Schedule
Tuesday, August 24, 2021
- Introduction to the class and introduction to studying history
- Asking questions about the choices made by people
- Set up your website
- Reclaim Hosting – select the student/personal plan ($30/year)
- This is the only required purchase for this class. All readings are available for free online.
- Defining digital humanities
- Jason Heppler, “What is Digital Humanities?”
- Readings due:
- Zachary Schrag, “Chapter 1: Defining History,” in Princeton Guide to Historical Research (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021), 9-23
- Miriam Posner, “Creating Your Web Presence: A Primer for Academics,” Chronicle of Higher Education, February 14, 2011
- Ryan Cordell, “Creating and Maintaining a Professional Presence Online: A Roundup and Reflection,” Chronicle of Higher Education, October 3, 2012
- Resources:
- Abby Mullen, “Project Base 1: Setting Up Your Website,” abbymullen.org, spring 2021
- Miriam Posner, “How Did They Make That?” August 29, 2013
Tuesday, August 31, 2021
- Due: Install WordPress and write a blog post on establishing your digital identity.
- Readings due:
- 1619 Project Introduction by Nikole Hannah-Jones. (See Blackboard-Content)
- Blog post assignment: After reading through the articles assigned for today and setting up your WordPress site, reflect on your current digital presence. When you Google yourself, what results do you get? Do those results reflect who you are and how you want others to perceive you? In what ways will your website help you in creating or modifying your existing digital presence? (400 words minimum)
- Resources:
- WordPress, “First Steps with WordPress”
- Reclaim Hosting, “Client Area and cPanel Basics”
Tuesday, September 7, 2021
- Topic: Legal literacies in digital humanities
- Readings due:
- Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor, “From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in the Archives,” Archivaria 81 (Spring 2016): 23-43. (See Blackboard Content)
- Andrej Zwitter, “Big Data Ethics,” Big Data & Society (July-September 2014): 1-6.
- Blog post assignment: Consider the four literacies we discussed today (ethics, privacy, copyright, and licenses). How do these literacies affect your research and scholarship as historians or scholars? What surprised you about these literacies? What are some important considerations to think about before beginning a digital humanities project? (400 words minimum)
- Resources
- Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, “Owning the Past,” in Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web
- James Grossman, “Whose Memory? Whose Monuments? History, Commemoration, and the Struggle for an Ethical Past,” Perspectives on History, February 1, 2016
Tuesday, September 14, 2021
- Topic: Data literacy; organizing your research; finding datasets
- Guest instructor: Wendy Mann, Director, Digital Scholarship Center
- Finding and reading data
- In class assignment: In groups, devise a method to clean the death certificates data. Write out your specific plans to revise this data into a tidy dataset.
- Reading due:
- Hadley Wickham, “Tidy Data,” Journal of Statistical Software 59, no. 10 (August 2014)
- Blog post assignment: What are the three principles of tidy data? What are the best methods for organizing your research? Consider how you might implement both tidy data and organizational research methods into your scholarly practice. (400 words minimum)
Tuesday, September 21, 2021
- Topic: Thinking about topic and finding research and asking questions
- What makes a good historical question and how to use sources to help write a better question?
