Table of Contents
Week 1: What is DH?
This week, we will be trying to develop and understand what exactly it is people mean when discussing topics related to “digital humanities.” While there still is not a general consensus on a singular definition of DH, we can begin to survey the types of work happening in the field to get a sense of how we will be using the term in this course.
Readings:
Chapter 1 of Digital_Humanities by Anne Burdick et. al.
“The Humanities, Done Digitally” by Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Tools:
The following links are all for websites listing a variety of digital humanities tools. Start clicking around these websites to get an idea of what kind of DH tools are out there and what they might be used for.
Digital Humanities Resources for Project Building
Folgerpedia Glossary of DH Terms
Week 2: Examples of DH Projects
There are many DH projects out there, and the ones listed here can only begin to scratch the surface. However, I have tried to select examples that are well known and well established to give you an idea what a long-term DH project can look. I recognize that the work in this class will not reach these levels, so I wanted to provide you with an opportunity to explore just how robust DH scholarship can be.
Example Projects:
The Fallen of World War II: “The Fallen of World War II is an interactive documentary that examines the human cost of the second World War and the decline in battle deaths in the years since the war. The 15-minute data visualization uses cinematic storytelling techniques to provide viewers with a fresh and dramatic perspective of a pivotal moment in history.”
Mapping the Republic of Letters: “Before email, faculty meetings, international colloquia, and professional associations, the world of scholarship relied on its own networks: networks of correspondence that stretched across countries and continents; the social networks created by scientific academies; and the physical networks brought about by travel. But what did these networks actually look like? Were they as extensive as we are led to believe? How did they evolve over time? Mapping the Republic of Letters, in collaboration with international partners, seeks to answer these and other questions through the development of sophisticated, interactive visualization tools. It also aims to create a repository for metadata on early-modern scholarship, and guidelines for future data capture.”
Music Encoding Initiative: “The Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) is a community-driven effort to define a system for encoding musical documents in a machine-readable structure. MEI brings together specialists from various music research communities, including technologists, librarians, historians, and theorists in a common effort to define best practices for representing a broad range of musical documents and structures. The results of these discussions are formalized in the MEI schema, a core set of rules for recording physical and intellectual characteristics of music notation documents expressed as an eXtensible Markup Language (XML) schema. It is complemented by the MEI Guidelines, which provide detailed explanations of the components of the MEI model and best practices suggestions.”
The Valley of the Shadow: “The Valley Project details life in two American communities, one Northern and one Southern, from the time of John Brown’s Raid through the era of Reconstruction. In this digital archive you may explore thousands of original letters and diaries, newspapers and speeches, census and church records, left by men and women in Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennsylvania. Giving voice to hundreds of individual people, the Valley Project tells forgotten stories of life during the era of the Civil War.”
Slave Voyages: “The Trans-Atlantic and Intra-American slave trade databases are the culmination of several decades of independent and collaborative research by scholars drawing upon data in libraries and archives around the Atlantic world. The new Voyages website itself is the product of three years of development by a multi-disciplinary team of historians, librarians, curriculum specialists, cartographers, computer programmers, and web designers, in consultation with scholars of the slave trade from universities in Europe, Africa, South America, and North America.”
Activity:
Find a DH project in your field that is not on this list and share it with your discussion group. Describe why it is significant in your field and why this project needed to be digital in nature.
Week 3: Coding/Web Development
There is a lot of debate in DH about whether humanities scholars need to learn how to code or just work collaboratively with computer scientists or others who are proficient in web development. Regardless, you should at least have a basic knowledge of the coding that goes into building DH projects, and the following includes a brief overview as well as websites that provide basic instruction for a variety of different types of coding.
Readings:
“An Introduction to Coding for Digital Humanities,” Scott Kleinman
Tools:
W3Schools: this site provides tutorials on several different coding systems and always users to work through at their own pace
Code Academy: this platform provides courses on coding and web development for a variety of ages, and you can tailor which tutorials you take to what you are attempting to do
Activity:
Complete one unit of a course on a coding language you have not learned previously. Write a short review of that course–describe what worked well, and what you thought could use more explanation. Share your review with your discussion group, and discuss your opinion on whether you feel you would need to learn coding for your work as a digital humanist.
Week 4: Intro to Data Mining & Visualization
Data mining involves using tools to extract certain sets of information from a body of work–whether it is a novel or Twitter. If you are collecting data as part of your research, you will need to experiment with ways to represent that information. By using data visualization tools and software, you can organize your data in ways to be more visually dynamic and make trends clearer to your audience.
Readings:
Intro to Digital Humanities by Johanna Drucker, Chapter 1 sections 4B-5B
Tools:
Voyant: an open-source text analysis software
Tableau: a software that has both a paid and free version that allows users to create interactive data visualizations
Activity:
Pick a work of literature you’re a fan of (that is available for free online) and run it through Voyant. Identify the most frequently used words and note any significant connections between words. Additionally, pick one word and describe how its usage changes throughout the work and explain why you think that is.
Week 5: Networking
Networking projects develop visualizations that highlight the connections between different points–oftentimes between people or characters. The point of the network is to show the relationship between these data points and indicate the degree of that association.
Readings:
“Literary Lab: Network Theory, Plot Analysis,” Franco Moretti
“The Star Wars social network,” Evelina Gabasova
Tools:
Gephi: an open-source visualization and exploration software for graphs and networks
Cytoscape: an open source software platform for visualizing complex networks
Activity:
Developing a networking project can be very intensive, so I do not expect you to create one from scratch. However, use one of the above tools and experiment with the datasets available in their tutorials. Write a brief reflection to share with your discussion group in which you share what you found after experimenting with this datasets and what, if you had time, you might choose to create a network visualization for.
