1. What is digital humanities? Meta-Narratives and Definitions
  2. Origin Stories: The Foundations of Digital Humanities and Coding
  3. Origin Stories: The Big Tent of Digital Humanities
  4. Case Study: Public Digital Humanities and Data As Collections
  5. Case Study: Minimal Computing and New Media Studies
  6. Case Study: Cultural Analytics and Digital History
  7. Making Digital Humanities: Humanities Sources Into Datasets
  8. Making Digital Humanities: Humanities Research Into Hypotheses
  9. Making Digital Humanities: Humanities Arguments Into Data Analyses and Visualizations
  10. Retrospectives: Failures and Successes in Digital Humanities
  11. Retrospectives: Sustainability and Obsolesce in Digital Humanities
  12. The Futures of Digital Humanities

Week 1: What is digital humanities? Meta-Narratives and Definitions

First Meeting: Introduction to Digital Humanities February 4, 2020

What is digital humanities? Why is that question so hard to answer? How do we define academic disciplines?

Class Activities:

  • Introductions and goals for the course
  • What is digital humanities? Visit https://whatisdigitalhumanities.com/ and refresh a few times.
  • Annotate the syllabus and finalize the course
  • (time permitting) Sign up for Slack, Github, and start with installation instructions.

Assignment for next class:

Additional Readings:

Second Meeting: Introduction to Computers and Code February 6, 2020

What is the digital in digital humanities? How does a computer understand code?

Class Activities:

  • Brief overview of the history of computing and how computers read code slides
  • Seminar discussion of what do we mean by digital? Check out this thread on Twitter by Scott Weingart
  • Finish installations and environment setup. See instructions here
  • Introduction to the terminal and command line

Assignment for next class:

Read the following articles and primary sources:

Skim either:

OR:

Complete the following code exercises:

Additional Readings:

Week 2: Origin Stories: The Foundations of Digital Humanities and Coding

First Meeting: The Origins of Digital Humanities February 11, 2020

How do different histories of digital humanities explain the emergence of this field? Why is digital humanities called digital humanities? What are some of the antecedents of this field?

Class Activities:

  • Seminar discussion about early DH and debates over how to define the field slides
  • Experiment with Google Ngram Viewer. What does it tell us about the origins of DH? https://books.google.com/ngrams

Assignment for next class:

  • Read through and complete Introduction to Python
  • “Which Dh Tools Are Actually Used In Research?” By Laure Barbot, Frank Fischer, Yoann Moranville And Ivan Pozdniakov, December 6 2019 https://weltliteratur.net/dh-tools-used-in-research/
  • If you get through the Introduction to Python quickly, go ahead and research one of the tools from the reading.
  • NO PRE-SUBMITTED QUESTIONS REQUIRED FOR NEXT CLASS!

Additional Readings:

Second Meeting: Introduction to Python and Coding February 13, 2020

What is Python? How can you tell computers to execute code?

Class Activities:

  • Introduction to data structures and coding in the terminal slides
  • Seminar discussion of “tools” in DH. Which ones are popular? How do we define “tools”?

Assignment for next class:

Complete introduction to Python coding exercises if not finished during class. Exercise 3 is available here

Read the following:

And read one of the following:

Additional Readings:

Week 3: The Big Tent of Digital Humanities

First Meeting: The Big Tent and Many Forms of DH February 18, 2020

What was the Big Tent of DH? What are the many formats of digital humanities’ scholarship?

Class Activities:

  • Seminar discussion on the many forms of DH scholarship and what makes a good review slides
  • In-class exercise to compile list of DH projects

Assignment for next class:

  • Read through Python Fundamentals one
  • Start thinking about final projects and review assignment. We’ll start brainstorming in class, but feel free to bring in potential ideas.
  • Skim for reference Miriam Posner, “How Did They Make That?,” August 29, 2013. http://miriamposner.com/blog/how-did-they-make-that/

Additional readings:

Second Meeting: Python Fundamentals and DH Project Management February 20, 2020

How do you manage a digital humanities project? How do you manage code?

