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Scaling up DH101
Over the last few years, enrollment in my Introduction to Digital Humanities class has been trending steadily upward, as has enrollment in the minor itself. Last spring, we had an unexpected surge in enrollment in the minor, and many of those students needed to take DH101 right away. We had to scramble a bit to…
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Data Packages for DH Beginners
The quarter is off and running again at lightning speed. At UCLA, we’re on the quarter system, and things move fast — just 10 weeks to get through all your material. I’m teaching DH101 again this year, and, as usual, it’s a race against the clock. The profile of my students changes a bit every year,…
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New tutorials on network analysis with Cytoscape
For some reason I got it into my head to write a bunch of tutorials on using Cytoscape for network analysis. They’re now all up on Github. (I’ve been moving to Github for tutorials because they’re easier to update there.) I started writing these for the students in my spring-quarter class and, even though the class is over, I’ve been…
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Materials on Image-Mining for Medical History
Last week, I taught the image-mining portion of the Images and Texts in Medical History workshop at the National Library of Medicine. I am far from an expert on OpenCV, the open-source computer-vision library. But as usual, that didn’t stop me from attempting to teach it. The materials I created for the workshop include detailed…
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A better way to teach technical skills to a group
My DH101 class this year was my biggest yet, with 45 undergrads. I suppose that’s not huge compared with many other classes, but DH101 is very hands-on. I am fortunate enough to have a TA, the awesome Francesca Albrezzi, who runs separate weekly labs. Still, I often have to teach students to do technical things…
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Rehabbing DH101
I’m teaching Introduction to Digital Humanities for the third time this year, along with Francesca Albrezzi, my wonderful two-time teaching assistant, and I’m really enjoying it. It’s a challenging but rewarding class, with 45 students, a 10-week quarter, and a large number of moving parts. I reworked the syllabus quite a bit for this iteration, and…
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The (sort-of) selfies class
Last winter I taught a class called Selfies, Snapchat, and Cyberbulles: Coming of Age Online. It was incredibly fun and rewarding, and I learned a ton. Mark Marino simultaneously taught a great class on selfies over at USC, and while we weren’t able to sync up our classes as much as we might have liked,…
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What’s Next: The Radical, Unrealized Potential of Digital Humanities
This is a lightly edited version of the keynote address I was honored to give at the Keystone Digital Humanities Conference at the University of Pennsylvania on July 22, 2015. Thank you to the organizing committee for inviting me! My sincere thanks, too, to Lauren Klein and Roderic Crooks for their advice and feedback on…
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The Case of the Missing Faces
As I’ve often mentioned, I’ve been working for quite some time on a study of the photographs of Walter Freeman. Freeman, a Washington, D.C., based physician, was the world’s foremost lobotomist; it’s estimated that he lobotomized some 3,500 people. He was also a prolific and dedicated photographer. He almost invariably took photos of his patients…
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Humanities Data: A Necessary Contradiction
This is a talk that I gave at the Harvard Purdue Data Management Symposium on June 17, 2015, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The audience was mostly librarians and other data-management professionals. I was the only humanities person on the program, so I wanted to talk about the ways that humanists think about data differently from people…