Digital History 💾

Topics

• Introductions

• Course + syllabus overview

• Navigating resources

• Tech stuff!

Class

Lab Set up Hypothes.is, GitHub, and Mural

Install the Hypothes.is bookmarklet or Chrome app

Walkthrough

Join our Hypothes.is reading group

Create a GitHub account

Walkthrough - Just step one!

Join our “organization” on GitHub (send me your username and I will invite you!)

Create a Mural account

Join our Mural team

Topics

• Defining our terms

• Reviewing class survey results

• Exploring how to make this class work for you

Featured

• “What is Digital Humanities?”

Due by today

Annotate

• “Digital History,” definition in The Inclusive Historian’s Handbook
• Risam, “The Stakes of Postcolonial Digital Humanities” in New Digital Worlds A reminder that you should aim for five (5) or more “substantial” annotations per piece - thoughtful contributions that productively move the conversation forward.

Watch

• Posner, “How Did They Make That?” (~40 minutes)

Submit

• Class survey
• Set up Hypothes.is, GitHub, and Mural if you haven’t yet (see week 1)
• Pick a week to lead discussion

Class

Lab

Troubleshooting 🔧

Collaboratively Defining Digital History

How to navigate in Mural

Bonus

Temple Library Research Guides

Introducing the Digital Humanities

No Class

Topics

• Digitization + digital archives (slides here)

• Possibilities + limitations of structured knowledge databases

• Labor

Featured

• SNCC Digital Gateway

• The Early Caribbean Digital Archive

• The Jane Addams Digital Edition

Due

Annotate

• Putnam, “The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast”
• Klein, “The Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemings”
• Gitelman, “Searching and Thinking About Searching JSTOR”
• Zeffiro, “Digitizing Labor in the Google Books Project: Gloved Fingertips and Severed Hands”

Discussion leader: Lucas

Class

Lab

GitHub basics :octocat:

Crowdsourced history with Zooniverse + LOC’s “By the People”

Bonus

Read

• Caswell, Michelle. “Seeing Yourself in History: Community Archives and the Fight Against Symbolic Annihilation,” The Public Historian (2014) 36 (4): 26–37. https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2014.36.4.26
• Mayer, Allana. “Crowdsourcing, Open Data and Precarious Labor,” Model View Culture 33 (February 24, 2016), https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/crowdsourcing-open-data-and-precarious-labour

Topics

• Categories, portals, and knowledge systems

• Access + accessibility

• Digital editions

• Sharing (your) stuff

Featured

• (AHR Open Review) Locke, “History Can be Open Source: Democratic Dreams and the Rise of Digital History”

• Philly Community Wireless

Due

Annotate

• Christen, “Does Information Really Want to Be Free? Indigenous Knowledge Systems and the Question of Openness”
• Fitzpatrick, “Beyond Metrics: Community Authorization and Open Peer Review”
• Hedley and Kooistra, “Prototyping Personography for The Yellow Nineties Online: Queering and Querying History in the Digital Age” NOTE: This text was published on the Manifold platform, a open-source, annotatable, multimodal web publishing concept started by collaborators at CUNY and the University of Minnesota. Discussion in class will include a recap of your experience using the platform. In order to read and comment on this chapter, you will need to make an account with Manifold. Click the link above, then the avatar icon in the upper right. When you’re prompted to log in, choose “Need to sign up?” and fill in your information.

Discussion leader: Mikayla

Submit

• Group project: Team Charter

Class

Lab

Finding/defining audience with user personas

Bonus

Temple Library Research Guides

Open Access, Research Impact and Scholarly Credentials, Scholarly Credentials Toolkit for History Faculty

Read

• Dressler, Virginia and Cindy Kristof. “The Right to Be Forgotten and Implications on Digital Collections: A Survey of ARL Member Institutions on Practice and Policy,” College and Research Libraries 79:7 (2018). https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.79.7.972
• Robichaud, Danielle and Krista McCracken. “Doing the work: Editing Wikipedia as an act of reconciliation.” UWSpace (2018). http://hdl.handle.net/10012/14198.
• Kirby, Jasmine Simone. “How NOT to create a digital media scholarship platform: the history of the Sophie 2.0 project.” IASSIST Quarterly, 42:4(2019), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.29173/iq926.

