Readings are either hyperlinked below or can be found in our class’s CCLE site, filed under the appropriate week. Lecture slides and notes 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 | Reading 3 | Framing Questions |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monday, September 26 | Introduction | What's this class about? How much work is required? Who should take this class? | |||
| Wednesday, September 28 | The Humanities & the Digital Humanities | Burdick et al. "One: From Humanities to Digital Humanities." In Digital_Humanities. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.. | McPherson, Tara. "Introduction: Media Studies and the Digital Humanities." Cinema Journal 48, no. 2 (2008). | 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, September 30 | Project Critiques | To do in lab: technical self-assessment. | How does one interpret, understand, and critique a DH project? | ||
| Monday, October 3 | "Data" and the Question of History | White, Hayden. “The Narrativization of Real Events.” Critical Inquiry 7, no. 4 (July 1, 1981): 793–98. | "Roger Ekirch on Segmented Sleep," Backstory Radio | 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 much stuff have we just forgotten? |
| Wednesday, October 5 | 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. | Noriega, Chon A. “Preservation Matters.” Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies 30, no. 1 (March 22, 2005): 1. | 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 7 | Project Management, Forming Groups | To do in lab: Receive group assignments. Submit top choices for research topics. | |||
| Monday, October 10 | The Humanities Research Question. Renee Romero and Joanna Chen Cham, Guest Lecturers. Notes from this class. | 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." | C. P Snow, “The Two Cultures,” in The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, 1959, 1–22. | 4Humanities | 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 12 | Categorization: How the World Becomes Data. Claudia Horning, Guest Lecturer. | National Information Standards Organization, “What is Metadata?” (Bethesda, MD: NISO Press, 2004). | "Case Study: Basic Metadata," Stanford University Library, n.d. | Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group | 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 14 | Cleaning and Refining Data with OpenRefine | To do in lab: Receive topic assignments and datasets. | |||
| Monday, October 17 | Complicating Categorization | Wallack, Jessica Seddon, and Ramesh Srinivasan. "Local-Global: Reconciling Mismatched Ontologies in Development Information Systems." 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2009. | 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. | TLAM Project | 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 19 | 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 21 | Data Visualization Tools and Techniques | Due by 11:55 pm: Five preliminary research questions + project charter. | |||
| Monday, October 24 | Complicating Data Visualization | Johanna Drucker, “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 5, no. 1 (2011). | Lauren Klein and Catherine D'Ignazio, "Feminist Data Visualization," Proceedings of the Workshop on Visualization for the Digital Humanities, IEEE 2016, Baltimore. | Poemage, US Gun Deaths, Hearing Eugenics. | What are some problems, for the humanist, of data visualization? What experimental data visualization methods are emerging? |
| Wednesday, October 26 | Intro to Web Design | 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, October 28 | Content-Management Systems | Due by 11:55 pm: Data critique. | |||
| Monday, October 31 | What assumptions are embedded in conventional principles of "good design"? How are people experimenting with other forms of interaction? | ||||
| Wednesday, November 2 | Intro to Web Mapping. Albert Kochaphum, Guest Lecturer. | Alan McConchie and Beth Schechter, "Anatomy of a Web Map." (Give it a minute to load and click on each slide to advance.) | Jim Detwiler, "Introduction to Web Mapping" | Africa Map, Million Dollar Hoods, Mapping Indigenous L.A. | How does data get onto a map? |
| Friday, November 4 | Mapping Tools | ||||
| Monday, November 7 | 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 Exhibts 1-6 and 10. | What power relations are embedded in the act of mapping? | ||
| Wednesday, November 9 | Network Analysis for the Humanities | Scott Weingart, “Demystifying Networks, Parts I & II,” Journal of Digital Humanities 1:1 (Winter 2011). | Elijah Meeks and Maya Krishnan, "Introduction to Network Analysis and Representation" | Star Wars Social Networks, They Rule | What are some ways to show connections between people and things? |
| Friday, November 11 | Network Analysis Tools and Techniques | Due by 11:55 pm: Annotated Bibliography | |||
| Monday, November 14 | Data Journalism. Guest Lecturer: Christine Zhang. | "What the Fox Knows," by Nate Silver | "Shining light on explanatory journalism’s impact on media, democracy, and society," by John Hudak | "What This Means, How This Happens, What to Do Now," by Nathan Robinson | How is digital technology changing journalism? What does a data journalist do? |
| Wednesday, November 16 | Other Kinds of Data | Becky Williams, "Intro to Databases (for People Who Don't Know A Lot about Them)," Medium | Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, Linked Jazz | Beyond spreadsheets, what other types of data formats are out there? Why would someone choose one over the other? | |
| Friday, November 18 | Midterm | ||||
| Monday, November 21 | Project Work and Troubleshooting | ||||
| Wednesday, November 23 | No Class | ||||
| Friday, November 25 | No Class | ||||
| Monday, November 28 | A Little Coding | Paul Ford, "What is Code?", Bloomberg, June 11, 2015 | What exactly do people mean when they talk about "coding"? How might someone get started? | ||
| Wednesday, November 30 | 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 | Walc | |
| Friday, December 2 | Final Exam | ||||
| Monday, December 5, 3pm-6pm | Final Presentations |