Fred Gibbs (fwgibbs@unm.edu)
Mesa Vista Hall, 1077
Office Hours: M 10-11; T 2-4
This course explores the theoretical and methodological issues now facing humanistic study in a digital age. It presents a broad survey of how powerful new research methodologies now allow historians (broadly construed, including literary historians) to ask and answer fundamentally different kinds of questions. It explores topics such as data visualization, geo-spatial analysis, and text mining. On the whole, it aims to provide conceptual fluency on topics such as the uses of new media to present scholarly research, the implications of copyright law on access to historical data and scholarship, the changing role of museums and libraries, and the politics of authority and expertise in knowledge networks. The course also reflects on the changing nature of the humanities (such as their possible convergence toward the social sciences). This course challenges the typical conceptions of how one ought to produce and consume history as well as provides guidelines for effectively bridging and combining humanities and technology skills that will make you more employable.
Understand the theories and principles of new media and technology and their potential impact on the humanities, with an emphasis on history
Develop conversational fluency: understand current debates and speak intelligently with both skeptics and advocates about the history and future of digital scholarship and its relationship to the world.
Appreciate the theoretical possibilities and practical limitations of digital archives, new research methodologies, and modes of scholarly communication.
Begin to experiment with new tools, workflows, and ways of thinking about history.
Thorough preparedness and engaged participation in every class meeting. See the note about readings and discussion below. (30%)
Create and use your own blog and Twitter account for the course. (5%)
Original 400-word critical reaction blog posts posted to your own blog before each class. I will supply a brief prompt for these to help focus your posts on key issues. These should NOT merely summarize the readings, but critically evaluate them and ask questions that will guide our discussion. You need to do 7 of these throughout the semester. (30%)
Lead one discussion by having good questions prepared ahead of time to help call attention to interesting points in the readings, connect them to each other, and connect that day’s readings to previous readings and discussions. (5%)
Completion of a Final Project in the guise of a preparing necessary materials for (but not actually submitting) a Kickstarter campaign. (25%)
Perseverance and tolerance for frustration with hypothetical discussions. Digital humanities engages with new methodological problems and professional challenges raised by rapidly shifting technology and new media. Must be able to have fun while groping. (5%)
###Other Important Information
Academic Integrity: The University of New Mexico believes that academic honesty is a foundation principle for personal and academic development. All University policies regarding academic honesty apply to this course. Academic dishonesty includes, but is not limited to, cheating or copying, plagiarism (claiming credit for the words or works of another from any type of course such as print, Internet or electronic database, or failing to cite the source), fabricating information or citations, facilitating acts of academic dishonesty by others, having unauthorized possession of examinations, submitting work of another person or work previously used without informing the instructor, or tampering with the academic work of other students. The University’s full statement on academic honesty and the consequences for failure to comply is available in the college catalog and in the Pathfinder.
Attendance Policy: Regular and punctual attendance is required. UNM Pathfinder policies apply, which in part means instructor drops based on non-attendance are possible. This policy applies regardless of the grading option you have chose.
Accommodation: Accessibility Services (Mesa Vista Hall 2021, 277-3506) provides academic support to students who have disabilities. If you think you need alternative accessible formats for undertaking and completing coursework, you should contact this service right away to assure your needs are met in a timely manner. If you need local assistance in contacting Accessible Services, see the Bachelor and Graduate Programs office.
Do not suffer in silence. I try to situate discussions and assignments squarely within the objectives of the course, but I expect that you’ll ask for clarification if such connections elude you.
If you have questions about your performance/grade during the semester, I will be very happy to meet with you to discuss how things are going. I understand that everyone comes into the course with different skills and backgrounds. Serious effort goes a long way toward your grade!
Our reading list only scratches the surface of the topics that inevitably arise during discussion. I expect that you will help steer the discussions around your particular interests. In fact, that you retain such control is central to the success of the course. This is a polite way of saying that you share some responsibility in making this class relevant to your future career(s). Of course I’ll do my best to make sure that it is, but I need your help.
The goals of the final project are (1) to show that you have grasped the topics presented in the course, and (2) to express them in a non-traditional form.
You will design a Kickstarter campaign (following their guidelines) for a digital history project relevant to your field. It doesn’t have to overlap perfectly with your current research, but it shouldn’t be so far afield that you don’t have enough subject matter expertise to propose an interesting project. Your proposal should employ technologies, methodologies, and approaches that we’ve decided constitute digital history.
In addition to the Kickstarter materials, each proposal must explain its historical relevance, use of technology, limitations of methodology, expected research outcomes and benefits, sustainability plan. As with any campaign, one great challenge is to explain in lay terms why your project is interesting, how people will benefit from it, and why people should get excited enough to support it.
