The weekly schedule of discussion topics, reading assignments, and hands-on activities.
Week 1: Introduction to Digital Humanities
1.1 Introductions
- Introductions, Syllabus
ASSIGNMENT: Digital Creation: SketchUp and 3D basics
1.2 What are the Digital Humanities? Who are the Digital Humanists?
Read:
- Burdick et al. “One: From Humanities to Digital Humanities,” in Digital_Humanities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 1-26.
- Debbie Chachra, “Why I Am Not a Maker,” The Atlantic, January 23, 2015.
- Moya Z. Bailey, All the Digital Humanists Are White, All the Nerds Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave
Taking Control of the Digital:
- Tech tools and you
- Your digital identity
- Your digital data
- Under the Hood: Course website and WordPress basics
ASSIGNMENT: Blogging 101 and Defining Your Place in DH
Week 2: How it Works: DH Projects and the Code at their Heart
2.1 Digital Humanities Projects 101
Read:
- Burdick et al. “The Project as Basic Unit” (124-125) and “Project-Based Scholarship” (130-131) in Digital_Humanities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 124-125.
Watch:
- Miriam Posner, How Did They Make That
ASSIGNMENT: Analyzing DH Projects
2.2 Web Development Fundamentals
Read:
- Matt Kirschenbaum, Hello Worlds: Why Humanities Students Should Learn to Program
- Evan Donahue, A “Hello World” Apart (why humanities students should NOT learn to program)
Lab: Under the hood: HTML/CSS/JavaScript and Programming 101
- DevTools: inspecting the web
ASSIGNMENT: HTML/CSS/JavaScript 101
Week 3: Data and MetaData
3.1 Big Data and Data Storage
Read:
- Tim Hitchcock, Academic History Writing and the Headache of Big Data
- Stephen Marche, Literature is not Data: Against Digital Humanities
- Scott Selisker and Holger Syme, In Defense of Data: Responses to Stephen Marche’s “Literature is not Data”
Lab:The Database “Back-End”
- Setting up your own server, cPanel 101
- Content Management Systems
ASSIGNMENT: Data, Databases, and Your Own Server Space
3.2 Databases, Classification, and Metadata
Read:
- Christine L. Borgman, “The Digital Future Is Now: A Call to Action for the Humanities,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 003, no. 4 (March 20, 2010).
- Albert Meroño-Peñuela, “Digital Humanities on the Semantic Web: Accessing Historical and Musical Linked Data,” Journal of Catalan Intellectual History 1, no. 11 (October 1, 2017): 144–49, https://doi.org/10.1515/jocih-2016-0013.
Lab: Metadata and Classification
- Collecting Data, Where and How
- Spreadsheets/Google Sheets
- Research in the Carleton Archives
ASSIGNMENT: Gathering Data and Metadata with Omeka
Week 4: Spatial Humanities
4.1 GIS/Mapping 101
Read:
- Jo Guldi, What is the Spatial Turn? (read the introduction and at least one disciplinary section of interest)
- Anne Kelly Knowles, “GIS and History,” in Anne Kelley Knowles, ed., Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS are Changing Historical Scholarship (2008): 1–20.
Lab: DH Mapping Projects and Historical Mapping
- QGIS/ArcGIS
- Georeferencer/MapWarper
ASSIGNMENT: Omeka 201 and Spatial Humanities 101
4.2 Web Mapping 101
Read:
- Alan McConchie and Beth Schechter, Anatomy of a Webmap (use arrows to advance or go back)
Lab: WebMapping 101
- JavaScript APIs
- ArcGIS Online
Week 5: Virtual Humanities: 3D, VR, and Simulation
5.1 3D Approaches 101
Read:
- David J. Bodenhamer, Beyond GIS: Geospatial Technologies and the Future of History
- Diane Favro, “Se Non È Vero, È Ben Trovato (If Not True, It Is Well Conceived): Digital Immersive Reconstructions of Historical Environments,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 71, no. 3 (2012): 273–77.
Lab: PhotoModeling Historic Buildings
- Advanced SketchUp
5.2 Analog to Digital and Back: 3D Printing and Fabrication
Read:
Lab: 3D Printing in the Maker Space
- SketchUp
- NetFabb
- Illustrator
Week 6: Data Visualization
6.1 Data Viz and Network Analysis 101
Read:
- Scott Weingart, Demystifying Networks, Parts I & I
6.2 Text Analysis 101
Lab: Cleaning Data and Basic Data Viz principles
Week 7: Putting it all together
7.1 Midterm Exam
7.2 Creating Video and Assembling the Campus Map
Week 8: Project Work
8.1 Final Project Update and Work Session
8.2 DA&H Across Campus
Week 9: Group Work to Finalize Projects and Presentations
9.1 Group Project Work
Prepare:
- Your final project materials
- Your complete bibliography of sources
9.2 Tutorial Assignments and Jason Mittell visit
Everyone will give a brief description of the tool or technique they wrote a tutorial for, and we will each work through 3 of our peers’ tutorials in class, leaving feedback as comments.
Jason Mittell, Professor of Film & Media Culture and founding Faculty Director of the Digital Liberal Arts at Middlebury College will be our guest for today’s class. He will check out your tutorials, offer some feedback on your final projects, and discuss with us how Cinema and Media Studies play a role in the Digital Humanities.
Attend (if you’re able):
- Cinema and Media Studies as a Digital Liberal Art, LTC talk in Weitz 236 11:45pm – 1pm.
FREE LUNCH
Read:
- Jason Mittell, “Videographic Criticism as a Digital Humanities Method,” in Debates in DH 2019, ed. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein (Minneapolis, MN) 2019, https://doi.org/10.5749/9781452963785
Week 10: Project Presentations
10.1 Final Project Presentations
Prepare:
- A “Pecha Kucha” style presentation of your final project:
- 20 slides, for 20 seconds each (6:40 total), following the 1/1/5 rule: at least 1 image per slide, each used only 1 time, and less than 5 words per slide
