Schedule
I. Orientation
Week 1, 9/5: Introduction
Week 2, 9/12: The Digital Age
Reading
- Julia Angwin, Jeff Larson, Surya Mattu and Lauren Kirchner, “Machine Bias”, ProPublica, 23 May 2016.
- Jenna Wortham, “Black Tweets Matter” Smithsonian Magazine (September 2016).
- Nicholas Confessore et al., “The Follower Factory” New York Times, 27 January 2018.
Assignments
- Register for a personal account and domain name with Reclaim Hosting (Cost: $25).
- Install Wordpress on your website: https://reclaimhosting.com/portfolio-resource-guide/installing-wordpress/.
- Join the class Slack channel (check email for invitation).
II. Approaches and Methods
Week 3, 9/19: Archives and Historical Data
Reading
- Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past (1997), Chapter 1 (pp. 1-31) [Access to ebook through Northeastern]
- Lara Putnam, “The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast,” The American Historical Review, Volume 121, Issue 2, 1 April 2016, pp. 377–402.
- Trevor Owens, “What Do you Mean by Archive? Genres of Usage for Digital Preservers” 27 February 2014.
Assignments
- Complete tutorial: Miriam Posner, “Get started with OpenRefine”
Discussion leader: Hailey and Mahala
Note: Digital Scholarship Group / NULab Fall Welcome Event on Monday, 9/24, from 3:00-5:00pm
Week 4, 9/26: Public History and Digital Collections
Reading
- Sheila A. Brennan, “Public, First”, Debates in Digital Humanities 2016.
Assignments
- Post a 500-word review on your personal webpage of your assigned Omeka site (Colored Conventions, Histories of the National Mall, or Goin’ North). Critically evaluate the site in terms of content, scope and purpose. Try to focus more on the collection itself, rather than on the aesthetics of the site. Some questions to consider:
- Who created the site?
- What is its stated purpose/goal?
- Does it accomplish this goal? Why or why not?
- How large is the collection and what kind of items does it contain?
- How are items organized and displayed?
- How does it approach metadata (information about individual items)?
Discussion leader: Meg
Week 5, 10/3: Virtual Reality
Note: Class will meet in Snell Library Room 140
Reading
- Nikki Erlick, “20,000-year-old artifacts, 21st-century technology: Museums are turning to virtual reality, apps, and interactive experiences to keep tech-savvy visitors engaged” The Verge, 6 May 2017.
Assignments
- Complete “Getting Started With SketchUp” tutorials, Parts 1 and 2. Note: You can either download a trial version of SketchUp or use Snell library’s computers
Discussion leader: Gabrielle and Shannon
Week 6, 10/10: Visualization
Reading
- Watch first 13:20 of Neil Halloran, The Fallen of World War II (2015).
- Lauren Klein, “Feminist Data Visualization; Or, the Shape of History”, 24 January 2017.
- Frederick W. Gibbs, “New Forms of History: Critiquing Data and Its Representations” The American Historian, February 2016.
- Familiarize yourself with your assigned visualization made by Professor Benjamin Schmidt in preparation for his class visit (see Slack channel for assigned group).
Assignments
- In-Class: Erin Bush, “Creating a Narrative Timeline with Timeline JS”
Discussion leader: Emma
Week 7, 10/17: Maps
Reading
- Robert K. Nelson, LaDale Winling, Richard Marciano, Nathan Connolly, et al., “Mapping Inequality,” American Panorama, ed. Robert K. Nelson and Edward L. Ayers, https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/
- Digital Scholarship Lab, “Renewing Inequality,” American Panorama, ed. Robert K. Nelson and Edward L. Ayers, http://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/renewal/
Assignments
- Complete first part (just Google Maps) of: Jim Clifford, Josh MacFadyen, and Daniel Macfarlane, “Intro to Google Maps and Google Earth,” The Programming Historian 2 (2013), https://programminghistorian.org/en/lessons/googlemaps-googleearth
Discussion leader: Cassie
Week 8, 10/24: Texts
Reading
- Kellen Funk and Lincoln Mullen, “The Spine of American Law: Digital Text Analysis and U.S. Legal Practice”, American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 1, 1 February 2018, p. 132–164.
- Ted Underwood, David Bamman, and Sabrina Lee “The Transformation of Gender in English-Language Fiction”, Cultural Analytics, 13 February 2018.
Assignments
- Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, Voyant Tutorial, Doing Digital History: 2016
Discussion leader: Carly
Week 9, 10/31: Networks
Reading
- Maeve Kane, “All One People and Under One King”, presentation at William and Mary Quarterly Digital Research in Early America Forum at University of California Irvine, October 11-12, 2018.
- Pamela Fletcher and Anne Helmreich, “Local/Global: Mapping Nineteenth-Century London’s Art Market” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, Volume 11, Issue 3, Autumn 2012.
Assignments
- Miriam Posner, “Getting Started with Palladio”
Discussion leader: Aaron
III. Putting it Together
YOU will be in the driver’s seat for Weeks 10 and 11.
- The class will vote on a topic(s) that you would like to learn more about. This can consist of revisiting a topic (ex. “we want to know more about spatial history”) or exploring a brand-new topic (ex. “we want to learn about machine learning”). I will then select readings for these two weeks and we will discuss them during the first hour of class.
- Each student will choose one method or skill that you want to learn in more depth. I will be working with each of you to find tutorials, hands-on practicums, or other strategies that you will work on during the second half of these classes.
Week 10, 11/7: Practicum
Reading
- Julia Falkowski, “Custom collections content and generous interfaces” Museums and the Web 2016.
- Andrew Hurley, “Chasing the Frontiers of Digital Technology: Public History Meets the Digital Divide” The Public Historian, Vol. 38 No. 1, February 2016 (pp. 69-88).
- Explore Kate Bagnall and Tim Sherratt’s Invisible Australians and read “‘A map and some pins’: Open data and Unlimited Horizons”
Week 11, 11/14: Practicum
Reading
- Nathan Yau, Data Points: Visualization That Means Something, Ch. 5: Visualizing with Clarity, pp. 201-240.
- Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein, Data Feminism Chapter 5: The Numbers Don’t Speak for Themselves (draft in review).
Reading
- TBD
Week 12, 11/21: No Class, Official Holiday
Week 13, 11/28: The Big Picture | Project Workshop
Reading
- Bethany Nowviskie, “Reconstitute the World: Machine-Reading Archives of Mass Extinction” nowviskie.org, 12 June 2018.