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Syllabus
- Instructor: Dr. Alice McGrath, Senior Digital Scholarship Specialist
- Office Hours: Fridays 1-2:30 or by appointment; Carpenter A5
- Course: T/Th 2:40-4:00 PM, Dalton 20
OL 116 - Bryn Mawr College, Spring 2025
Description & learning goals
“Digital Humanities” includes a variety of ways that computers can be used to explore, analyze, and publish human histories and cultural objects (literature, art, music, and more), as well as the study of computer technologies through humanistic frameworks. This course will provide a general introduction to digital humanities through a combination of reading, discussion, and hands-on digital making. We will begin with digital publication and digitization (multi-modal scholarship, digital collections, creative coding, immersive/3D models, and more) by discussing examples and building our own small-scale projects. We will ask: how can understanding and situating the digital infrastructures we inhabit every day help us imagine new ones? Then we will turn towards humanities data: how are cultural objects represented digitally, and how can computational analysis methods provide insights? What are the limitations and possibilities of these data-centered approaches? Assignments will include visual essays, simple websites, and data visualization; students will learn to work in command line, Python, and HTML, among other digital skills.
Through this course, you will:
- Gain practical computing skills, including work in the command line, Python, HTML, and git
- Build skill in digital communication, including web design and publishing
- Improve data literacy skills, including data cleaning, data presentation, and digital tools for data analysis
- Gain a better understanding of the ways in which computers model and represent human-created materials
- Become familiar with a range of computational analysis and digital publication methods used for humanistic research
- Develop frameworks for critical digital literacy and critical computing
Materials
- Books:
- Most of the readings for this course are freely available as open-access resources. Others will be available through TriPod or via Moodle. You are expected to bring materials to class in print or digital form.
- Technology:
- For many in-class workshops and many assignments, you will need to use a laptop that you have administrative access to in order to install programs. If you do not have a laptop, they are available for loan at Canaday Library.
Assignments
Your grade will be assessed from a combination of short assignments – demonstrating several genres of digital humanities scholarship – as well as your participation in the class and a final research project or portfolio showing your growth over the semester.
| Assignment | Worth | Due | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Participation | 20% | – | Includes attendance, discussion participation, and weekly short responses |
| Project review | 10% | 1/31 | A short analysis and review of a Digital Humanities project |
| Website | 10% | 2/14 | A simple static website |
| Data story | 15% | 3/28 | A data visualization with context |
| Visual essay | 15% | 4/18 | A mini-exhibit featuring primary sources and commentary |
| Final project or portfolio | 30% | 5/7 | Option A: a published digital humanities project on a topic or format of your choice. Option B: a portfolio site collecting revised assignments and responses, including a self-assessment. |
Attendance & participation
You will be expected to come prepared to every session and participate actively in class discussion. Each person is allowed one absence, no questions asked, but you are expected to make up any work that you missed. If you need to miss additional classes, please reach out to me as soon as possible ahead of time. Repeated absences may affect your participation grade.
Responses
Weekly reflections on the readings or related activities will be posted to Moodle Forum by Monday 11:59 PM and should be approximately 200-300 words. Each student should submit a minimum of 10 responses throughout the semester. In most cases there will be a specific prompt; otherwise, do your best to show how you have engaged with the readings, ask questions, and share ideas and reflections. I view these as an opportunity to participate in and shape the class discussion, so if you are someone who is less prone to speak in class, you are encouraged to engage more frequently in this space.
Policies
Late work
Responses will not be accepted late because their purpose is to stimulate discussion for Tuesday’s class. For other assignments, each student gets an extension on a single assignment. Let me know when you are taking it. Otherwise, Late work will not be accepted.
Accessibility
Bryn Mawr College is committed to providing equal access to students with a documented disability. Students needing academic accommodations for a disability must first speak with Access Services. Students can email accessservices@brynmawr.edu to request an appointment to begin this confidential process. If eligible for accommodations as per Access Services, students should schedule an appointment with the professor as early in the semester as possible to share their verification form and make appropriate arrangements. Please note that accommodations are not retroactive and require advance notice to implement. More information can be obtained at the Access Services website. (http://www.brynmawr.edu/access-services/)
Any student who has a disability-related need to record this class must first be found eligible to do so by Access Services and must share this eligibility with me, the instructor. Class members need to be aware that this class may be recorded.
Religious holidays
Please contact me if you need accommodations related to a religious holiday.
Generative AI
There will be situations within this course where you will be asked to use AI tools to explore how they can be used. Otherwise, I discourage the use of generative AI tools because of ethical, environmental, and pedagogical reasons. Writing assignments should be your original work, not generated by AI. I do not recommend using AI for research because it produces inaccurate information. Use of AI for coding, data processing, and other forms of automation depends on the context and purpose of the assignment: if learning the skill is central to the assignment, AI coding tools should not be used. Otherwise, you may use them as long as you check their output for accuracy and describe how you used them in your submitted work. If you have questions about a particular use case, please feel free to ask.
Content warning
We live in a world that has been and still is shaped by structural inequalities, oppression, and exclusion. It is my belief that study of the humanities must reckon with these conditions and with their cultural traces responsibly and with care; therefore we will consider difficult material. Please consider that your own emotional and intellectual responses to these questions may not be shared by others; enter them humbly.
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