Resources

• The IDEO Human Centered Design Toolkit (download the Field Guide here)
• Chartability
• WCAG Essential Components of Web Accessibility

Slides from this week’s Humanities Data Primer

Topics

• Networks, relationships and interconnectedness

• Linked/open data

• Local/Global

Featured

• In the Same Boats

• Six Degrees of Francis Bacon

Due

Annotate

• Błoch, Filho, Bojanowski, “Slaves, Freedmen, Mulattos, Pardos, and Indigenous Peoples: The Early Modern Social Networks of the Population of Color in the Atlantic Portuguese Empire” in The Digital Black Atlantic
• Ahnert, Ahnert, Coleman, Weingart, “Part I: Frameworks”in The Network Turn: Changing Perspectives in the Humanities
• Casey, “A Committee of the Whole” in Current Research in Digital History 2 (2019)

Discussion leader: Xiang

• Posner, “Humanities Data: A Necessary Contradiction”
• Owens, “Defining Data for Humanists: Text, Artifact, Information or Evidence?”

Submit

• Group project: Project Proposal Part I

Class

Lab

Mini dataset creation lab

Network visualization (chord diagram) with Flourish

Bonus

Temple Library Research Guides

Network Analysis

Read

• Griffin, Gabriele and Matt Steven Hayler, “Collaboration in Digital Humanities Research: Persisting Silences.” DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly 12:1 (2018). http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/12/1/000351/000351.html

Topics

• Spatial/temporal knowledge and representation

• Linearity, causality, progress, and contested space

• Maps and imagination

Featured

• Bending Lines: Maps and Data from Deception to Distortion

• Mapping Violence

• Layers of London

• The St. Louis Map Room

Due

Annotate

• Fisher, “Behind the Scenes of GIS at the Woodlands”
• Grunewald, “Beyond the Archive: What GIS Mapping Reveals about German POWS in Soviet Russia” in AHA Perspectives on History
• Cowley and Barnes, “Unsettling Colonial Mapping: Sonic-Spatial Representations of amiskwaciwâskahikan,” HASTAC blog
• Anderson, “Census, Map, Museum,” in Imagined Communities (Second Edition)

Discussion leader: Ryan

Submit

• Group project: Project Proposal Part II

Class

Lab

Narrative maps with StoryMapJS

Bonus

Temple Library Research Guides

Digital Mapping

Read

• Pewu, Jamila Moore. “Digital Reconnaissance: Re(Locating) Dark Spots on a Map,” in The Digital Black Atlantic (2021), http://muse.jhu.edu/book/84470
• Mattern, Shannon. “Local Codes: Forms of Spatial Knowledge,” Public Knowledge (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, January 18, 2019), https://publicknowledge.sfmoma.org/local-codes-forms-of-spatial-knowledge/.

No class I’m sick! All readings pushed forward one week!

Virtual class Join me at 5pm at https://upenn.zoom.us/my/cynthiaheider

Topics

• Understand the basic principles of data visualization.

• Identify challenges of data integrity, ambiguity, situatedness, and “normalization.”

• Charts, graphs, and quantitative visualization

Featured

• Audubon Bird Migration Explorer

• An Interactive Visualization of Every Line in Hamilton

• The Shape of History: Reimagining Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s Historical Visualization Work

• Shakespeare and Company

• From Data to Viz

Due

Annotate

• Johnson, “Markup Bodies: Black [ Life ] Studies and Slavery [ Death ] Studies at the Digital Crossroads”
• Klein and D’Ignazio, “The Number Don’t Speak for Themselves” in Data Feminism
• McGrath, “Mapping Violence: A Case Study on Project Development, Iterative Approaches to Data Collection and Visualization, and Collaborative Work With Undergraduates”
• Risam, “‘It’s Data, Not Reality’: On Situated Data with Jill Walker Rettberg.”

Discussion leader: Drew

Submit

• Group project: Project Proposal Part III

Class

Lab

Visualizing data meaningfully with Datawrapper

Bonus

Temple Library Research Guides

Data Visualization, Digital Storytelling, Graphic Design, Datasets and Data Repositories

Read

• Dinsman, Melissa. “The Digital in the Humanities: An Interview with Jessica Marie Johnson.” Los Angeles Review of Books (July 23, 2016), https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/digital-humanities-interview-jessica-marie-johnson/
• Rettberg, Jill Walker. “Situated Data Analysis: A New Method for Analysing Encoded Power Relationships in Social Media Platforms and Apps,” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 7:5 (2020), https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-0495-3.

