assignment ideas to work in: oral history (maybe about food traditions) place essay (spatial history)??? create short essays based on existing collection at CSWR (with Omeka?) digitize physical artifact short podcast interviews about artifact (or something else) corral digital route 66 projects into central repository maybe keep transcription assignment from previous DH class?

1: Introductions

Mon Aug 17:

Today we’ll review the syllabus, course aims, assignments, and general plan for the semester. We’ll also figure out how to customize the course to best suit participants’ interests.

Sample Digital Archive Projects

Civil War Washington, Blue Ridge Parkway, Slave Voyages + a striking visualization, Colonial Dispatches, Colored Conventions, Lynching America, Mapping Segregation, Native Land, UM Heritage Project, First Days Project, American Yawp, American Panorama

Wed Aug 19:

• Laura King, James F. Stark, Paul Cooke, “Experiencing the Digital World: The Cultural Value of Digital Engagement with Heritage” online.
• Andrew Flinn, “Community Histories, Community Archives: Some Opportunities and Challenges” PDF
• Michelle Caswell et al., “‘To Be Able to Imagine Otherwise’: Community Archives and the Importance of Representation,” Archives and Records 38, no. 1 (January 2, 2017): 5–26.
• Introduction to Zotero and connecting to the course library.
• Make sure you can access our group library.

Fri Aug 21:

2: Archival Knowledge Structures

Mon Aug 24:

• Knowledge Infrastructures
• What is an archives?
• Trevor Owens, What Do you Mean by Archive? Genres of Usage for Digital Preservers

Wed Aug 26:

• María Cotera, “Nuestra Autohistoria: Toward a Chicana Digital Praxis,” American Quarterly 70.3 (2018): 483–504.
• Chicana por mi Raza
• Chicano/a Activism in the Southern Plains Interactive Map and Timeline

Fri Aug 28:

3: Archival Power

Mon Aug 31

• Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook, “Archives, Records and Power: The Making of Modern Memory,” 1–19.
• A Royer. “Warming up records: archives, memory, power and index of the disappeared.” Interactions 6.1: 1-11. online
• Lauren Klein, “The Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemings,” American Literature 85, no. 4 (January 1, 2013): 661–88.

Wed Sep 2

Read one of the following and be prepared to discuss in class. For ideas of what to think about when reading, see the reading response guidelines (even if you’re not going to write anything).

• Marisa Elena Duarte and Miranda Belarde-Lewis, “Imagining: Creating Spaces for Indigenous Ontologies,” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 53, no. 5–6 (July 4, 2015): 677–702.
• Melissa Adler and Lindsey M. Harper, “Race and Ethnicity in Classification Systems: Teaching Knowledge Organization from a Social Justice Perspective,” Library Trends 67.1 (2018): 52–73.
• IN CLASS: Introduction to Metadata and Controlled Vocabularies

Fri Sep 4

4: From Analog to Digital Archives

Mon Sep 7

• Mario Ramirez. “Being Assumed Not to Be: A Critique of Whiteness as an Archival Imperative,” The American Archivist 78 (Fall/Winter, 2015): 2–18.
• Gail Okawa, “Finding American World War II Internment in Santa Fe: Voices Through Time.” In Marta Weigle (ed.), Telling New Mexico: A New History. Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 2009. 360–73. (in Zotero)
• Jefferson Bailey, Disrespect Des Fonds: Rethinking Arrangement and Description in Born-Digital Archives

Wed Sep 9

• Mitchell Whitelaw, Generous Interfaces for Digital Cultural Collections
• Skim through more examples here
• Margaret Hedstrom, “Archives, Memory, and Interfaces with the Past,” 21–43.
• Joshua Sternfeld, “Archival Theory and Digital Historiography: Selection, Search, and Metadata as Archival Processes for Assessing Historical Contextualization,” 544–75.

Fri Sep 11

5: Archives and Algorithms

Mon Sep 14

• Matthew Reidsma, Algorithmic Bias in Library Discovery Systems
• Ted Underwood, Why an Age of Machine Learning Needs the Humanities
• Kritika Agarwal, Doing Right Online: Archivists shape an ethics for the digital age

Wed Sep 16

• ajobin, Google’s Autocompletion: Algorithms, Stereotypes, and Accountability
• Joy Buolamwini, Algorithms aren’t racist. Your skin is just too dark
• SKIM: Angwin, Larson, Mattu, and Kircher, Machine Bias. Look especially at the images, captions, and statistics provided.

Fri Sep 18

6: Community Archives

Mon Sep 21

• Jimmy Zavala 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.
• Laura Sydell, 3D Scans Help Preserve History, But Who Should Own Them?
• SKIM: Michelle Caswell, “Seeing Yourself in History: Community Archives and the Fight Against Symbolic Annihilation,” The Public Historian 36, no. 4 (2014): 26–37.

Wed Sep 23

• Hannah Alpert-Abrams, Transcribing Multilingual Documents in the Digital Age
• SKIM: Sofía Becerra-Licha, Participatory and Post-Custodial Archives as Community Practice

In class we’ll survey a few transcription projects and go over instructions for your transcription assignment

• Colored Conventions
• Transcribe Bentham
• Information Wanted: Contribute to the construction of a searchable digital database of advertisements printed by former enslaved people searching for their loved ones.
• What’s on the Menu?: Contribute to food history research with over 17,000 menus from the past 170 years. Currently they need help reviewing submitted transcriptions.
• Making History: A wealth of papers, records, images, and speeches from more than 300 years of Virginian history.
• The Civil War in Letters: This collection contains letters from Civil War soldiers that give a human view of the conflict.
• Library of Congress transcription project
• Citizen Archivist: A set of transcription projects organized by the National Archives

• Smithsonian Digital Volunteers: LOTS of great projects to contribute to, based on archives of the Smithsonian Institution. You can browse all projects by name or by theme.