Class Activities:

  • Introduction to loops, functions, and conditionals slides
  • Seminar discussion about review assignment and final projects

Assignment for next class: Complete coding assignment on Python fundamentals and share on Slack.

Read through pre-lesson materials on Python Classes and version control

. Read Dale Markowitz “The Servers Are Burning” Logic Magazine https://logicmag.io/failure/the-servers-are-burning/ to learn why debugging is so difficult. No questions needed for this reading (should take you ~10 minutes).

Select two articles from Current Research in Digital History https://crdh.rrchnm.org/ for the DH Review assignment. When selecting, consider what topics, methods, or data you might be interested in using in the final project. Send me an email or Slack message with a short paragraph explaining your selection.

Case Study: Public Digital Humanities and Data As Collections

First Meeting: Python Classes and Libraries February 25, 2020

What is a Python library? How do we store information in Python?

Class Activities:

  • Review coding assignment and concepts slides
  • Introduction to git, Github, and input and output of files
  • (Time permitting) Introduction to Python Classes

Assignment for next class:

Additional Readings:

Second Meeting: DH in Public and in Libraries February 27, 2020

What is public digital humanities? Where does this type of scholarship happen? What are its knowledge stakes? How does digital humanities intersect with library studies?

Class Activities:

  • Special class section with Meredith Martin on the Princeton Prosody Archive, covering the building of the project and computational poetry

Assignment for next class:

Complete the coding assignments on Python classes and continue to pair program. Continue working on your DH review assignment.

Additional readings:

  • Ian Milligan “Welcome to the Web: The Online Community of GeoCities During The Early Years of The World Wide Web” https://ianmilligan.ca/2017/03/14/new-chapter-welcome-to-the-web-the-online-community-of-geocities-during-the-early-years-of-the-world-wide-web/

Week 5: Case Study: The Web, Minimal Computing, and New Media Studies

First Meeting: How the Web Works March 3, 2020

How does the web work? How can you pass data to a web page? What is hypertext markup language?

Class Activities

  • Introduction to history of the Web and HTML slides
  • Introduction to Web Scraping
  • Discussion about the legality of web scraping and who owns the web

Assignment for next class

Second Meeting:

DH and Media March 5, 2020

What theoretical perspectives informed digital humanities and vice versa? How does DH intersect with media studies? How have scholars theorized computing?

Class Activities

  • Special Session with Grant Wythoff

Assignment for next class:

  • Read preface from Ted Underwood, Distant Horizons: Digital Evidence and Literary Change
  • “All models are wrong”. RJ So. PMLA 132 (3), 668-673, 2017. 14, 2017 (On Blackboard)
  • Lincoln Mullen “A Braided Narrative for Digital History,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019, ed. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein (University of Minnesota Press, 2019). link
  • Continue working on DH review assignment

Week 6: Case Study: Cultural Analytics and Digital History

First Meeting: Counting and Computing in DH March 10, 2020 CLASS CANCELED

DH review assignment due How can we use computational methods in DH research? What types of questions have scholars used computation to answer? How do we blend humanities and computational narratives?

Class Activities

  • Seminar discussion about Cultural Analytics and Digital History
  • How do we study culture with computation?
  • Explore articles from the Journal of Cultural Analytics

Assignment for next class:

Answer the following questions and have them prepared to share for class on Thursday:

  • What is the dataset in the article or project? How did the authors get their data? Is their dataset or code available?
  • What sorts of visualizations do they use? Are their visualizations interactive?
  • Do they use perspectival modeling or the braided narrative in their projects? Do they offer any interpretation of their data analysis? What might be missing from their dataset?
  • What sorts of conclusions can we draw from this project or article about “culture”?

These should be short bullet point answers and we’ll be sharing them together in class during our discussion of Cultural Analytics and Digital History

Additional readings

  • Katie Rawson and Trevor Muñoz, “Against Cleaning”, Curating Menus, 7 July, 2016.
  • Wes McKinney. Python for Data Analysis. 2017. Chapters 2, 5 (Available online through the Princeton Library)

Second Meeting: Data in Python March 12, 2020

How do we deal with data in Python? What types of formats does data come in? Which Python libraries are used for data analysis? What does it mean to clean data? What sorts of choices do we make when we transform data?

