Schedule
Week 1 - Welcome! (August 22)
- Topics
- Introductions
- Course + syllabus overview
- Navigating resources
- Tech stuff!
- Class
- Lab Set up Hypothes.is, GitHub, and Mural
- Join our Hypothes.is reading group
- Join our “organization” on GitHub (send me your username and I will invite you!)
- Join our Mural team
Week 2 - What is Digital History? (August 29)
- Topics
- Defining our terms
- Reviewing class survey results
- Exploring how to make this class work for you
- Featured
- 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 🔧
- Troubleshooting 🔧
- Bonus
- Temple Library Research Guides
- Introducing the Digital Humanities
Week 3 - Labor Day! (September 5)
No Class
Week 4 - Digital Sources (September 12)
- Topics
- Digitization + digital archives (slides here)
- Possibilities + limitations of structured knowledge databases
- Labor
- Featured
- 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”
- GitHub basics :octocat:
- 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
Week 5 - Access + Audience (September 19)
- 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”
- 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
- 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
Week 6 - Networks (September 26)
Slides from this week’s Humanities Data Primer
- Topics
- Networks, relationships and interconnectedness
- Linked/open data
- Local/Global
- Featured
- 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
- Class
- Lab
- Mini dataset creation lab
- Network visualization (chord diagram) with Flourish
- Mini dataset creation lab
- 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
Week 7 - Maps (October 3)
- Topics
- Spatial/temporal knowledge and representation
- Linearity, causality, progress, and contested space
- Maps and imagination
- Featured
- 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
- 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/.
Week 8 - No Class (October 10)
No class I’m sick! All readings pushed forward one week!
Week 9 - Quantitative Visualization (October 17)
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
- 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
- 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.
Week 10 - No Class (October 24)
No class Sick again! See you next week.
Week 11 - Audio/Visual Modalities (October 31)
- Topics
- Audio + video interventions (slides here)
- Collaborative meaning-making
- Oral history
- Podcasts + soundscapes
- Featured
- 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).
Week 12 - Play + Embodiment (November 7)
- 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
- Exploring contingency with Twine
- 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.
Week 13 - 3D Printing + Photogrammetry (November 14)
- Topics
- 3D modeling and photogrammetry
- Critical making
- Simulacra & simulation
- Featured
- 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.
Week 14 - Fall Break (November 21)
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
Task management
Data wrangling
- 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
Week 15 - Curation + Storytelling (November 28)
- Topics
- Storytelling + narrative
- Digital exhibits + interactives
- Representing contingency
- Multi-modality + visual essays
- 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
- Class
- Lab
- Digital Storytelling in Five Frames
- Bonus
- Temple Library Research Guides
- Digital Storytelling, Digital Exhibits with Omeka
Week 16 - Wrap-up (December 5)
- Topics
- Your group project presentations
- Due
- Submit
- Class
- Present your group project - 10-15 minutes per group, followed by Q&A