No class Sick again! See you next week.

Topics

• Audio + video interventions (slides here)

• Collaborative meaning-making

• Oral history

• Podcasts + soundscapes

Featured

• GIF IT UP
• “She Walked Here” street tour
• Citizen DJ

Due

Annotate

• Mullen, “How to Listen to a Podcast for Class”
• Guzy, “The Sound of Life: What Is a Soundscape?” and “The Sound of Life: The Making of a Soundscape”
• Bleeker, Verhoeff, Werning, “Sensing Data: Encountering Data Sonifications, Materializations, and Interactives as knowledge objects”
• Sheftel and Zembrzycki, “Slowing Down to Listen in the Digital Age: How New Technology Is Changing Oral History Practice”

Discussion leader: Lauren

Listen

• Carpenter, Drafting the Past (podcast) episode 14: “Dan Bouk Finds Wonder in the Boring” and try to answer Mullen’s “When the show is over” questions as you listen.

Class

Lab

Data sonification

Bonus

Temple Library Research Guides

Digital Video and Image Analytics, Media Studies, Film and Media Arts

Read

• Kramer, Michael J. “What Does A Photograph Sound Like? Digital Image Sonification As Synesthetic AudioVisual Digital Humanities,” DHQuarterly 15:1 (2021), http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/15/1/000508/000508.html.
• Wheeler, Rachel, and Sarah Eyerly, “Singing Box 331: Re-Sounding Eighteenth-Century Mohican Hymns from the Moravian Archives.” The William and Mary Quarterly 76:4 (October 2019).

Topics

• Video and other digital games

• AR/VR/MR

• Embodiment, affect, human-computer interaction

Featured

• Virtual tour of The Breakers mansion on Newport, RI created with Matterport (3D scanned)

• Kisima Innitchuna/Never Alone (video game)

• Sweet Chariot (interactive tour)

Due

Annotate

• Chapman, “Interacting with Digital Games as History” in Chapman, Digital Games as History
• Sullivan, Nieves, Snyder, “Making the Model: Scholarship and Rhetoric in 3-D Historical Reconstructions” in Sayers, Making Things and Drawing Boundaries
• Schrader, “‘Traveling While Black’: Virtual reality exhibit at Civil Rights Memorial Center will immerse audiences in Black experience on the road” (Southern Poverty Law Center blog)
• Nakamura, “Feeling Good About Feeling Bad: Virtuous Virtual Reality and the Automation of Racial Empathy”

Discussion leader: N/A

Schedule a time for me to meet and check in your group this week.

Class

Lab

Exploring contingency with Twine

Playing with VR

Bonus Material

Temple Library Research Guides

Games and Gaming, Digital Storytelling, Graphic Novels, Comic Books, and Sequential Art, Digital Video and Image Analytics, Immersive Technology, Media Studies, Film and Media Arts

Read

• McGrath, Jim. “Days of Future Past: Augmented Reality and Temporality in Digital Public Humanities” (July 19, 2017).
• Poole, Steve. “Ghosts in the Garden: Locative Gameplay and Historical Interpretation From Below,” International Journal of Heritage Studies, 24:3, 300-314, https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2017.1347887.
• Clark, Jasmine and Alex Wermer-Colan. “The Virtual Blockson: Immersive Technologies for Teaching Primary Source Literacy on the African Diaspora” dh + lib (2020 Special Issue: 14 June 2020).
• Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. “Text Messaging: The Transformissions of ‘Agrippa’” in Mechanisms : New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007.