- Analyzing sources
- Start thinking of markers
- Reading due:
- Benedict Carton and George Oberle, “‘[T]o each of their heirs forever’ Legacies of George Mason IV: Beneficiary, Patriarch, Bequeather, Enslaver”
- First half of Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995)
Tuesday, September 28, 2021
- Topic: Discuss Silencing the Past
- Example:
- A Directory of Caribbean Digital Scholarship, Collections and Curations
- Reading due:
- Remainder of Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995)
- Blog post assignment: Use the following resources to select a highway marker to explore. Describe the marker you chose and why you chose it. In what ways will you use Trouillot’s methods from Silencing the Past to learn more about the history of your selected highway marker? (400 words minimum)
Tuesday, October 5, 2021
- Topic: History as data/primary sources as data
- Guest instructor: Wendy Mann, Director, Digital Scholarship Center
- Organizing and working with files
- Examples:
- Mason Family Papers: The Digital Edition and spreadsheets
- See also: Loyalist data; death certificates; Abby Mullen and Lincoln Mullen’s datasets in RStudio
- Reading due:
- Frederick W, Gibbs, “New Forms of History: Critiquing Data and its Representations,” The American Historian (February 2016)
- Blog post assignment:
- Possible Ways historians can represent primary sources into data. Consider the primary sources we have looked at already in this class as well as primary sources you have encountered in your own work. How might these primary sources be represented as data? What are the advantages of considering primary sources as data? What are Wickham’s principles of tidy data? (400 words minimum)
Tuesday, October 12, 2021
No Class—FALL BREAK
- Creating a Tidy Data Set Due
Tuesday, October 19, 2021
- Topic: Timelines and mapping/spatial history
- Tools:
- Knightlab’s TimelineJS and StorymapJS
- Examples:
- Andy’s Story and Black Lives Next Door
- University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab’s Redlining Richmond
- See also: John Kneebone and team’s Mapping the Second Ku Klux Klan, 1915-1940; Lincoln Mullen’s The Spread of US Slavery, 1790-1860; University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab’s Visualizing Emancipation
- Reading due:
- Richard White, “What is Spatial History?” Stanford University Spatial History Project, February 1, 2010
Tuesday, October 26, 2021
- Topic: Text analysis
- Tools:
- Examples:
- Robert Nelson’s Mining the Dispatch
- Lincoln Mullen’s America’s Public Bible
- Reading due:
- Cameron Blevins, “Space, Nation, and the Triumph of Region: A View of the World from Houston,” Journal of American History 101, no. 1 (June 2014)
- Cameron Blevins, “Topic Modeling Martha Ballard’s Diary,” April 1, 2010
- Resources:
- Ted Underwood, “Where to Start with Text Mining,” August 14, 2012
- Ted Underwood, “Seven Ways Humanists are Using Computers to Understand Text,” June 4, 2015
- Benjamin Schmidt and Mitch Fraas, “The Language of the State of the Union,” The Atlantic, January 18, 2015
DUE: Timeline Assignment
Topic: Network analysisExamples:Introduction, Women of the Early Harlem Renaissance
Paula Findlen, Dan Edelstein, and Nicole Coleman’sMapping the Republic of Letters
Nicholas Jenkins, Elijah Meeks, and Scott Murray’sKindred Britain
Ryan Cordell and David Smith’sViral Texts: Mapping Networks of Reprinting in 19th-Century Newspapers and Magazines
Tools:Readings due:George Oberle, “Science, Skepticism and Societies: The Politics of Knowledge Creation in the Early Republic”
Kieran Healy,“Using Metadata to Find Paul Revere,”June 9, 2013
Tuesday, November 2, 2021
- Start working on Historic Markers
- Example:
- Readings due:
- Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff, “‘Silent Sentinel’ Confederate Statue Removed From Outside Loudoun County Courthouse,” Washington Post, July 21, 2020
- Michael S. Rosenwald, “After a Long Debate, Fredericksburg, Va., Finally Removes a Slave Auction Block from Downtown,” Washington Post, June 6, 2020 OR Nora McGreevy, “Fredericksburg’s Slave Auction Block Will Be Moved to a Museum,” Smithsonian Magazine, September 30, 2020
Tuesday, November 9, 2021
- Individual Meetings
Tuesday, November 16, 2021
- Topic: Security and sustainability
- Readings due:
- Dan Goodin, “Why passwords have never been weaker,” Ars Technica, August 20, 2012
- Mat Honan, “How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking,” Wired, August 6, 2012
- Mat Honan, “How I Resurrected My Digital Life After an Epic Hacking,” Wired, August 17, 2012
- Jennifer Howard, “Born Digital, Projects Need Attention to Survive,” Chronicle of Higher Education, January 6, 2014
Tuesday, November 23, 2021
- Individual Meetings
Tuesday, November 30, 2021
- Presentation on Historic Markers: This will be a celebration of your scholarship and accomplishments during the class. Students will be asked to share their findings by speaking for a maximum of three minutes.
- Self-Assessment: Reflect on the semester and the work you have done and write a blog post that communicates what you have specifically learned. We are particularly interested in how you feel you have improved in understanding how to use technology in your major. We would also like you to share what you have learned about history in the class. (400 words minimum)
Tuesday, December 7, 2021
- Final Historical Marker Research Package DUE
