Digital Humanities
ILS Z657 Spring 2014
Office: Wells Library 005B
Office Hours: Tuesdays 2–4pm and by appointment.
Phone: 856–0707
Web: http://johnwalsh.name
Blog: http://www.biblicon.org/
Twitter: @jawalsh
Course Description
This course will introduce students to the range of research and other scholarly activities that are frequently categorized as digital humanities. Through readings and explorations of texts and tools and projects, we will learn about many of the issues and debates in the field.
Course Objectives
- Students will be able to speak and write articulately and knowledgeably about the field of digital humanities
- Students will have an awareness of the range of digital humanities scholarship, and be able to cite individual scholars and projects as examples of different types of digital humanities work
- Students will have become familiar and perhaps expert with a number of common digital humanities tools, including Omeka, XML and TEI, TEI Boilerplate, Voyant, Neatline, timeline tools, etc.
- Students will make productive contributions to a collaboratively developed digital humanities resource.
Assignments
Course Blog 20%
A great deal of digital humanities scholarship occurs in social media such as Twitter and on blogs, which have the social activity of commenting and response that engages authors and readers.
The blog post is a new genre of scholarly writing. Many of the essays in Matthew Gold’s Debates in Digital Humanities began as blog posts. Articles in the [Journal of Digital Humanities] are often selected from “open and public discussions in the field.” Many of these “open and public discussion” occur in blogs.
Digital humanities scholar Ryan Cordell lists on his syllabus the following reasons for blogging:
- All writing—even academic writing—is being reshaped by online modes of publication. Many academics maintain personal research blogs in which they try out their ideas and get feedback before developing articles or even books. For many scholars working in DH, blogs are places to share work that doesn’t fit neatly into articles or monographs with the community, to get immediate feedback on their methodologies, and to improve their projects. Dan Cohen, Director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, has claimed that reading junior scholars’ blogs is how he identifies promising collaborators and job candidates. I strongly believe that graduate students should begin thinking about the affordances (and potential pitfalls) of creating and maintaining an online scholarly presence.
- In a related point, blogs give you the opportunity to experiment with your writing, composing arguments that integrate links, quotations, images, video, and other online media as evidence.
- Blogging allows for a broader spectrum of participation in the class. Even shy students can contribute to a course blog.
- Blog posts give you the chance to learn from each other. You’ll read your colleague’s writing and, hopefully, learn from it or be challenged by it.
- Public blogging allows us to connect to larger communities outside of our classroom. Who knows? Perhaps the author of an article you blog about will respond directly…
During the course of the semester you must write 10 blog posts of 250–500 words and engage with the post of others by commenting. You may write as many blog posts and comments as you wish each week, but you may only receive credit for 1 blog post per week. This means you cannot wait until the end of the semester and cram all 10 posts and 20 comments into one or two weeks. Your blog writing must be spread out over the course of the semester.
Your blog posts should reflect on our readings and other activities for the week (labs, project work, social media engagement, etc.). For instance, when we are studying text encoding and the TEI, you might blog about:
- readings
- related XML vocabularies
- alternatives to XML for text markup
- TEI-related digital projects
- a section of the TEI Guidelines that were not covered in class
- A special-purpose TEI customization, e.g., EpiDoc
DH scholar Mark Sample has described one of his blog assignments as follows:
There are a number of ways to approach these open-ended posts: consider the reading in relation to its historical or theoretical context; write about an aspect of the day’s reading that you don’t understand, or something that jars you; formulate an insightful question or two about the reading and then attempt to answer your own questions; or respond to another student’s post, building upon it, disagreeing with it, or re-thinking it.
It is especially useful when writers can connect current course topics and discussions with your own research, intellectual interests, and/or career goals.
Blog posts are due by 9pm each Wednesday evening, so that we may refers to them in class on Thursday.
Each week you submit a blog post for credit, you will receive up to 20 points–up to 15 for the blog post itself and up to 5 for substantive engagement with other posts.
Digital Project 50%
As part of this course you will develop a digital humanities project. Throughout the semester we will see many examples of the different types of projects done in digital humanities. Some possibilities include:
- A digital edition of a shorter text or collection of short texts.
- An visualization of humanities texts or data.
- A computational analysis of humanities texts or data.
- A software tool.
- An interpretive and analytical temporal and/or spatial exhibit.
- A well-documented data model for a particular type of humanities object, e.g., a new markup language or TEI extension for modeling and representing a class of documents that cannot easily be expressed with existing markup languages.
- An online thematic research collection, which might combine many of the above elements.
- A study that uses topic modeling to interrogate a corpus of documents.
The project will be a collaborative group project, with students working in groups of three or four. The project will be presented on the web and will include an introduction (1000–1500 words) that provides an overview of the project, the motivations behind the project, and a discussion of the development process.
To keep the project moving along, your group must schedule an initial meeting with me by February 7th, after which we will schedule subsequent meetings, one to twice a month throughout the remainder of the semester.
Presentation 20%
Each student will be responsible for presenting (or co-presenting) on one of the weekly class topics. The presentation should include references to our readings and student blogs, as well as other related content discovered on Twitter, DHNow, or elsewhere. Your presentation should synthesize the material and provide questions that support further discussion with the class. Presentations should be about 20 minutes in length.
