Proposed Schedule
This schedule should be considered a living document that is subject to change. We will iterate on this plan together as a class cohort, as this seminar should serve the needs of those participating. Canvas links are open only to those enrolled in the course.
Week 1 — January 19
What are the Digital Humanities?
We will work through definitions, examples, and the state of the field. We will discuss existing overlaps and tensions across Digital Humanities, Public Humanities, Digital Pedagogy, and Open Science / open research.
Lab: Discord and setting up accounts
Readings for next week:
- Risam, Roopika. “Double and Triple Binds: The Barriers to Computational Ethnic Studies.” Computational Humanities, edited by Jessica M. Johnson, David Mimno, and Lauren Tilton, University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming.
- Tagliaferri, Lisa. “Humanistic and Technological Endeavors: Re-centering Innovation within the Humanities.” Computational Humanities, edited by Jessica M. Johnson, David Mimno, and Lauren Tilton, University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming.
- Schroeder, Robyn. “The Rise of the Public Humanists.” Doing Public Humanities, edited by Susan Smulyan, Routeledge, 2020.
- McGrath, Jim. “Podcasts and public history.” History@Work, 2019.
- Corbett, Hillary. (2017). “Out of the archives and into the world: ETDs and the consequences of openness.” In Kevin L. Smith & Katherine A. Dickson (Eds.), Open access and the future of scholarly communication: Implementation (pp. 187-202). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Week 2 — January 26
The public humanities and open source
What does it mean to be a public scholar and what does it mean to do open research?
Lab: Introduction to Markdown, Static Sites and Git
Readings for next week:
- Barats, Christine; Schafer, Valérie, Fickers; Andreas. “Fading Away... The challenge of sustainability in digital studies.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 14:3, 2020.
- Boyles, Christina; Cong-Huyen, Anne, et al. “Precarious Labor and the Digital Humanities.” American Quarterly, Volume 70, Number 3, September 2018, pp. 693-700.
- Liu, Jia. “Digital Object Identifier (DOI) Under the Context of Research Data Librarianship.” Journal of eScience Librarianship 10:2, 2021.
- Lepore, Jill. “Can the Internet be archived?” The New Yorker. January 26, 2015.
Week 3 — February 2
Digital impermanence: the web, repositories, stability, and authority
The Internet Archive, the rise of code, the sustainability of digital humanities, and how to do research when so much of digital knowledge production is ephemeral.
Lab: Web development continued, an introduction to the Humanities Commons, setting up public scholarly profiles
Readings for next week:
- Zweibel, Stephen; Smyth, Patrick. “DH Box and Access in the Digital Humanities.” dh+lib, 2017.
- Gil, Alex; Ortega, Élika. “Global outlooks in digital humanities: Multilingual practices and minimal computing.” Doing Digital Humanities: Practice, Training, Research, edited by Constance Crompton, Richard J. Lane, Ray Siemens, Routledge, 2016.
- Lingel, Jessa. “The Big Problems of Big Tech.” The Gentrification of the Internet: How to Reclaim Our Digital Freedom, University of California Press, 2021.
- Dunbar-Hester, Christina. “Putting Lipstick on a GNU? Representations and Its Discontents.” Hacking Diversity: The Politics of Inclusion in Open Technology Cultures, Princeton University Press, 2020.
Week 4 — February 9
Computational humanities
Should humanists learn to code? What does humanistic software look like?
Lab: Introduction to the Linux terminal
Readings for next week:
- Hall, Crystal. “Digital Humanities and Italian Studies: Intersections and Oppositions.” Italian Culture, 37:2, 97-115, 2019.
- Alpert-Abrams, Hannah. “Machine Reading the Primeros Libros.” Digital Humanities Quarterly, Volume 10 Number 4, 2016.
- Bergenmar, Jenny; Leppänen, Katarina. “Gender and Vernaculars in Digital Humanities and World Literature.” NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, 25:4, 232-246, 2017.
- Toner, Gregory; Han, Xiwu. “Dating Texts: Principles and Methods.” Language and Chronology: Text Dating by Machine Learning, Brill, 2019.
Week 5 — February 16
The complexity of humanities data
The challenges of working with historical data, non-digital data, messy data. The challenges of multilingualism and non-textual data in an anglo- and literacy-centric field.
Lab: Linux automation and searching
Readings for next week:
- W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America (selections). Princeton Architectural Press, 2018.
- Marchese, Francis T. “Medieval Information Visualization.” IEEE VIS 2013, Atlanta, GA.
Week 6 — February 23
Data analysis and visualization
The history of data visualization. How to visualize data in the humanities.
Lab: Jupyter Notebooks, introductory data analysis with Python
Readings for next week:
- Ahnert, Ahnert, Coleman, Weingart. The Network Turn: Changing Perspectives in the Humanities (selections). Cambridge University Press, 2020.
