1: Introductions
Tuesday (Jan 15)
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.
- What is Digital Heritage Studies?
Sample Digital Cultural Heritage 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
Thursday (Jan 17)
- 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.
2: Archival Knowledge Structures
Tuesday (Jan 22)
Thursday (Jan 24)
3: Archival Power
Tuesday (Jan 29)
- 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.
TO-DO FOR TUESDAY
Thursday (Jan 31)
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
4: From Analog to Digital Archives
Tuesday (Feb 5)
- 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
TO-DO
Create an RSS Feed for your blog and put the link on our RSS Feed page.
Thursday (Feb 7)
- 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.
5: Archives and Algorithms
Tuesday (Feb 12)
Thursday (Feb 14)
- 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.
Tuesday (Feb 19)
- 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.
Thursday (Feb 21)
In class we’ll survey a few transcription projects and go over instructions for your transcription assignment
TO-DO FOR NEXT THURSDAY
- 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
Tuesday (Feb 26)
- 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
Thursday (Feb 28)
- “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).
DUE: Transcription essays
8: Contested Memory and Power
Tuesday (Mar 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.
Thursday (Mar 7)
9: SPRING BREAK
10: Spatial History, Historical GIS, and Digital Mapping
Tuesday (Mar 19)
- David J. Bodenhamer, “The Potential of Spatial Humanities”, 14-30. (note the Zotero PDF has an extra chapter at the beginning, so make sure you read chapter 2).
- IN CLASS: Introduction to GIS and Historical GIS
Thursday (Mar 21)
11: Intersectionality: Race, Class, and Gender
Tuesday (Mar 26)
Thursday (Mar 28)
- 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.
Story Map
Drawing only from the cues in the short story, draw a map of Jonesville on the Grande. As a literary cartographer, you get to decide what to include. Bring a physical copy to class because we will be using them during class.
12: Historical Authorities of Knowledge + Collaboration
Tuesday (Apr 2)
- Roy Rosenzwieg, “Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past.” Journal of American History 93.1 (2006): 117-146.
Thursday (Apr 4)
13: Digital Public History
Tuesday (Apr 9)
Thursday (Apr 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.
14: Critiquing Data Interfaces
Tuesday (Apr 16)
Thursday (Apr 18)
15: Digital Activism
Tuesday (Apr 23)
Thursday (Apr 25)
16: Wrapping up & Loose ends
Tuesday (Apr 30)
Thursday (May 2)
FINAL DEADLINE
Technically, all work is due Tuesday, May 7, by 9:30am, which is the end of our scheduled final exam. (we of course don’t have an actual exam)
