Fred Gibbs (fwgibbs@unm.edu)
Mesa Vista Hall, 1077
Office Hours: M 10-11; W 11-1; almost anytime by appointment
This course explores new theoretical and methodological issues now facing humanists working in a digital age, as well as old issues that have taken a new form. Combining provocative readings from the emergent field “Digital Humanities” with gentle technical tutorials that improve digital skills, we’ll talk about and experiment with powerful new research methodologies that now allow humanists to ask and answer fundamentally different kinds of questions and use new media to communicate about them in innovative ways. With an emphasis on collaborative teaching and learning, we’ll explore topics such as digital workflows for organizing, accessing, and analyzing sources, data visualization, geospatial analysis, text mining, web publishing, and a bit of programming.
This course challenges and complements the typical conventions for humanities research, as well as provide guidelines for effectively bridging and combining humanities and technology skills that will make you more considerably employable than your colleagues who remain afraid of data, however you intend to use your humanities degree.
The course meets 2 days a week for 1.25 hours. Generally, on Wednesday we’ll discuss readings and theorize about methods; on Friday, which will be more like a lab section, we’ll develop particular digital skills, such as developing functional webpages, maps with GIS tools, basic text mining techniques, and data visualization tools.
All the while, we’ll be collaborating to create an online History of the ABQ Airport, which will entail new historical research at the Center for the Southwest Research and other local archives, as well as other project skills such as digitization and digital workflows, content management, web development, design, and marketing.
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 and new research methodologies.
Understand the theories and principles of new media and its potential impact on scholarly communication.
Begin to experiment with new tools, workflows, methods, and techniques for large-scale research questions in the humanities; become able to teach yourself technical skills as needed.
Thorough preparedness and engaged participation in every class meeting and in the class project. (20%)
6 500-word blog posts that critically engage with the readings, the course in general, digital humanities, or your experience working through some of the tutorials–or that offers comments about what can improve the tutorial or our discussion of the topic. If responding to the readings, you should describe what you found interesting, novel, exciting, boring, impossible, delusional, etc. For the tutorials, you should reflect on how the potential advantages and disadvatnages of the technique. These blog posts, compared to the weekly updates (see below), will be more of a meta-discussion about digital methods rather than about technical details. Your blog posts will be evalutated in terms of the quality of their original and thoughtful contribution to the overall course discussion. (20%)
You should blog or post to your website once per week as to your progress and what you’ve learned in the weekly assignments (~500 words, but there is no official min or max). As opposed to the blog posts, these should address the technical nitty-gritty of the assignments. This gives you a chance to foregound the hard work you’re doing so that it is less important that you get everything to “work”, and more important that you can think critically about what you’ve done, what you haven’t, and articulate what you’ve learned. These short posts will improve the utility of the assignments, help me address concerns during class, and evaluate your performance in the course based on your effort rather than relying on a few final products at the end. These posts will be directly useful for your digital portfolios as described below. (20%)
As a final project / exam, you must create a digital portfolio hosted at your own ReclaimHosting domain, composed by hand in a text editor with HTML and CSS (ie do not use web design software to write the code for you). There is no formal structure requirements in terms of precisely what pages you need to have or how it needs to be organized (you might have a single page for the maps, even though there are 2 distinct mapping assignments, for instance), as I’d prefer that you make these decisions yourself (it’s your site!). However you assemble it, your portfolio must demonstrate that you can apply the techniques in the course to your own research, even if in a contrived and trivial way. You might also indicate what you might do with considerable more time and expertise. Some of your portfolio will serve particular course needs, and you might jettison those componenets when the course ends, but hopefully you’ll have a core of a professional website that will continue to benefit your career. (20%)
Your portfolio must include:
critical review of digital projects in your field. What exists? How could they be better? What should new projects be doing? If there is not much to report, then write a short manifesto about how the “digital humanities” values and ethos might serve (or not!) your field.
Good faith contributions to the ABQ Airport History Project. Particular roles and duties will be decided in class according to your own interests. This will be a public project that we want to show off at the end of the semester, so as long as you’re doing work that you’re proud of (you’re name will be on it), this requirement will be successfully fulfilled.
A 3 minute “video” that showcases the methods, results, and significance of your MA or PhD research (whatever stage you’re at). We’ll cover tools and techniques for doing this in class; I’ll bring goodies to our screening day. (5%)
Create and use your own blog and Twitter account for the course. (5%)
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%)