The weekly schedule of discussion topics, reading assignments, and tech tool lab sessions. Watch and Read are self explanatory, but Explore means you should skim over the entire collection of articles, projects, or whatever is listed, and then pick a few that grab your attention to read or investigate more fully. Think critically about why you were drawn to those instead of others as you formulate your responses and discussion questions.
Week 1: Introduction to Digital Humanities
1A: September 15
- Introductions, Syllabus
- SketchUp and 3D basics
1B: September 17
Read:
- Stephen Ramsay, Who’s In and Who’s Out
- Mark Sample, The Digital Humanities is not about Building, it’s about Sharing
- Moya Z. Bailey, All the Digital Humanists Are White, All the Nerds Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave
Explore:
- The New York Times’ series, Humanities 2.0
- Virtual Paul’s Cross Project
Lab: Essential Course Tools Overview, How to Blog
- Course website and WordPress basics
- Shared bibliography using Zotero
- Dirt Digital Research Tools
Week 2: How it Works: DH Projects and the Code at their Heart
2A: September 22
Watch:
- Miriam Posner, How Did They Make That?
Read:
- Johanna Drucker, Analysis of DH Projects
Lab: Under the hood: HTML/CSS 101
- DevTools: inspecting the web
- Codecademy tutorials
2B: September 24
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)
Explore:
Lab: Under the hood: JavaScript and Programming 101
Week 3: Big Data, Metadata, and the Database
3A: September 29
Special Guest Evan Roberts, University of Minnesota
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”
Explore:
Lab: Metadata and Classification
- Collecting Data, Where and How
- Spreadsheets/Google Sheets
3B: October 1
Read:
- Stephen Ramsay, “Databases,” A Companion to Digital Humanities
- Patrick Murray-John, “Hacking on Cooper-Hewitt’s data release at THATCamp, Or, How to get me to work for free“
Explore:
Lab:The Database “Back-End”
- Setting up your own server, cPanel 101
- Content Management Systems
- Server-side programming 101
Week 4: Spatial Humanities
4A: October 6
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.
Explore:
- Spatial Humanities Projects & Groups
- Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilization
- ESRI StoryMaps
Lab: GIS / Mapping Basics
- Google Fusion Tables
- ArcGIS Online
4B: October 8
Read:
- Alan McConchie and Beth Schechter, Anatomy of a Webmap (use arrows to advance or go back)
Lab: WebMapping 101
- Google Maps API
- Leaflet
- CartoDB
Week 5: 3D Modeling and Simulation
5A: October 13
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.
Explore:
Lab: PhotoModeling Historic Buildings
- Advanced SketchUp
5B: October 15
Read:
Watch:
- James Coltrain – Connecting Digital Humanities Data with the Scholarly 3D Toolkit
Lab: 3D Visualization and Procedural Modeling
- Google Earth
- CityEngine
Week 6: Getting More out of Texts
6A: October 20
Read:
Explore:
6B: October 22
Lab: Structured Markup and Text Analysis
Week 7: Seeing Data in New Ways
7A: October 27
Read:
- Edward Tufte, Envisioning Information
- John Theibault, Visualizations and Historical Arguments
Explore:
7B: October 29
Lab: The Visual Display of Quantitative (and Qualitative!) Information
Week 8: Networks of Text and Space
8A: November 3
Read:
- Scott Weingart, Demystifying Networks, Parts I & II
Explore:
Lab: Network Analysis 101
- Google Fusion Tables
- NodeXL
- Gephi Quick Start Tutorial
8B: November 5
Group Work and Project Check in
Week 9: Group Work to Finalize Projects and Presentations
9A: November 10
Prepare:
- Your final project materials
- Your complete Zotero bibliography of sources
9B: November 12
Packaging and Prettifying a Project
Finalize projects and comment on the “Project Gallery”
Week 10: Project Presentations
10A: November 17
NO BLOG POST THIS WEEK
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
10B: November 19
Presentations and Publication!
- Now put those skills to use and join a project on the DH Commons!
