Schedule of Readings & Assignments
1. Introductions
- what's going on in this class?
- past v. history v. heritage
- why study history?
T: What you’ve signed up for…
Today we spend most of the time looking at the aims of the course, topics on the syllabus, course expectations, etc..
Connect to Zotero
Make sure you can access our Zotero library ASAP. ALL COURSE READINGS are available via Zotero.
If you don’t connect to it, you’ll WASTE A LOT OF TIME finding things on your own.
Th: Stories and forms of history
Check out the Reading Guide
For ideas of what to think about when reading, and how to best prepare for our discussions, see the reading guide.
- Jenkins, Keith. Re-thinking History, Chapter 1: What history is, pp. 6–32.
- Cronon, William. “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative.” Journal of American History 78, no. 4 (1992): 1347–76.
2. Archives and Algorithms
- how algorithms are transforming archival practices
- how history and heritage are increasingly shaped by algorithms
- how present archives represent the future of history
- how archived-marginalized communities are creating new kinds of archives
T: The power of archives
- Schwartz, Joan M. and Terry Cook. “Archives, Records and Power: The Making of Modern Memory,” 1–19.
- Putnam, Lara. “The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast: The Transnational and the Text-Searchable.” The American Historical Review 121, no. 2 (2016): 377–402.
- Christen, Kimberly. “Tribal Archives, Traditional Knowledge, and Local Contexts: Why the ‘s’ Matters,” 2015.
- Duarte, Marisa Elena and Miranda Belarde-Lewis, “Imagining: Creating Spaces for Indigenous Ontologies,” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 53, no. 5–6 (July 2015): 677–702. Read through 691 and skim the rest.
- Guiliano, Jennifer, and Carolyn Heitman. “Difficult Heritage and the Complexities of Indigenous Data.” Journal of Cultural Analytics 4, no. 1 (August 2019).
-
Caswell, Michelle. “Seeing Yourself in History: Community Archives and the Fight Against Symbolic Annihilation,” The Public Historian 36, no. 4 (2014): 26–37.
- Community Webs
- SAADA
- After Violence
- Genoa Indian School
Book discovery exercise
Come to class prepared to discuss the book discovery exercise. Use the readings to explain your discoveries.
3. Digital archives -> Computational history
- historic data sets
- machine learning and data classification in digital archives
- energizing archives
T: Interfacing the Archive
- Hedstrom, Margaret. “Archives, Memory, and Interfaces with the Past,” 21–43.
- Presner, Todd. “8. The Ethics of the Algorithm: Close and Distant Listening to the Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive.” In Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture, 167–202. Harvard University Press, 2016.
- Whitelaw, Mitchell. Generous Interfaces for Digital Cultural Collections
- Gibbs, Fred. New Forms of History: Critiquing Data and Its Representations, American Historian 7 (2016): 31-36.
Sample Digital Archive/History projects
American Panorama, Valley of the Shadow, American Social Movements, Slave Voyages, Civil War Washington, Blue Ridge Parkway, Colonial Dispatches, Colored Conventions, Lynching America, Mapping Segregation, Native Land, First Days Project, American Yawp
Early efforts
Valley of the Shadow, Virtual Jamestown, Documenting the American South
Th: Computing the Archive
Data interface exercise
Come to class prepared to discuss the data interface exercise. Use the readings to explain your discoveries.
- Willson, Michele. “Algorithms (and the) Everyday.” Information, Communication & Society 20.1 (2017): 137–50.
- Goldstone, Andrew, and Ted Underwood. “The Quiet Transformations of Literary Studies: What Thirteenth Thousand Scholars Could Tell Us.” In New Literary History, 1–30, 2014.
- Donovan, Moira. “How AI Is Helping Historians Better Understand Our Past”. MIT Technology Review (April 11, 2023).
- Jaillant, Lise, and Arran Rees. “Applying AI to Digital Archives: Trust, Collaboration and Shared Professional Ethics”. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 38 (2023): 571–85.
AI Summary Critique Intro
Upload one of our readings into ChatGPT or a similar AI tool. Ask the “machine” for a summary. Read the article carefully and critique what the AI did well and what it missed. Hopefully your notes from class discussions will be helpful. Come to class next Thursday prepared to discuss!
4. Engaging History
- how have FORMS of history kept pace with information technology change?
- what should history look like?
- how can campus histories come alive?
T: Digital Storytelling
- Hurley, Andrew. “Chasing the Frontiers of Digital Technology: Public History Meets the Digital Divide,” The Public Historian 38, no. 1 (2016): 69–88.
- Wyman, Bruce et al., “Digital Storytelling in Museums: Observations and Best Practices,” Curator: The Museum Journal 54, no. 4 (2011): 461–68.
- Quimby, Claire. Digital Catalogues Study: A Cross-Institutional User Study of Online Museum Collection Catalogues Art Institute of Chicago, November 2019.
- Read the Key Findings section, and the 3 short sections in the “Functionality and Design” section.
Engagement (browse a little, have something to say…)
- Digital Community Engagement
- Cifor, Marika, Michelle Caswell, Alda Allina Migoni, and Noah Geraci. “‘What We Do Crosses over to Activism’: The Politics and Practice of Community Archives.” The Public Historian 40.2 (2018): 69–95.
- Hausknecht, Simone, Shannon Freeman, Jenny Martin, Carrie Nash, and Kelly Skinner. “Sharing Indigenous Knowledge through Intergenerational Digital Storytelling: Design of a Workshop Engaging Elders and Youth.” Educational Gerontology 47, no. 7 (July 2021): 285–96.
- Zavala, Jimmy, et al., “‘A Process Where We’re All at the Table’: Community Archives Challenging Dominant Modes of Archival Practice.,” Archives and Manuscripts 45, no. 3 (2017): 202–15.
