What is digital humanities? How does studying “the digital” vs. using “the digital” factor into definitions? Is it necessary to have a working definition?
William Cronon
The Public Practice of History in and for a Digital Age.
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.
Set up our digital infrastructure: Establish blog, rss feeds, twitter, and zotero accounts.
Katrina Gulliver
10 Commandments of Twitter for Academics.
Chuck Tyron
Blogging, Scholarship, and the Networked Public Sphere.
Kim Barbour and David Marshall
The Academic Online: Constructing Persona Through the World Wide Web.
Larry Cebula
Advice for Academic Bloggers.
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.
Sort out DH Project Review assignments for Friday.
We’ll delve into some of the debates about the nature of “DH” and also begin exploring some DH projects (whether focused on presenting archives, interpretation, methodology, exhibits, etc) to get a better feel for the digital footprint of DH.
You shouldn’t be ignorant of how the internet works—the largest and most accessible publishing platform ever—if your job invovles knowledge production and dissemination anymore than you should be ignorant of literacy. If you think your work is valuable, you should know something about the methods at your disposal to communicate it to a wide audience in the form you think is most appropriate.
Omeka + Neatline
StoryMap
Story Maps
HyperCities | More on this
Homework to be done by today:
1) Install MAMP (Mac) or WAMP (Windows) so you can make webpages on your own computer.
2) Make a simple webpage, after reading through an Introduction to HTML and an Introduction to XML and HTML
How does all this stuff work?
Learn to use CSS to stlye your pages. Read through this entire CSS tutorial.
Homework to be done by today:
Create a short version of your CV with HTML and CSS.
Discuss differences between XML and HTML.
Meet in Zimmerman Library, Frank Waters Room for Library presentation on ABQ Airport sources
To get to the Frank Waters Room, do a U-turn to the left after coming through the main entrance of the library, through the double doors (heading toward the Center for Southwest Research), and you’ll see through the glass wall a seminar room, and probably me, on your left.
After the presentation, we’ll stay in that room and do a bit more initial planning about what our ABQ Airport project will look like, first exploring some existing efforts (which you should consult before class; use experience of our previous critiques and discussion):
Historic Albuquerque
Historic Old Town
Historic Photo Archive
New Mexico Historic Markers
Albuquerque Murals Project
The Plazas of New Mexico
Introduction to Javascript for the total beginner
Interactive Javascript tutorial
Add interactivity to your webpage. More details to come…
Richard White
What is spatial history?
Ian Gregory and David Cooper
GIS, Texts, and Images: New Approaches.
Prepare critiques of some DH GIS Projects
Read “Introducing GIS” and “Vector Data” from this gentle introduction to GIS.
Download and install QGIS. Your job is just to get the application running on your computer. Note: if you have a Mac, you have to install 2 required packages before installing QGIS; follow the instructions carefully (kyngchaos is your friend)! We’ll troubleshoot any installation issues and go over the interface and other basic GIS concepts in class.
Return to the gentle introduction to GIS, reading up through “Coordinate Reference Systems”.
Load some ABQ data layers with QGIS, using shapefiles (or CSV or KML files) from one of the below sources:
ABQ GIS Data
ABQ Open Data
UNM GIS Data Clearinghouse
See if you can create some interesting, even if useless, maps by overlaying totally different data sets.
If you get stuck or have questions, consult the QGIS Training Manual, the QGIS wiki, and an array of tutorials.
Peter Fisher and Jo Wood
What is a Mountain? Or The Englishman who went up a Boolean Geographical Concept but Realised it was Fuzzy.
Jason Farman, “Mapping the Digital Empire: Google Earth and the Process of Postmodern Cartography,” New Media & Society 12, no. 6 (2010): 869–88.
Experience the lite-ness of Google Maps Engine Lite, but use the ABQ public art data, and play around with the map styling as the tutorial suggests.
Understand the basics of KML.
Add a simple Google map using these instructions. Do not proceed to the next step until this is working!
Make it fancier with these instructions. There is lots of technical jargon here that will confuse you–it’s going to extend your javascript skills–and that’s why we’ll talk it over in class. But you should have already worked through the tutorial so you have questions about what’s going on.
See if you can display a KML file from ABQ Open Data
With a few notable exceptions, historians typically don’t consider their sources as data. But why is that? What is data? Are there any advantages to shifting the way we conceptualize our sources? What might we gain, or lose, by thinking about the historical record as data?
Trevor Owens
Defining Data for Humanists: Text, Artifact, Information or Evidence?.
