Schedule

Readings which are openly available are linked from this page. All other readings are on CCLE, under the appropriate week.

CLASS 1 | JANUARY 5

In-class links

Opening slides

Full “How Did They Make That” lecture

CLASS 2 | JANUARY 12

What is digital humanities? (part 2)

  • (This is an annotated version of this chapter, designed to help provide context. Click on a highlighted passage to see my notes, and feel free to add your own for others to see.)
  • Terras, Melissa, and Julianne Nyhan. “Father Busa’s Female Punch Card Operatives.” In Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew Gold and Lauren Klein, 2016 edition. Ann Arbor, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/57.

Data cleaning and manipulation

OPTIONAL

In-class links

Discussion leaders: Alea and Michael

Please sign up to lead a discussion section

alea and Michael’s collaborative Google doc

Slides (Data Basics)

OpenRefine tutorial (written, with screenshots)

Watch me walk through the OpenRefine steps on video (Click “Watch on Loom” to view bookmarks keyed to each step)

CLASS 3 | JANUARY 19

Interrogating data

Data visualization

“Data Storytelling” (Lynda video). In order to access Lynda videos, you’ll need an LA Public Library card, which you can obtain here. Pay specific attention to chapters two and three; the others aren’t so important.

Niles, Robert. “Statistics Help for Journalists.” Robert Niles, n.d. https://www.robertniles.com/stats/. (You might look specifically at “Per capita and Rates” and “Standard Deviation and Normal Distribution.”)

Projects to examine

In-class links

Discussion leaders: Patricia and Russell

Patricia and Russell’s discussion document

Slide-based Tableau and Flourish tutorial (also embedded below; later, you may want to access an easier-to-read version on our course site)

Tableau and Flourish tutorial

Data visualization principles and practices slide presentation (also embedded below)

Data Visualization Principles and Practices

CLASS 4 | JANUARY 26

Reconsidering data visualization

Johanna Drucker, “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 5, no. 1 (2011).

Introduction and chapter two: Klein, Lauren, and Catherine D’Ignazio. Data Feminism. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2018, OR watch this video of their talk at Data & Society:

Text analysis

Ted Underwood. “Seven Ways Humanists Are Using Computers to Understand Text.” The Stone and the Shell (blog), June 4, 2015. https://tedunderwood.com/2015/06/04/seven-ways-humanists-are-using-computers-to-understand-text/.

Clement, Tanya E. “‘A Thing Not Beginning and Not Ending’: Using Digital Tools to Distant-Read Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans.” Literary and Linguistic Computing 23, no. 3 (September 1, 2008): 361–81.

Rather than asking you to read that second article, I felt it might be more useful to share my text analysis lecture in advance of class. That way we’ll have more time for hands-on work. This version is annotated so that you can follow links; find a full-size version here.

To submit for this class

Homework 3: Create a stacked bar chart

CLASS 5 | FEBRUARY 2

Web design

In-class links

Introductory slides

HTML and CSS reference handouts

Today, in the second portion of class, we’ll move through a series of five interlinked tutorials. I offer them here as slides, so that I can keep track of your progress. Later, though, you may find it easier to use the written tutorials.

  1. Build a webpage from scratch with HTML and CSS
  2. Paint that page with CSS
  3. CSS Part 2: Divs, classes and IDs
  4. Publish your site with Github Pages
  5. Make a fancy site with Mobirise

To submit for this class

Homework 4: Your own text analysis

CLASS 6 | FEBRUARY 9

Rethinking design

Burdick, Anne. “Meta!Meta!Meta!: A Speculative Design Brief for the Digital Humanities.” Visible Language 49, no. 3 (December 1, 2015): 13.

Introduction from Miriam (Why did I assign this?)

Web mapping

  • Sack, C. (2017). Web Mapping. The Geographic Information Science & Technology Body of Knowledge (4th Quarter 2017 Edition), John P. Wilson (ed.). DOI: 10.22224/gistbok/2017.4.11.
  • McConchie, Alan, and Beth Schechter. “Anatomy of a Web Map.” http://maptime.io/anatomy-of-a-web-map/#0. (Please give this a moment to load and then click each slide to advance.)

To submit for this class

Homework 5: A skeleton website

CLASS 7 | FEBRUARY 16

Rethinking mapping

Introduction to this week’s reading

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.

Edit, Feb. 15: Sunkyu, Eduardo, and Lily offer these annotated versions of some of the exhibits in Maps are Territories: , , , .

The Cartographer’s Dilemma (video)

Why All World Maps are Wrong (video)

“Critical Cartography” (The Occupied Times)

OPTIONAL:

Battersby, Sarah E., Michael P. Finn, E. Lynn Usery, and Kristina H. Yamamoto. “Implications of Web Mercator and Its Use in Online Mapping.” Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization 49, no. 2 (2014): 85–101.

“Critical cartography: subjectivity, politics, and power of spatial data,” Erica Nelson (video)

To submit for this class

Homework 6: Make a map

CLASS 8 | FEBRUARY 23

Rethinking network analysis

Introduction to this week’s reading

Zer-Aviv, Mushon. “If Everything Is a Network, Nothing Is a Network.” Visualizing Information for Advocacy, January 8, 2016. https://visualisingadvocacy.org/node/739.html.

Kurgan, Laura, Dare Brawley, Brian House, Jia Zhang, and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun. “Homophily: The Urban History of an Algorithm.” E-Flux Architecture. https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/are-friends-electric/289193/homophily-the-urban-history-of-an-algorithm/. OR this video

Introduction to machine learning

Mimi Onuoha and Mother Cyborg, “A People’s Guide to AI” (Allied Media Projects)

To submit for this class

Homework 7: Network graph

CLASS 9 | MARCH 2

Project worktime (nothing due)

CLASS 10 | MARCH 9

Presentations