• One tool to note (that we won’t be using): Transkribus

Fri Sep 25

TO-DO FOR NEXT CLASS

• Get started with this over the weekend and bring questions to class on Tuesday.
• Review the assignment guidelines. (summarized below, but important details are on the guidelines page)
• Review some transcription tips.
• Pick one of the transcription projects above.
• Transcribe at least THREE pages (can be sequential pages of the same document).
• Create screen shots of your work, including images of what you’re transcribing and aspects of the interface that you comment on.
• Create a NEW PAGE in your portfolio for your ~800-word essay–this is not a blog post like reading responses–that describes and critiques your experience.
• Imagine that you’re writing for other students in the class (so you don’t need to introduce what a transcription project is, for example). We all know the general assignment, but you can’t assume anyone is familiar with your site, interface, text, or experience.

7: Decolonized the Archive and Cultural Heritage

Mon Sep 28

• Decolonizing Research
• “Revising History and Re-authouring the Left in the Postcolonial Digital Archive.” Left History 18.2 (Fall/Winter 2015): 35-46.
• Kent Norsworthy, and T-Kay Sangwand. “From Custody to Collaboration: The Post-Custodial Archival Model at the University of Texas (2013) Libraries” online

Wed Sep 30

• “Archival Diasporas: A Framework for Understanding the Complexities and Challenges of Dispersed Photographic Collections.” American Archivist 77.2 (fall/winter 2014).
• Siobhan Senier. “Decolonizing the Archive: Digitizing Native Literature with Students and Tribal Communities” Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities 1.3 (Fall 2014).

Fri Oct 2

DUE: Transcription essays

• See the transcription guidelines

8: Contested Memory and Power

Mon Oct 5

• A Strauss. “Treading the ground of contested memory: archivists and the human rights movement in Chile.” Archival Science 15(4): 369-397. 2014.
• Ivy Schweitzer, “Native Sovereignty and the Archive: Samson Occom and Digital Humanities” in Resources for American Literary Study, vol. 38, 2015: 21-52.

Wed Oct 7

• Reclaiming the Lesbian Archives
• Alexis Lothian and Amanda Phillips, Can Digital Humanities Mean Transformative Critique?
• Joel Zapata, “Taking Chicana/o Activist History to the Public: Chicana/o Activism in the Southern Plains through Time and Space,” Great Plains Quarterly 38.4 (2018): 407–24.

Fri Oct 9: FALL BREAK

9: Intersectionality: Race, Class, and Gender

Mon Oct 12

• Roopika Risam, Beyond the Margins: Intersectionality and the Digital Humanities
• Moya Z. Bailey, All the Digital Humanists are White, all the Nerds are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave

Wed Oct 14

• Americo Paredes, The Hammon and the Beans and Other Stories (Houston, TX: Arte Publico Press, 1994), 3-9.
  • How does intersectionality affect how space is conceived or structured? In other words, how is space modified by race, class, and gender? When reading Paredes think about what the landscape tells us about these positionalities. Who moves between the different spaces in the short story, who determines the spacial boundaries and their markers? What can be read in this movement? As White states in What is Spatial History? (week 9!) we “produce and reproduce space through our movements and the movements of goods…” and I would add the movement of ideologies as well.

Fri Oct 16

10:

Mon Oct 19

Wed Oct 21

Fri Oct 23

11: Historical Authorities of Knowledge + Collaboration

Mon Oct 26

• Roy Rosenzwieg, “Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past.” Journal of American History 93.1 (2006): 117-146.

Mon Oct 28

• Leslie Madsen-Brooks, I Nevertheless Am a Historian: Digital Historical Practice and Malpractice around Black Confederate Soldiers
• Robert S. Wolff, The Historian’s Craft, Popular Memory, and Wikipedia.

Fri Oct 30

12:

Mon Nov 2

Wed Nov 4

Fri Nov 6

13: Digital Public History

Mon Nov 9

• Sheila Brennan, Public, First, in Debates in the Digital Humanities (2016).
• Trevor Owens and Jesse Johnston, Archivists as Peers in Digital Public History.

Wed Nov 11

• Andrew Hurley, “Chasing the Frontiers of Digital Technology: Public History Meets the Digital Divide,” The Public Historian 38, no. 1 (2016): 69–88.
• Bruce Wyman et al., “Digital Storytelling in Museums: Observations and Best Practices,” Curator: The Museum Journal 54, no. 4 (2011): 461–68.

Fri Nov 13

14:

Mon Nov 16

Wed Nov 18

Fri Nov 20

15: Digital Activism

Mon Nov 23

• All these links are a kind of digital history. How/Why are they all completely different?
• this hankerchief from https://njahs.org/confinementsites/santa-fe-internment-camp/
• this New Mexico History website article
• this New Mexico Historical Review article – also available through our Zotero library.
• this encyclopedia article
• Read the absurd “Three Peoples Mural” description from Zimmerman Library, and scan the larger images of the four murals: 1, 2, 3, 4

Wed Nov 25

• Jesse Daniels, W.E.B. DuBois for the Twenty-First Century: On Being a Scholar-Activist in the Digital Era
• Skim through the images in W.E.B. Du Bois’s Little-Known, Arresting Modernist Data Visualizations of Black Life for the World’s Fair of 1900
• Carol M. Taylor, “W.E.B. DuBois’s Challenge to Scientific Racism,” Journal of Black Studies 11, no. 4 (1981): 449–60.

Fri Nov 27

16: Wrapping up & Loose ends

Mon Nov 30

Wed Dec 2

Fri Dec 4