A panoramic examination of the impact of digital media and technology on the theory and practice of history. Topics include the construction of scholarly websites on historical topics, how research methods and historiography are being transformed by the digitization of primary sources and digital tools, and the significance of new trends such as social and semantic computing for the discipline. Students will investigate the potential advantages and disadvantages of a variety of web technologies and envision their own historical resources that use those technologies.
In addition to preparedness and participation in every seminar, classwork consists of two main assignments, both carried out over the course of the semester:
1) Participation in the seminar’s social media: blog posts, comments on other students’ blogs, and the addition of articles, websites, and links of interest via Twitter and Zotero.
2) Envisioning and planning a digital historical resource. A resource might be a website, web tool, software, or any other form that uses digital means to enhance historical research, scholarship, learning, teaching, communication, or collaboration. We will be using a modified version of the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Digital Humanities Start-up Grants Format as the basis for the final paper (samples can be found here). In addition to this paper, mock-ups, visuals, and web-based forms will be added to the project throughout the semester.
Many of the readings are available online, and more will be added during the semester (such as relevant blog posts), so it is critical to visit this syllabus online each week. In addition, will we be reading the following books:
Daniel J. Cohen & Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web
Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media
Robin Williams and John Tollett, The Non-Designers Web Book
Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees
John Willinsky, The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship
Christopher M. Kelty, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software
The coauthor of the first book might sound familiar; note that the book is available for free online and linked to from this syllabus. The books by Willinsky and Kelty are also available for free online.
Week 1: Getting Started (Sept. 1)
Sign up for a WordPress blog, and accounts for Twitter, Google Reader, and Zotero. Subscribe to three history blogs from this list and other resources based on interests.
General introduction to the course and to the technologies used. Half of the class will take place in the Center for History and New Media’s lab.
“RSS in Plain English” by CommonCraft
Week 2: What’s Special About Digital Media and Technology? (Sept. 8)
Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media
Examination of digital technologies under the hood.
Week 3: What is Digital History? (Sept. 15)
“The Promise of Digital History,” Journal of American History, September 2008.
Edward L. Ayers, “The Pasts and Futures of Digital History”
William Turkel, “What It’s About,” Parts 0, 1, 2, 3
Cohen & Rosenzweig, Digital History, Introduction, Ch. 1
Errol Morris, “Which Came First?” Parts 1, 2, 3; “Photography as a Weapon”
HistoryWired website from the Smithsonian
Close reading of historical websites.
Week 4: Historical Websites and Web Design (Sept. 22)
Cohen & Rosenzweig, Digital History, Chs. 2, 4, and Appendix
Williams and Tollett, The Non-Designers Web Book
Paula Petrik, “Top Ten Mistakes in Academic Web Design”
Jacob Nielsen, Alertboxes:”Are Users Stupid?“; “End of Web Design“; “Why Web Users Scan Instead of Read”
Larry Gales, “Web Page Design Inspired by Edward Tufte”
Week 5: Web 2.0 and Non-Web Digital Technologies (Sept. 29)
Roy Rosenzweig, “Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past”
First Monday issue on Web 2.0 projects in museums and libraries, articles from Session 4 and Jeffrey Schnapp, “Animating the archive.”
Examine the “discussion” and “history” tabs of three Wikipedia entries on historical topics of your choosing.
Lab with use of various Web 2.0 technologies.
Week 6: Building and Shaping an Audience (Oct. 6)
Cohen & Rosenzweig, Digital History, Ch. 5
David A. Bell, “The Bookless Future: What the Internet is Doing to Scholarship”
Week 7: “Born Digital” History (Oct. 20)
Cohen & Rosenzweig, Digital History, Ch. 6
Cohen, “The Future of Preserving the Past”
Examples: April 16 Archive, Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, September 11 Digital Archive, Flickr, Thanks, Roy.
N.B.: Students present outlines of their semester project.
Week 8: Copyright, Copyleft, Rights, and Wrongs (Oct. 27)
Cohen & Rosenzweig, Digital History, Ch. 7
Licenses: GNU GPL, Creative Commons
Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture, chapter ten (“property”), which is available for free download at http://free-culture.org/freecontent/
Christopher M. Kelty, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software
Week 9: Digitization, Digital Collections, and Digital Preservation (Nov. 3)
NINCH Guide, Chs. V-VIII, XIV
Cohen & Rosenzweig, Digital History, Chs. 3, 8
Roy Rosenzweig, “Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era”
Examples from Google Books, the Open Content Alliance, and other libraries and archives.
Week 10: Digital Scholarship I: Searching and Finding (Nov. 10)
Patrick Leary, “Googling the Victorians”
Peter Norvig, “Theorizing from Data”
American Council of Learned Societies’ cyberinfrastructure report
Week 11: Digital Scholarship II: Text and Data Mining (Nov. 17)
Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees
Timothy Burke, response to Graphs, Maps, Trees
Cohen, “From Babel to Knowledge: Data Mining Large Digital Collections”
Will Thomas and Edward Ayers, “The Difference Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities,” http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/AHR/
Week 12: Scholarly Communications in a Digital Age (Nov. 24)
John Willinsky, The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship
Week 13: Student Presentations and Critiques (Dec. 1)
Week 14: Student Presentations and Critiques (Dec. 8)