Most readings are either hyperlinked to an online version, or are available via the course Zotero library. There are 5 required books. Some of these are available online for free, but we’re reading through each of the books in their entirety (so that’s a lot of screen time).
Important note about reading and discussion: During each class, articles for the next class will be assigned to a person who will act as the “primary reader” (PR) for that article (sometimes this will be me; generally we’ll just take volunteers). The PR will provide a ~5 minute synopsis of the point or argument of the piece, and a ~5 minute contextualization of that article within other course readings. Throughout discussion, they will serve as the expert for that piece and bring it into the conversation whenever relevant. Everyone is expected to read all the assignments, even if not the primary reader. Take special care if you are.
What is digital humanities? Digital history? How does studying “the digital” vs. using “the digital” factor into definitions? Is it necessary to have a working definition? What about digital history? We’ll delve into some of the debates about the nature of “DH” and also begin exploring some (online) projects (whether focused on presenting archives, interpretation, methodology, exhibits, etc) to get a better feel for the field.
William Cronon, The Public Practice of History in and for a Digital Age. Also scan the digital sessions from recent AHA meetings. AHA Today: The Future Is Here: Digital History at the 126th Annual Meeting.
Julia Flanders, The Productive Unease of 21st-century Digital Scholarship.
Stephen Ramsay, DH Types One and Two.
Mark Sample, The Digital Humanities Is Not About Building, It’s About Sharing.
Is the digitally networked academic sphere networked differently than it has been? As part of our discussion, you’ll set up individual blogs for the course, populate your RSS feed, establish Twitter accounts, make sure you’re connected to the course Zotero Library.
Dawn Gilpin, Working the Twittersphere.
Chuck Tyron, Blogging, Scholarship, and the Networked Public Sphere.
Larry Cebula, Advice for Academic Bloggers.
Kim Barbour and David Marshall, The Academic Online: Constructing Persona Through the World Wide Web.
Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Blogs as Serialized Scholarship.
What are the central concerns of the so-called digital humanities community? Does it make sense to talk about Digital Humanities as opposed to Digital History or Digital Literature? Why is there no Digital Philosophy?
Anne Burdick et al., Digital_Humanities.
Why has narrative been so central to the history profession? What are the advantages and disadvantages? Is narrative still the best way of describing or “doing” history in the 21st century?
Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics.
Hayden White, The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality.
What are the pros and cons of thinking of the historical record as data? What are the perils and promises of visualizing it? We’ll also get some practice mucking around with a few tools designed to make this easier and relatively non-technical.
Trevor Owens, Defining Data for Humanists: Text, Artifact, Information or Evidence?.
Fred Gibbs and Trevor Owens, The Hermeneutics of Data and Historical Writing.
Tricia Wang, Big Data Needs Thick Data.
Tim Hitchcock, Culturomics, Big Data, Code Breakers and the Casaubon Delusion.
Are there any meaningful differences between digital history and social science? What happens to historical interpretations that are filtered through quantitative analysis and visualization tools?
John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past.
Matt Might, The Illustrated Guide to a PhD.
Johanna Drucker, Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display.
Elijah Meeks, Infoviz and New Literacies.
John Theibault, Visualizations and Historical Arguments
Dmitry Paranyushkin, Identifying the Pathways for Meaning Circulation using Text Network Analysis.
Andrew J. Torget & Jon Christensen, Mapping Texts: Visualizing American Historical Newspapers
Check out: a few places to find data: Chronicling America, HathiTrust, Time Magazine Corpus, Internet Archive, Digital Public Library of America.
… a few tools (and videos) for data manipulation: DataWrangler, OpenRefine.
… a few tools to see/make stuff: Viewshare, Flowing Data, Gephi, Visualeyes.
What are the issues with using GIS for historical research? Is mapping just too complicated to be useful?
Patricia Cohen, Digital Maps are Giving Scholars the Lay of the Land.
Richard White, What is spatial history?
Ian Gregory and David Cooper, GIS, Texts, and Images: New Approaches.
Peter Fisher and Jo Wood, What is a Mountain? Or The Englishman who went up a Boolean Geographical Concept but Realised it was Fuzzy.
Matthew Wilkens, Geolocation Extraction and Mapping of Nineteenth-Century U.S. Fiction.
Check out some DH GIS Projects, as well as a few other tools for making maps, like OpenHeatMap, CartoDB.
See how far you can get with mapping with QGIS, and we’ll work through problems in class. For tutorials, see The Geospatial Historian, the QGIS wiki, and an array of tutorials
Under what circumstances are these techniques useful? Dangerous? How can they be used most effectively?
Stanford Literary Lab, Quantitative Formalism: an Experiment.
Elijah Meeks and Scott Weingart, The Digital Humanities Contribution to Topic Modeling. Follow the links in this brief introduction!