Class Activities

  • Discussion about moving our course to online
  • Discussion of modeling in the humanities, cultural analytics, and digital history
  • Introduction to APIs and review of HTTP/web scraping, along with introduction to Jupyter notebooks and pandas

Assignment for next class:

Complete initial data cleaning assignment using pandas and the previous data from web scraping assignment. Over spring break, start thinking about what data and research questions you want to pursue for the final project (for some example datasets checkout the website Humanities Data and The Pudding’s available datasets).

Read the following:

Additional Readings:

SPRING BREAK

Week 7: Making Digital Humanities: Humanities Sources Into Datasets

First Meeting: Data in DH March 24, 2020

What sources are used in humanities versus digital humanities research? How do sources become data?

Class Activities:

  • Discuss updated course policies slides
  • Discussion about data in the humanities. What do humanists’ mean when they say data? What is a data biography?
  • Discuss potential datasets for final project and some of the difficulties in finding data, as well as potential research questions
  • Explore The Pudding’s Film Dialogue project and data with Jupyter notebooks and Pandas (time permitting)

Assignment for next class:

Second Meeting: Exploratory Data Analysis in Python March 26, 2020

What is exploratory data analysis (EDA)? How do we apply it in the humanities? What are the basics of statistical knowledge that we need to understand to use EDA?

Class Activities

  • Pandas, Jupyter Notebooks, and Exploratory Data Analysis using The Pudding data
  • Introduction to git and Github

Assignment for next class:

Complete at home assignment.

Read:

Additional Readings:

  • Scott B. Weingart, “‘Digital History’ Can Never Be New,” the scottbot irregular, 2 May 2016 and “ Argument Clinic” July 26, 2017
  • Matthew K. Gold et al., “Forum: Text Analysis at Scale,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016 (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 525–568.
  • Arguing with Digital History working group, “Digital History and Argument,” white paper, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (November 13, 2017): https://rrchnm.org/argument-white-paper/. (primary author with Stephen Robertson)
  • Benjamin Bengfort, Tony Ojeda, Rebecca Bilbro. Applied Text Analysis with Python. 2018. Chapter 1-2 (aviailable online through the library)
  • Maciej Cegłowski. “Deep Fried Data” Idle Words. September 27, 2016. https://idlewords.com/talks/deep_fried_data.htm

Week 8: Making Digital Humanities: Humanities Research Into Hypotheses

First Meeting: Analysis in DH March 31, 2020

How do we translate humanities research into hypotheses that can be tested computational? What’s the difference between a research question and a hypothesis?

Class Activities

  • Introduction to foundations of text analysis with Pandas
  • Seminar discussion of what sorts of hypotheses and research questions can we answer with text analysis

Assignment for next class:

Additional readings:

  • Explore Quantifying Kissinger by Micki Kaufman http://blog.quantifyingkissinger.com/
  • David A. Smith, Ryan Cordell, and Abby Mullen, “Computational Methods for Uncovering Reprinted Texts in Antebellum Newspapers,” American Literary History 27, no. 3 (2015): E1–E15, doi:10.1093/alh/ajv029 and Viral Texts of 19th Century Newspapers https://viraltexts.org/
  • Funk, Kellen, and Lincoln Mullen. “The Spine of American Law: Digital Text Analysis and U.S. Legal Practice.” American Historical Review 123, no. 1 (2018).

Second Meeting: Text Analysis in Python April 2, 2020

What is text analysis? What is natural language processing? How do computers understand text?

