Our class starts at the “bottom” of a digital humanities project, by investigating where historical sources come from and how they get into the cultural record. We then talk about how they become data, and then what you can do with data (like visualize and map it). We end with the “top” layer of a DH project, which is its interface. But we also stop a lot along the way for guest speakers and other fun stuff!
Readings are either hyperlinked below or can be found in our class’s CCLE site, filed under the appropriate week. Lecture podcasts will be posted here as they become available, but please note that they’re not an adequate substitute for what we do in class.
| Date | Topic | Reading 1 | Reading 2 | Framing Questions |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monday, October 2 | Introduction. Special Guest: Connor Thompson (UCLA '18) | What's this class about? How much work is required? Who should take this class? | ||
| Wednesday, October 4 | The Humanities & the Digital Humanities | Burdick et al. "One: From Humanities to Digital Humanities." In Digital_Humanities. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.. | Robots Reading Vogue, The Garden of Earthly Delights, Six Degrees of Francis Bacon, The Green Book Map | What are "the humanities"? What are the digital humanities? What's a DH project? |
| Friday, October 6 | Project Critiques | To do in lab: technical self-assessment. | How does one interpret, understand, and critique a DH project? | |
| Monday, October 9. Blog post 1 due. | "Data" and the Question of History | Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, 2015, chapter one. | Images from Cartographies of Time | What constitutes a fact? From all the infinite events in human history, how do we select those worth recording? How does power factor in? |
| Wednesday, October 11 | Power and the Archive. Prof. Michelle Caswell, Guest Lecturer. | Caswell, Michelle. "Seeing Yourself in History: Community Archives and the Fight Against Symbolic Annihilation." The Public Historian 36, no. 4 (November 1, 2014): 26-37. | The South Asian American Digital Archive | When we're assembling an archive (or dataset), how do we decide what to include? Can an archivist be neutral? Should she be? |
| Friday, October 13 | Project Management, Forming Groups | To do in lab: Receive group assignments. Submit top choices for research topics. | ||
| Monday, October 16. Blog post 2 due. | The Humanities Research Question. | Information Literacy Lynda video, chapters two, three, and four. I can't link directly to the video; instead, click on Lynda at this link, log in, and then search for "Information Literacy." | How do you develop a good humanities research question? What's the difference between a humanities research question and a research question from another discipline? Where do I start? | |
| Wednesday, October 18 | Categorization: How the World Becomes Data. Guest Lecturer: Jenny Benevento, Taxonomist at etsy | National Information Standards Organization, "What is Metadata?" (Bethesda, MD: NISO Press, 2004). Focus on pages 1 through 18. | Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group (OK to skim) | What is "metadata"? How do you organize objects so that you can easily find them (and use them for computation)? What standards have people developed for doing this? |
| Friday, October 20 | Getting to know your data | To do in lab: Receive topic assignments and datasets. | ||
| Monday, October 23. Blog post 3 due. | Complicating Categorization | Duarte, Marisa Elena, and Miranda Belarde-Lewis. "Imagining: Creating Spaces for Indigenous Ontologies." Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 53, no. 5-6 (July 4, 2015): 677-702. | Gabriel Aceves Seplveda, [Re]Activating Mama Pina's Notebook and also see author's statement. | How do we organize and categorize objects that come from other knowledge systems? What kind of power do we wield when we name and categorize things? |
| Wednesday, October 25 | Intro to Data Visualization | Yau, Nathan. Data Points: Visualization That Means Something. Indianapolis, IN: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2013, chapter three. | Look through Data + Design: A Simple Introduction to Preparing and Visualizing Information. | Why do people visualize data? What are some ways you can make your visualizations legible and accurate? |
| Friday, October 27 | Data Visualization Tools and Techniques | Due by 11:55 pm: Five preliminary research questions + project charter. | ||
| Monday, October 30. | Complicating Data Visualization | Johanna Drucker, "Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display," Digital Humanities Quarterly 5, no. 1 (2011). | Poemage, US Gun Deaths, Hearing Eugenics. | What are some problems, for the humanist, of data visualization? What experimental data visualization methods are emerging? |
| Monday, October 30, 5-7: 🍕Research-a-thon!🍕 Meet in the Scholarly Innovation Lab at YRL. | ||||
| Wednesday, November 1. NOTE: For this class, we'll meet in the Young Research Library Main Conference Room. Blog post 4 due. | Intro to Web Design with HTML and CSS | Sue Jenkins, Design Aesthetics for Web Design (Lynda video), chapters one through three. Note: I can't link directly to the video. You'll have to search for it at the Lynda site. | How does a webpage get on the web? What's HTML and how do you write it? | |
| Friday, November 3 | Content-Management Systems | Due by 11:55 pm: Data critique. | What are ways, beyond writing a website by hand, that you can publish your work to the web? | |
| Monday, November 6. Blog post 5 due. | Guest Lecturer: Prof. Lauren McCarthy, UCLA Design Media Arts | Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art (New York N.Y.: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2010), introduction. | ||
| Wednesday, November 8 | Intro to Web Mapping. Albert Kochaphum, Guest Lecturer. | Jim Detwiler, "Introduction to Web Mapping" | Africa Map, Million Dollar Hoods, Mapping Indigenous L.A. | How does data get onto a map? |
| Friday, November 10 -- NO CLASS, VETERANS' DAY | ||||
| Monday, November 13. Blog post 6 due. | Cities and Data. Hunter Owens, Data Scientist, City of Los Angeles, Guest Lecturer. | How are cities using all the data they collect? | ||
| Wednesday, November 15 | Complicating Mapping | Turnbull, David. Maps Are Territories: Science Is an Atlas: A Portfolio of Exhibits. University of Chicago Press ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Read Exhibits 1-6 and 10. | ||
| Friday, November 17 | Mapping Tools and Techniques | Due by 11:55 pm: Annotated Bibliography | ||
| Monday, November 20. Blog post 7 due. | Network Analysis for the Humanities | Scott Weingart, "Demystifying Networks, Parts I & II," Journal of Digital Humanities 1:1 (Winter 2011). | Star Wars Social Networks, They Rule | What are some cool ways to show connections between people and things? |
| Wednesday, November 22 -- NO CLASS | NO CLASS | |||
| Friday, November 24 -- NO CLASS | NO CLASS | |||
| Monday, November 27. | Project Work and Troubleshooting | |||
| Wednesday, November 29 | Algorithms, Big Data, and Inequality | Julia Angwin et al., "Machine Bias," ProPublica, May 23, 2016. | ||
| Friday, December 1 | Midterm (held in your section; details here) | |||
| Monday, December 4. Blog post 9 due. | A Little Coding | Paul Ford, "What is Code?", Bloomberg, June 11, 2015 Earn your certificate!!! | What exactly do people mean when they talk about "coding"? How might someone get started? | |
| Wednesday, December 6 | Virtual Reality. Francesca Albrezzi, Guest Lecturer. | Will virtual and augmented reality move us into the knowledge age? | Toward a Definition of "Virtual Worlds" by Mark W. Bell | |
| Friday, December 8 | Final Exam (held in your section; details here) | |||
| Thursday, December 14, 8am-11am | Final Celebration | |||