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.
- 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.
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
- transcription + computational overviews
- 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, edited by Claudio Fogu and Claudio Fogu, 167–202. Harvard University Press, 2016. https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674973244-009.
- 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
Campus Histories
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.
4. Engaging History
- how have FORMS of history kept pace with information technology change?
- what should history look like?
- what should a humanities poster look like?
T: Digital Storytelling
Engagement
- 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
Humanities Poster Assignment Due
More details and instructions coming soon!
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 what’s going on and we’ll go over it.
5. Digital artifacts
- what good are digital scans of historical artefacts?
- when does a technology become worth it (and what is _it_?)
T: 3D scanning and digital twins
Th: Scan something
- tutorials on photogrammetry coming soon!
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.
Th: Fact, Fiction and History
- Roussou, Maria. “The Components of Engagement in Virtual Heritage Environments.” In Proceeding of New Heritage: Beyond Verisimilitude, 265–83, 2008.
- Güntan, S. & Ar, B. “Recreating the past: Historical narratives and virtual environments of video games,” Mekansal Araştırmalar Dergisi, 2(1): 1-10.
- Sachs, Aaron. “Letters to a Tenured Historian: Imagining History as Creative Nonfiction – or Maybe Even Poetry.” Rethinking History 14, no. 1 (2010): 5–38.
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.
Th: Making history with AI
- Use ChatGPT prompts to create and critique short historical essay on a topic from another course.
8. Review and wrap-up
- what have we done?
- what haven't we done?
- how do you think differently about history?
T: Campus History Reviews
Campus History Reviews
Peer reviews today! Make sure you have a COMPLETE version of your campus history essay for critique.
Th: Final Reflections