Week 6: Ethics of DH
Readings:
On Not Looking: Ethics and Access in the Digital Humanities, by Kimberly Christen-Withey (recorded lecture)
Building an ethical digital humanities community: Librarian, faculty, and student, by Roopika Risam (you’ll need to log on via your library account)
“This is Why We Fight”: Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities, by Lisa Spiro
Activity:
Please bring two discussion questions on the topic of ethical practices in DH to class. We will be breaking up into smaller, in-person discussion groups (these groups will be different than your online discussion group!) to talk through our ideas surrounding best practices for developing ethical Digital Humanities projects. As a class, we will develop our own code of conduct to abide by as we begin working on our own DH research.
Week 7: Project Proposal
There are no assigned readings or tools this week as you will be working on developing your project proposal. This should include a paragraph description of your selected topic, what tool you will use and why, and an annotated bibliography containing a minimum of ten sources covering the various projects and key DH articles in your field.
If you are interested in one of the upcoming units, this is a good opportunity to go ahead and take a look at that week’s materials. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the project proposal, please do not hesitate to contact me to set up a meeting.
Week 8: Editing
Editing can mean a lot of things for DH scholars. It can refer to merely editing code, developing online digital editions, or even encoding texts to make them searchable and interactive on the web. As we only have one week to cover this topic, we are going to explore editing from the perspective of textual editing. While the readings are more comprehensive, the tools below are ones that might aid editors in collating variant texts.
Readings:
Intro to Digital Humanities by Johanna Drucker, Chapter 6A. Text Encoding: Mark-up and TEI
“Unimagined Worlds of Digital Humanities and Textual Editing,” by Fred Gibbs
Tools:
DiffChecker: a diff tool to compare text differences between two text files.
Juxta: “an open-source tool for comparing and collating multiple witnesses to a single textual work. Originally designed to aid scholars and editors examine the history of a text from manuscript to print versions, Juxta offers a number of possibilities for humanities computing and textual scholarship.”
Week 9: Archiving
“From Archive Data to DH Practice: Starting a new Digital Humanities Project,” by Alok Amatya
Tools:
Omeka Classic: a web publishing platform for sharing digital collections and exhibits
Omeka S: a version of Omeka aimed at institutions working with digital cultural heritage collections
Activity:
Find a digital archive covering a topic in your field. After exploring the website, write up a brief review evaluating the standards or methodology the archive follows and whether or not you believe it is a sustainable project.
Week 10: Mapping
Mapping is a critical component of DH scholarship, and it often intersects with other fields such as the sciences and social sciences. In this unit, we’ll be exploring the various ways maps have made their way into humanities scholarship and how they have moved from a key physical tool to a digital one. We will also begin to think of the ways in which we can use mapping in humanities contexts; for example, by developing new ways to build narratives and tell stories.
Readings:
“What is the Spatial Turn?” Scholars Lab, University of Virginia
“GIS Analysis and Critical Issues” from Intro to Digital Humanities by Johanna Drucker
Tools:
There are many paid softwares for mapping, and this can become very complex depending on what you’d like to create. However, here are some free, simple tools to explore:
Google myMaps: Google provides it’s regular map feature as a basis for building your own. You can customize your map by through adding various layers and points on the map. Additionally, you can import GIS data into the map to create borders.
StoryMapJS: StoryMapsJS provides users with a way to build a narrative through mapping. In addition to marking your place on the map, you can also upload interactive media such as photos and videos to provide another dimension to your map.
Activity:
Pick one of the mapping tools list above and build your own. You can be creative in what you do with the map–it can be a map of some of your favorite places, key settings in you favorite movie or book, or even a map of the various buildings you use on campus. Practice changing label colors, uploading multimedia, and experimenting with the bounds of your space. Share and discuss your map in the group chat, and we will workshop your maps in class.
Week 11: Digital Storytelling Part I-Audio Production
Readings:
“Digital Storytelling: New opportunities for humanities scholarship and pedagogy,” by John F. Barber
Tools for Podcasting by Jill Olmsted, Chapter 8: Audacity, GarageBand, Audition Editing
Tools:
Audacity: free, open-source, cross-platform audio software
Soundtrap: another open-source software (you can pay for more features), marketed specifically to musicians and storytellers
Activity:
Create a short, one minute podcast on the topic of your choosing. Experiment with different methods of sound editing and the incorporation of sound effects and music.
Week 12: Digital Storytelling Part 2-Video Production
Readings:
StoryCenter.com, not technically a reading, but clicking through their digital stories and processes will help you better understand the process and product!
Tools:
KineMaster: a free video editing app that you can download to your phone; useful for making YouTube content
OpenShot: an open source video editing software that is very user-friendly
ShotCut: another open source video editing software , but slightly more complicated than OpenShot
Activity:
Create a short, 30 second video clip. Try to incorporate sound, still images, and video footage. Explore the different special effects you can add to the video in whatever software you are choosing, and try to layer all of these elements together.
Week 13, 14, & 15: Project Presentations
More details on project requirements will be posted here once people have met with me regarding their project proposals. You will be signing up for a ten-minute presentation slot in class. Your presentation does not need to be done at this point, but you need to have a clear start and be able to walk your classmates through whatever you have so far. You are expected to be a good audience member for your classmates–be prepared to ask questions a provide constructive feedback. Projects will be due finals week.