Th: Campus History Collaboration
- why collaborative history?
- does UNM history matter?
- what if buildings could talk?
- maybe Everything is Alive
Campus Histories
AI Summary Critique DUE
Upload one of our readings into ChatGPT or a similar AI tool. Ask the “machine” for a summary. Read the article carefully and critique what the AI did well and what it missed. Hopefully your notes from class discussions will be helpful.
FOR TODAY: A few tools for collaborative campus history
- Introduction to Markdown. For later reference, there’s an easy cheat sheet.
- Introduction to GitHub. Read through this tutorial, but DO NOT actually do all the steps—just try to understand the general idea and we’ll walk through everything together.
- Garageband and Audacity
5. Digital artifacts
- what good are digital scans of historical artefacts?
- when does a technology become worth it (and what is _it_?)
T: 3D and digital twins
Everyone
Pick 2
- Liang, Jiafang. “Mixing Worlds: Current Trends in Integrating the Past and Present through Augmented and Mixed Reality.” Advances in Archaeological Practice 9, no. 3 (2021): 250–56.
- Barilotti, Alyssa. “Will the Digital Do? Exploring the Role of 3D Technologies in Repatriation Negotiations,” (2022).
- DeHass, Medeia Krisztina Csoba, and Alexandra Taitt. “3D Technology in Collaborative Heritage Preservation.” Museum Anthropology Review 12.2 (2018): 120–52.
- Cameron, Fiona. “3 Beyond the Cult of the Replicant: Museums and Historical Digital Objects—Traditional Concerns, New Discourses”
Th: Work time
- No class in Ortega, but you should be working on your campus history project
- I will be in the studio (MVH 2068) from 1-3:30 if you want any help
- Please come and work even if you don’t have specific questions!
- Stuff you need to do and should make progress on this week:
- Campus history research in CSWR
- Create GitHub and SketchFab accounts. This are required for finishing the campus history project
- Get your campus history copy working
- Scan something either in the lab with the scanner or via your phone and RealityScan (scans are due in 2 weeks!)
- Start writing out what your soundbite is going to be, and experiment with recording (soundbites are due in 2 weeks!)
6. Historical Reconstructions and Simulations
- theory and practice of reconstruction
- historical authenticity
- heritage, generally
T: Historic Site Reconstruction
- Sanders, Donald H. “Virtual Heritage: Researching and Visualizing the Past in 3D.” Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies 2, no. 1 (2014): 30–47.
- Douglass, et al., “Virtual Reconstruction as Archaeological Observation: Embracing New Ways of Treating Sites, Places and Landscapes.” Advances in Archaeological Practice (2024).
- Huang, Jiawei, et al., “From Archive, to Access, to Experience––Historical Documents as a Basis for Immersive Experiences.” Journal of Map & Geography Libraries 14.1 (2018): 40–63.
- Ottaway, Susannah, and Austin Mason. “Reconsidering Poor Law Institutions.” The Historical Journal 64, no. 3 (2021): 557–82.
Make sure you have a working clone of the campus-history site
Make sure you have your own copy of the campus-history site under your GitHub account and a new page for your essay—just to make sure everything is working for Thursday! You don’t need to have any real work on your essay, but you need to have everything ready.
Th: Fact, Fiction and History
- Roussou, Maria. “The Components of Engagement in Virtual Heritage Environments.” In Proceeding of New Heritage: Beyond Verisimilitude (2008): 265–83.
- Güntan, S. & Ar, B. “Recreating the past: Historical narratives and virtual environments of video games,” Mekansal Araştırmalar Dergisi, 2(1): 1-10.
Campus History Draft Due
Have a more or less complete draft of your essay. It doesn’t need to be super polished, but clear enough we can tell what you’re trying to do and what the story is. We’ll be looking at these in class.
7. Rethinking History with AI
- historical authority
- algorithmic narratives
- role of critical humanities
T: The role of the humanities
- Platt, Ben. “Now the Humanities Can Disrupt ‘AI’”. Public Books, February 20, 2023.
- Danaher, John. “The Threat of Algocracy: Reality, Resistance and Accommodation.” Philosophy & Technology 29, no. 3 (September 2016): 245–68.
- Klein, Lauren. “Are Large Language Models Our Limit Case?” Startwords, no. 3 (August 1, 2022).
Th: Campus History Essay Reviews
Campus History Checkpoint
- Make sure you have your scan complete and uploaded to SketchFab
- Make sure you have your audio recording done and integrated to your campus history page
8. Review and wrap-up
- what have we done?
- what haven't we done?
- how do you think differently about history?
T: Final Reflections
- Sachs, Aaron. “Letters to a Tenured Historian: Imagining History as Creative Nonfiction – or Maybe Even Poetry.” Rethinking History 14, no. 1 (2010): 5–38.
In class:
- brief wrap-up review lecture and take-home points
- advice on how to do well on final course reflections (due on our finals day)
Campus History Reviews
Peer reviews today! Make sure you have a COMPLETE version for critique.
- Final essays are due by May 16.
Th: NO CLASS
- No class in Ortega!
- As before on our work day, I will be in the studio (MVH 2068) from 1-3:30 if you want any help
- Even if you don’t have specific questions, please come and work!
- Stuff you should be finishing up:
- Last campus history research in CSWR
- Polishing the narrative and visual flow of your essay
- (Re)doing scans either in the lab with the scanner or via your phone and RealityScan
- Sound recording and editing
- Starting to draft your final course reflections
Final Deadline: MAY 16
- Campus History page: submit a GiutHub Pull Request as explained in the submission guide
- Final course reflection: send to me via email (fwgibbs@unm.edu)