Class Activities:

  • Special guest meeting with David Mimno
  • More advanced Pandas and text analysis methods

Assignment for next class:

  • Complete your project proposal
  • Read the Appendices of Underwood’s Distant Horizons (available on Blackboard)

Complete one of the following:

For those interested in topic modeling, you may want to read Benjamin Schmidt (2013). “Words Alone: Dismantling Topic Models in the Humanities”. Journal of Digital Humanities.http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/2-1/words-alone-by-benjamin-m-schmidt/

Additional Readings

  • Dong Nguyen, Maria Liakata, Simon DeDeo, Jacob Eisenstein, David Mimno, Rebekah Tromble, and Jane Winters, “How We Do Things with Words: Analyzing Text as Social and Cultural Data” (2019). https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.01468

Week 9: Making Digital Humanities: Humanities Arguments Into Data Analyses and Visualizations

First Meeting: Data Analysis and Visualization in DH April 7, 2020

Initial project proposal due

Class Activities

  • Advanced text analysis methods
  • Introduction to Spacy

Assignment for next class:

  • Read Chapter 5 Lauren Klein and Catherine D’Ignacio, Data Feminism 2019

Additional Readings

  • Johanna Drucker, “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 5, no. 1 (2011) http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/5/1/000091/000091.html
  • Explore one of the following and listen to the corresponding interview on Data Sketches:
    • Following Data https://flowingdata.com/ and http://datastori.es/126-flowingdata-with-nathan-yau/
    • Data Sketches http://www.datasketch.es/ http://datastori.es/98-data-sketches-with-nadieh-bremer-and-shirley-wu/

Second Meeting: Data Visualization in Python April 9, 2020

How can we visualize data in digital humanities? What forms of visualization can help support digital humanities research? What Python libraries exist for visualization? How does data visualization in Python compare to other programming languages?

Class Activities

  • Data visualization in DH
  • Introduction to Altair

Assignment for next week:

Read:

Additional Readings:

Week 10: Works in Progress and Retrospectives: Data Driven Research in Digital Humanities

First project demo due

First Meeting: Evaluation Arguments & Experiments in DH April 14, 2020

Class Activities:

  • Seminar discussion about making data driven arguments
  • Continuing to work with NER humanist dataset
  • Experimenting with more advanced text mining methods

Assignment for next class:

No assigned readings, class meeting time used for project.

Second Meeting: Coding Reviews and Updates April 16, 2020~~

Class Activities:

  • Review session of previous coding or DH concepts (as needed)
  • In class working sessions in breakout rooms and share current updates on project with instructor

Assignment for next class: Prepare to demo your initial project to the class. Outline your initial research question for the class, describe your datasets and methods, and evaluate your progress based on your initial proposal. Come prepared to class to give feedback on your peers’ projects.

Week 11: Works In Progress and Retrospectives: Critiques of Digital Humanities

First Meeting: Retrospectives and Feedback in DH April 21, 2020

First Project Retrospectives Due (Demo initial progress and discuss next steps)

Class Activities

  • Initial demos of projects and discussion of next steps for the project

Assignment for next class:

Read:

Second Meeting: Critiques and Project Sprint April 23, 2020 What are critiques of DH? How does DH relate to other humanities’ disciplines? What are the limits of computational analyses in the humanities?

Class Activities

  • Seminar discussion about critiques of DH
  • Continue working on final project in class and discuss ongoing obstacles

Assignment for next class:

Additional Readings

  • Kathleen Fitzpatrick, “Obsolescence and Innovation in the Age of the Digital” in The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities, ed. Jentery Sayers (New York: Routledge, 2018)
  • Castelvecchi, D. (2019). Venice ‘time machine’ project suspended amid data row. Nature, 574(7780), 607–607. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-03240-w
  • Quinn Dombrowski What Ever Happened to Project Bamboo?, Literary and Linguistic Computing, Volume 29, Issue 3, 1 September 2014, Pages 326–339, https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqu026
  • Quinn Dombrowsk Towards a Taxonomy of Failure January 30 2019. https://www.quinndombrowski.com/?q=blog/2019/01/30/towards-taxonomy-failure
  • Bethany Nowviskie “Reconstitute the World” June 12, 2018. http://nowviskie.org/2018/reconstitute-the-world/

Week 12: The Futures of Digital Humanities

First Meeting: Imagining DH April 28, 2020

What’s next for digital humanities?

Class Activities

  • Seminar discussion about what might be next for Digital Humanities
  • Final chance to ask for feedback on projects

Second Meeting: Final Project Presentations April 30, 2020

Final project demo and reflection due (extension available for reflection if needed)