- Grandjean, Martin. “A social network analysis of Twitter: Mapping the digital humanities community.” Cogent Arts & Humanities (2016), 3: 1171458.
- Lee, Crystal, et al. “Viral Visualizations: How Coronavirus Skeptics Use Orthodox Data Practices to Promote Unorthodox Science Online (PDF), CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’21), May 8–13, 2021, Yokohama, Japan. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2021.
Week 7 — March 2
Cultural and social networks
Visualizing and understanding historical networks, current social networks, and academic conferences.
Lab: Setting up a Python programming environment, intro to networking tools
Readings for next week:
- Buzzoni, Marina. “A Protocol for Scholarly Digital Editions? The Italian Point of View.” Digital Scholarly Editing: Theories and Practices, edited by Matthew James Driscoll and Elena Pierazzo, Open Book Publishers, 2016.
- Huet, Hélène; Alteri, Suzan; Taylor, Laurie N. “Radical Collaboration to Improve Library Collections.” The Digital Black Atlantic, edited by Roopika Risam and Kelly Baker Josephs, University of Minnesota Press, 2021.
- Coker, Cait; Ozment, Kate. “Building the Women in Book History Bibliography, or Digital Enumerative Bibliography as Preservation of Feminist Labor.” Digital Humanities Quarterly, Volume 13 Number 3, 2019.
- McCormick, Stephen P. “A Contextual Analysis of Two Franco-Italian Manuscripts of the Huon d’Auvergne Romance Epic,” Digital Philology 5.2 (2016): 208-227.
- Connel, Flanders, et al. “Learning from the Past: The Women Writers Project and Thirty Years of Humanities Text Encoding.” Magnificat Cultura i Literatura Medievals 4, 2017, 1-19.
Week 8 — March 9
Digital book history, digital archives, digital editions
What is the place of book history, archives, and editions in Digital Humanities? How do digital avenues to materials both enable and resist access?
Lab: Working with text files in Python and Python I/O
Readings for Week 10:
- Glass, Erin. “Toward a Software of the Oppressed: A Freirean Approach to Surveillance Capitalism.” Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed, edited by James D. Kirylo, Bloomsbury, 2020.
- Savonick, Danica. “Write Out Loud: Risk & Reward in Digital Publishing.” Hybrid Pedagogy, November 8, 2017.
- Opeibi, Tunde. “Digitizing the Humanities in an Emerging Space: An Exploratory Study of Digital Humanities Initiatives in Nigeria.” The Digital Black Atlantic, edited by Roopika Risam and Kelly Baker Josephs, University of Minnesota Press, 2021.
Week 9 — March 16
No class — Spring recess
Week 10 — March 23
Digital pedagogy
What Digital Humanities are relevant to the undergraduate classroom? How can we use digital tools to support humanistic education? How can the Public Humanities drive engagement in the classroom?
Lab: Design a class activity that features a Digital Humanities tool
Readings for next week:
- Svensson, Patrik. “Humanities Infrastructure.” Big Digital Humanities. University of Michigan Press, 2016.
- Roh, David S. “The DH Bubble: Startup Logic, Sustainability, and Performativity.” Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, University of Minnesota Press, 2019.
Week 11 — March 30
Digital humanities project management
Creating projects at disciplinary crossroads. Can humanistic software development be informed by existing software development processes? Why do we call them Digital Humanities Labs?
Lab: Scrum and software lifecycles
Readings for next week:
- Kuhn, Virginia; Finger, Anke (eds). Shaping the Digital Dissertation: Knowledge Production in the Arts and Humanities (selections). Open Book Publishers, 2021.
- Shirazi, Roxanne. (2018). “The doctoral dissertation and scholarly communication.” College & Research Libraries 79 (1).
- Westerling, Kalle. Dissertation Data. 2022.
Week 12 — April 6
Humanistic research and digital tools
We will each share Digital Humanities projects that resonate, and analyze how the digital tools serve the humanistic research. In particular, we will look at the digital turn in dissertations.
Lab: Scrum and software lifecycles
Readings for next week:
- Rogers, Katina L. “Expanding Definitions of Scholarly Success.” Putting the Humanities PhD to Work, Duke University Press, 2020.
- Alpert-Abrams, Hannah. Job Market Support Network.
- Moretti, Franco. “Conjectures on World Literature.” Distant Reading, Verso, 2013.
- Davidson, Cathy. “Humanities 2.0: Promise, Perils, Predictions.” Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold, University of Minnesota Press, 2012.
Week 13 — April 13
Digital humanities futures
What does a Digital Humanities career look like? What are the possible futures for individual Digital Humanities practitioners and for the field?