Lab Assignments 10%
Occasionally you will be asked to provide samples of your lab work.
Texts
- DDH Gold, M. K. (Ed.). (2013). Debates in Digital Humanities. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Retrieved from http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu
- LSDA Price, K., & Siemens, R. (Eds.) (2013). Literary Studies in the Digital Age: An Evolving Anthology. New York: Modern Language Association. Retrieved from http://dlsanthology.commons.mla.org
- CDLS Schreibman, S., & Siemens, R. (Eds.) (2008). A Companion to Digital Literary Studies. Oxford: Blackwell. Retrieved from http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/DLS/
- CDH Schreibman, S., Siemens, R., & Unsworth, J. (Eds.) (2004). A Companion to Digital Humanities. Oxford: Blackwell. Retrieved from http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/
January 16: What is DH? The range(s) of DH scholarship.
January 23: More perspectives on DH
Lab: Wordpress
January 30: Text Encoding
Lab: Oxygen XML Editor
Oxygen is available on IUWare under the category “Development Tools.”
February 6: TEI
Lab: TEI
February 13: Text Analysis
- Jockers, Matthew. “On Distant Reading and Macroanalysis.”
- Jockers, Matthew. “The LDA Buffet is Now Open; or, Latent Dirichlet Allocation for English Majors.”
- Lohr, Steve. “Dickens, Austen and Twain, Through a Digital Lens.” New York Times 26 Jan. 2013.
- Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. The Remaking of Reading: Data Mining and the Digital Humanities.
- Sinclar, Stéfan. Introduction: Correcting Method.
- Sinclair, Stéfan. Now Analyze That: Comparing the discourse on race.
- Church, Kenneth Ward. “Unix for Poets.”
Ward’s “Unix for Poets” is a fun tutorial with exercises that teach one how to do some interesting text processing with simple Unix tools. You don’t need to “read” this for class, but I encourage you to test it out and try some of the exercises with your own data.
February 20: DH and Libraries
Guest-speaker: Michelle Dalmau, Interim Head of Digital Collection Services, IU Libraries)
- Posner, Miriam. (2013). “No Half Measures: Overcoming Common Challenges to Doing Digital Humanities in the Libraries.” Journal of Library Administration. Retrieved from http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01930826.2013.756694
- Vinopal, J. & McCormick, M. (2013). “Supporting Digital Scholarship in Research Libraries: Scalability and Sustainability.” Journal of Library Administration. Retrieved from http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01930826.2013.756689
- Nowviskie, B. “A Skunk in the Library.”
- Vandegrift, M. “What id Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in the Library?”
- Muñoz, T. “Digital humanities in the library isn’t a service.”
Lab: Timeline software
February 27: Topic Modeling
- Underwood, Ted. Topic modeling made just simple enough.
- Graham, Shawn, Scott Weingart, and Ian Milligan. Getting Started with Topic Modeling and MALLET.
- Mimno, David. “The details: how we train big topic models on lots of text.”
- Schmidt, Ben. “When you have a MALLET, everything looks like a nail.”
- Nelson, Robert K. “Mining the Dispatch: Introduction.”
- Nelson, Robert K. “Mining the Dispatch: Topics.”
- Blevins, Cameron. “Topic Modeling Martha Ballard’s Diary.”
March 6: Spatial Humanities
- Bodenhamer, D. J. (2010). The Potential of Spatial Humanities. In D. J. Bodenhamer, J. Corrigan, & T. M. Harris (Eds.), The Spatial Humanities: GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship (pp. 14–25). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
- Cooper, D., & Gregory, I. N. (2011). Mapping the English Lake District: a literary GIS. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 36(1), 89–108. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1475–5661.2010.00405.x
- Rumsay, David. Reading Historical Maps Digitally: How Spatial Technologies Can Enable Close, Distant and Dynamic Interpretations
- Rumsay, David. David Rumsay Map Collection.
- Sui, D. Z. (2004). GIS, cartography and the “third culture”: Geographic imaginations in the computer age. The Professional Geographer 56(1), 62–72.
Lab: Neatline
March 13 Digital Medievalism
Guest Speaker: Grant Simpson, Ph.D. student in English and Information Science.
March 20 Spring Break
March 27: Materialities
- Kirschenbaum, Matthew. “Introduction: An Awareness of the Mechanism.” Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. 1–23.
- Kirschenbaum, Matthew. “‘Every Contact Leaves a Trace’: Storage, Inscription, and Computer Forensics.” Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. 25–71.
- Galey, Alan. “The Human Presence in Digital Artefacts.” Text and Genre Reconstruction: Effects of Digitization on Ideas, Behaviours, Products, and Institutions. Ed. Willard McCarty. Cambridge: OpenBook, 2010. 93–117.
Lab: TEI Boilerplate
April 3: Final Project Updates / Final Project Lab
April 10: Student Presentations / Final Project Lab
April 17: Student Presentations / Final Project Lab
April 24: Student Presentations / Final Project Lab
May 1: Final Project Presentations
Acknowledgements
This syllabus was inspired by a number of digital humanities syllabi, including my own previous versions and the excellent syllabi by Mellissa Bailar and Lisa Spiro, Tanya Clement, Ryan Cordell, and Matt Kirschenbaum.