Fred Gibbs and Trevor Owens
The Hermeneutics of Data and Historical Writing.
Seth Bullock
“Charles Babbage the Emergence of Automated Reason.”
Ben Schmidt
Reading digital sources: a case study in ships’ logs.
Hadley Wickham
Tidy Data (read up to section 3.5).
Examine a few tools (and explanatory videos) for data manipulation:
Learn to use OpenRefine via Cleaning Data with OpenRefine
DataWrangler
In class:
Commmand Lion Crash Course
Set up your working environment
It’s easy to find data, but often hard to find data in the exact form / format you need. A few basic programming skills can go a LONG way, and sometimes is the only way. Untether yourself from tools that other people make for you.
Come to class having gone as far as possible with the Python tutorials and we’ll answer questions and write a program together to normalize data.
Relax a bit, but start early on your scripts to parse your data into a format that you can use with Bookworm or Overview or Voyant. This is going to take way longer than you think. We’ll do more troubleshooting next week.
Under what circumstances are these techniques useful? Dangerous? How can they be used most effectively?
Ted Underwood
Where to Start with Text Mining.
Stanford Literary Lab
Quantitative Formalism: an Experiment.
Shlomo Argamon et al.
Gender, Race, and Nationality in Black Drama, 1950-2006: Mining Differences in Language Use in Authors and Their Characters.
Rob Nelson
Mining the Dispatch.
Ted Underwood
Basic OCR Correction; A Half-Decent OCR Normalizer for English Texts after 1700.
Laura Turner O’Hara
Cleaning OCR’d text with Regular Expressions.
Google n-gram viewer
Voyant and a list of projects that have used it
Get some of your research data loaded into Bookworm and Voyant (and you might want to peruse a list of projects that have used it.
We’re going to talk about the different formats of data these tools require, problems moving from one to the other; pros and cons of their various approaches, and whatever you newly discovered about your sources from taking a broad view.
Megan R. Brett, Topic Modeling: A Basic Introduction.
Andrew Goldstone and Ted Underwood
The Quiet Transformations of Literary Studies: What Thirteenth Thousand Scholars Could Tell Us.
Scott Weingart
Topic Modeling for Humanists: A Guided Tour.
Cameron Blevins
Topic Modeling Martha Ballard’s Diary.
Install and use MALLET to topic model some of your sources.
Also, load up some of your sources into Overview, and compare what you can learn from “raw” topic modeling with MALLET and Overview’s presentation of your documents.
Johanna Drucker
Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display.
Elijah Meeks
Infoviz and New Literacies.
John Theibault
Visualizations and Historical Arguments
Andrew J. Torget & Jon Christensen
Mapping Texts: Visualizing American Historical Newspapers
Dmitry Paranyushkin
Identifying the Pathways for Meaning Circulation using Text Network Analysis.
Explore visualizations:
Viewshare
Flowing Data
Gephi
Visualeyes
Visual Complexity
Explore videos:
Michael Wesch
The Machine is Us/ing Us (4.5 min. video).
Aaron Titus
How the Internet Works
Fred Gibbs
A Brief History of Toxicology (please don’t watch the whole thing!)
Random Course Trailers
Medical Ethics and History
Making the Middle Ages
Advice
How to make an EPIC movie trailer (can you glean the serious reason for watching this?)
Create a Research Trailer
If you’re unfamiliar with movie editing software, consider Movie Maker (Windows) or iMovie (Mac), or a free trial of Camtasia.
Scott McCloud
Understanding Comics.
Hayden White
The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality.
Work on your Videos and Portfolios!
Is scholarly collaboration any different than it has been? Does Wikipedia mean the death of the author?
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.
Work on your Videos and Portfolios!
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?
Paul Fyfe
Open Access, Open Secrets: Peer Review and Alternative Scholarly Production.
William G. Thomas III
Writing A Digital History Journal Article from Scratch: An Account.
James Smithies
Evaluating Scholarly Digital Outputs: The 6 Layers Approach.
Modern Language Association
Guidelines for Evaluating Work in Digital Humanities and Digital Media.
Journal of American History
Guidelines for Web site reviews
Todd Presner
Evaluating Digital Scholarship; this also appears on pp. 128-9 of Digital_Humanities.
Using the criteria discussed in the readings, be prepared to describe digital landscape in your field. What are relevant digital projects? What are opportunities for collaboration and innovation? What is missing?
Video Presentations
name1, name2, name3, etc.
name1, name2, name3, etc.