Topics

• 3D modeling and photogrammetry

• Critical making

• Simulacra & simulation

Featured

• Thingiverse + Sketchfab + Scan the World

• Global History Hackathons at the University of Glasgow

• Heritage Jam through the University of York

Due

Annotate

• Garfinkel, “Dialogic Objects in the Age of 3-D Printing: The Case of the Lincoln Life Mask”
• Stuart, “Losing Our Senses: An Exploration of 3D Object Scanning”
• Jungnickel, “Making Things to Make Sense of Things: DIY as Research and Practice”
• Sayers, “Prototyping the Past”

Discussion leader: Justin

Class

Lab

Photogrammetry in a nutshell

Bonus Material

Temple Library Research Guides

Physical Computing, 3D Modeling and Printing

Read

• Kraus, Kari. “Finding Fault Lines: An Approach to Speculative Design” in The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities, 2018.
• Blas, Zach. “Gay Bombs: User’s Manual.” Queer Technologies, http://zachblas.info/works/queer-technologies/
• Melo, Marijel. “Knotty Cartographies: Augmenting Everyday Looking Practices of Craft and Race,” Craft Research 9:1 (2018), doi: 10.1386/crre.9.1.59_1. https://eitm.unc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Knotty-Cartographies_Melo.pdf.

No Class

Optional: Productivity and Research/Data Management Tools

Featured tools

Source organization, sorting, note-taking:

• Airtable
• Zotero
• Tropy
• Workflowy
• DEVONThink
  • See also DEVONThink for Historians videos
• Atlas.ti for qualitative data

Writing

• Hemingway Editor
• Scrivener

Task management

• Trello
• Todoist

Data wrangling

• OpenRefine
  • See also Library Carpentries tutorial for cleaning data in OpenRefine
• Databasic.io which includes
  • WordCounter: analyzes your text and tells you the most common words and phrases.
  • WTFcsv: tells you WTF is going on with your .csv file.
  • SameDiff: compares two or more text files and tells you how similar or different they are.
  • ConnectTheDots: shows you how your data is connected by analyzing it as a network.

Humanists’ digital systems and workflows

• Daegengna Duoer, “We Need a Better System: Streamlining Academic Digital Workflow from Reading to Writing” (2021)
• Bihter Esener, “Dissertating in the Digital Age: Research and Writing Tools for Organization and Productivity” (2020)
• Jessica Parr, “Data Management for #VastEarlyAmerica” (2019)
• Twitter thread by Andre Brett “How I do archival research” (2018) -Brooke Bryan, “After the Interview: On Workflow & Choosing a Digital Tool to Visualize, Organize, and Publish Interview Collections” (2016
• Zachary Schrag, “My Quirky Workflow” (2013)
• Jessica Marie Johnson’s “From the Archives: A Quick Post on Picasa, Archive Photography, Technology, and Afro-Atlantic History, Parts 1 and 2” (2013)
• Miriam Posner, “Embarrassments of riches: Managing research assets” (2013)
• Robert Karl’s Research Craft and Workflow Hacks for Historians video series

Topics

• Storytelling + narrative

• Digital exhibits + interactives

• Representing contingency

• Multi-modality + visual essays

Featured

Due

Annotate

• Mullen, “A Braided Narrative for Digital History” in Debates in the Digital Humanities (2019)
• Santana, “Historians as Digital Storytellers: The Digital Shift in Narrative Practices for Public Historians” in Handbook of Digital Public History
• Collin and Salamone, “Digital Storytelling: Presenting History in New Ways” on the National Trust for Historic Preservation: Preservation Leadership Forum Blog (November 1, 2017).
• Fickers and Clavert, “On pyramids, prisms, and scalable reading” in the Journal of Digital History
• Skim and explore Hoehne, “‘Murderous, Unwarrantable, and Very Cold’: Mapping the Rise of Extralegal Collective Killing in the United States, 1783-1865”, an example of the kind of transmedia scholarship described above.

Watch

• Ira Glass (from This American Life) on storytelling, “Part 1, The Building Blocks of a Good Story” (00:05:23)
• Optionally, “Part 2: How hard it is to find decent stories and abandon crap”, “Part 3: On good taste and falling short”, “Part 4: Be human”

Discussion leader: N/A

Submit

• Reflections assignment: Attend a Workshop/Event
• Reflections assignment: Digital Project Review

Class

Lab

Digital Storytelling in Five Frames

Bonus

Temple Library Research Guides

Digital Storytelling, Digital Exhibits with Omeka

Topics

• Your group project presentations

Due

Submit

• Reflections assignment: End-of-semester Survey

Class

Present your group project - 10-15 minutes per group, followed by Q&A