TBD
- In class
- 3D modeling workshop
Week 14: Review and presentations
Response due Monday
Tuesday, April 29: Project work
- In class:
- Work on final projects and portfolios
Thursday, May 1: Presentations
- In class
- Individual presentations on final project
Final project or portfolio due Friday, May 2
Note: Syllabus is subject to change.