I. Orientation
Week 1, 9/4: Introductions
Week 2, 9/11: The Digital Age (or, just how f’d are we?)
Reading
- “The Age of the Algorithm” 99% Invisible podcast (September 5, 2017).
- Farhad Manjoo and Nadieh Bremer, “I Visited 47 Sites. Hundreds of Trackers Followed Me.” New York Times (August 23, 2019)
- Tracy Samantha Schmidt, “Inside the Backlash Against Facebook” Time (2006)
Assignments
- Register for a personal account and domain name with Reclaim Hosting (Cost: thirty dollars)
- Download and install Anaconda
In-Class
II. Approaches and Methods
Week 3, 9/18: Archives
Adam and Isabel
Readings
- 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.
- Samantha Thompson, “Why Don’t Archvists Digitize Everything?” May 31, 2017.
Assignments
- Install Wordpress for your main domain, select a theme that you like, and make a short About page.
- Garen Torikian’s Markdown Tutorial: Read the landing page, then complete lessons 1, 2, 3, and 6.
- Post your discussion questions on: 1) Slack and 2) in a new Wordpress blog post. Include a link to your Wordpress post over Slack.
In Class
- Markdown Exercise
- Getting Started With Python (link to download Jupyter Notebook file)
Week 4, 9/25: Data
Sebastien
Readings
- Jessica Marie Johnson, “Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads” Social Text, Vol. 36, No. 4 (2018).
- Watch first 13:20 of Neil Halloran, The Fallen of World War II (2015).
Assignments
- Complete Week 4 Python homework.
In Class
Week 5, 10/2: Public History and Digital Collections
Grace W., Danielle
Readings
- Sheila A. Brennan, “Public, First”, Debates in Digital Humanities 2016.
- Julia Falkowski, “Custom collections content and generous interfaces” Museums and the Web 2016.
- Jennifer Hijazi, “Is Instagram killing our museum culture or reinventing it?” PBS, November 17, 2017.
Assignments
- Complete Week 5 Python homework.
In Class
Week 6, 10/9: Texts
Alex
Reading
- Ted Underwood, “Seven ways humanists are using computers to understand text” The Stone and the Shell, June 4, 2015.
Assignments
- Complete Week 6 Python homework.
In Class
Week 7, 10/16: Visualization
Claire and Grace P.
Reading
- Nathan Yau, Data Points: Visualization That Means Something, Ch. 5: Visualizing with Clarity, pp. 201-240. (See Slack channel for PDF)
- Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein, Data Feminism Chapter 5: The Numbers Don’t Speak for Themselves
Assignments
- Download and install Tableau Public
- Tutorial: Miriam Posner, “Getting started with Tableau Public” Digital Humanities 201 (UCLA, Winter 2019).
In Class
- Principles of data visualization
Week 8, 10/23: Maps
Alicia, Maethee, Nav
Reading
- Sarah Bond, “How Is Digital Mapping Changing The Way We Visualize Racism and Segregation?” Forbes, October 20, 2017.
- Andrew Wiseman, “When Maps Lie” CityLab, June 25, 2015.
- Anne Kelly Knowles, Levi Westerveld, and Laura Strom, “Inductive Visualization: A Humanistic Alternative to GIS”, Geohumanities, vol. 1, no. 2 (2015).
Assignments
- Tutorial: Miriam Posner, “Create a map with Tableau” Digital Humanities 201 (UCLA, Winter 2019).
In Class
- Spatial Data and Mapping
Week 9, 10/30: Narrative, Communication, and New Media
Anjelica, Jillian
Reading
- Rebecca Onion, “Making History Go Viral” Slate (11 Dec. 2018)
- Backstory Podcast, “Historians in the Press” July 17, 2019.
- Watch one video from Crash Course’s World History playlist
Assignments
- Download and install Audacity
- Come to class with:
- 30-60 second “pitch” for your final project
- Ideas for topics & methods you’re interested in delving into during Weeks 10 & 11.
- Headphones for your laptop
In Class
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, 11/6: Practicum
Reading
- Explore Kate Bagnall and Tim Sherratt’s Invisible Australians and then read “A Life Reduced to Data” (August 25, 2016).
- Hadley Wickham, “Tidy Data” Journal of Statistical Software, Vol. 59, Issue 10 (2014). (just read p. 1-13)
- Ian Bogost, “Welcome to the Age of Privacy Nihilism”, The Atlantic (August 23, 2018).
In Class
Week 11, 11/13: Practicum
Reading
- Richard White, “What is Spatial History?”, Stanford Spatial History Lab (2010).
- Harmony Bench and Kate Elswit, “Dance Touring and Embodied Data: Some Approaches to Katherine Dunham’s Movement on the Move”, Current Research in Digital History, Vol. 2 (2019).
- Martha Hollander, “The Imaginary Museum: Teaching Art History with Mobile Digital Technology” Digital Humanities Quarterly, 12, no. 2 (2018).
In Class
Week 12, 11/20: Project Workshop
Note: Class will end early today so that we can attend Paul Farber’s talk at Snell Library at 6:00PM.