Scott Weingart, Topic Modeling for Humanists: A Guided Tour.
Cameron Blevins, Topic Modeling Martha Ballard’s Diary.
Shlomo Argamon et al., Gender, Race, and Nationality in Black Drama, 1950-2006: Mining Differences in Language Use in Authors and Their Characters.
Play around with Overview or MALLET, and try to use them with a very small corpus, just to go through the process. This is play, not research! (if you separate them, anyway).
There are great digital datasets available, but most historians work with sources that are far from ready to be plugged into digital tools. This group of readings suggests some techniques and strategies to make traditional analog sources suitable for use in a digital workflow. Everyone has to choose the set of tools and workflow that’s appropriate to their own needs and habits. But having an open mind and flexibility in adjusting your own work habits can go a long way towards lowering the impedance between you and digital tools that can help your productivity skyrocket, and in fact allow you to venture into unchartered historical waters.
Rather than assign more specific readings to cover the pedagogy facet we talked about the first day, we’ll each find a reading related to how we might better integrate the kinds of concerns that underlie this course into undergraduate humanities courses generally.
For the readings below, we won’t have experts or a discussion leader. Rather, we’ll talk about how our own research needs present challenges to creating new workflows and how to meet them, and how they overlap with the pedagogy concerns that you raise from whatever reading(s) you choose.
William J Turkel, Workflows and Digital Sources (and explore the links!).
Elena Razlagova, History and the Digital Image Forum: DIY Image Management with Zotero.
Miriam Posner, Batch-processing photos from your archive trip.
Nancy Brown, History and the Digital Image Forum: Lightroom as a Research Tool: From Organization to Interpretation.
Rachel Leow, DevonThink. (Read this article AND at least skim through the short three part series that it links to.)
One particularly vibrant conversation of the past few years in the digital humanities community concerns whether digital humanists should learn to code. Although often answered with a yes or no, the more helpful question is the extent to which (and the conditions under which) coding knowledge and experience is either useful and/or necessary in the digital humanities. Should it be required learning in digital humanities courses? Regular humanities courses?
Less Reading, More Doing!
READ: ONE (not all!) of the below options (Tweet your choice to claim it, so we can maximize coverage as a group). We’ll spend a few minutes discussing the issues raised in the various pieces.
DO: The Preface, Introduction, and Exercises 0-6 of this programming tutorial mentioned last time. If you get stuck, I expect to see some tweets with screen shots and error messages. You WILL get this done before next class, and I will help you.
IN CLASS: We’ll talk about unanswered questions from the tutorials, and look at how basic programming can help with GIS and text mining projects we’ve discussed recently (especially cleaning text files).
Cathy Davidson, What are the 4 Rs Essential to 21st-century Learning?.
Matthew Kirschenbaum, Hello Worlds.
Caleb McDaniel, Mining the BPL Anti-Slavery Collection on the Internet Archive.
Michael Widner, Learn to Code; Learn Code Culture.
Jeff Atwood, Please Don’t Learn to Code.
Peter Norvig, Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years.
Miriam Posner, Some things to think about before you exhort everyone to code.
Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Planned Obsolescence (also online).
Paul Fyfe, Open Access, Open Secrets: Peer Review and Alternative Scholarly Production.
Is scholarly collaboration any different than it has been? Does Wikipedia mean the death of the author?
Michael Wesch, The Machine is Us/ing Us (4.5 min. video).
Roy Rosenzweig, Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past.
William Cronon, Scholarly Authority in a Wikified World.
Flickr Commons, Flickr: Discussing Question Re Crowdsourcing: Fail or Win? in Flickr Commons.
Nieman Journalism Lab Four Crowdsourcing Lessons from the Guardian’s (spectacular) Expenses-scandal Experiment.
Elissa Frankle, More Crowdsourced Scholarship: Citizen History.
What are the fundamental criteria for critiquing digital history projects? How much does the traditional peer review model need to change to accommodate new types of historical work/projects?
William G. Thomas III, Writing A Digital History Journal Article from Scratch: An Account.
James Smithies, Evaluating Scholarly Digital Outputs: The 6 Layers Approach.
MLA, Guidelines for Evaluating Work in Digital Humanities and Digital Media.
CDRH, Best Practices for Digital Work.
Todd Presner, Evaluating Digital Scholarship; this also appears on pp. 128-9 of Digital_Humanities.
What’s at stake for historians (even when not using images)? How is this relevant to historical texts? Or datasets that have been curated and published? What obligation do historians have to make the past more accessible in forms other than books and articles?
Susan M. Bielstein, Permissions: A Survival Guide
Brian Lamb, Dr. Mashup.
Overview of Licenses: GNU GPL and Creative Commons.
If you’re curious about the blue puppies, there is more, more, and the court case (esp. the DISCUSSION section).