Introducing DH Data

Seminar and Workshop Framing

What is humanities data? How do we work with data in DH? How do we create or discover datasets? What does it mean to transform historic and cultural objects into data?

Contextual Materials

• Posner, Miriam. “Humanities Data: A Necessary Contradiction – Miriam Posner’s Blog,” June 25, 2015. https://miriamposner.com/blog/humanities-data-a-necessary-contradiction/.
• D’Ignazio, Catherine, and Lauren F. Klein. “The Numbers Don’t Speak for Themselves.” In Data Feminism, 2020. https://data-feminism.mitpress.mit.edu/.
• Johnson, Jessica Marie. “Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads.” Social Text 36, no. 4 (137) (December 1, 2018): 57–79. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-7145658.

Applied Materials

• Lincoln, Matthew D., Scott B. Weingart, and Nickoal Eichmann-Kalwara. “The Index of Digital Humanities Conferences” Journal of Open Humanities Data 7, no. 0 (July 9, 2021): 12. https://doi.org/10.5334/johd.26.
• And skim Groskopf, Christopher. “The Quartz Guide to Bad Data.” Quartz, December 15, 2015. https://qz.com/572338/the-quartz-guide-to-bad-data.

Curated Additional Materials (optional but recommended if familiar with assigned materials)

• Tilton, Lauren, Emeline Alexander, Luke Malcynsky, and Hanglin Zhou. “The Role of Metadata in American Studies.” Polish Journal for American Studies, no. Issue 14 (Autumn 2020) (December 1, 2020): 149–63. https://doi.org/10.7311/PJAS.14/2/2020.02.
• Cordell, Ryan. “‘Q i-Jtb the Raven’: Taking Dirty OCR Seriously.” Book History 20, no. 1 (2017): 188–225. https://doi.org/10.1353/bh.2017.0006.
• Gebru, Timnit, Jamie Morgenstern, Briana Vecchione, Jennifer Wortman Vaughan, Hanna Wallach, Hal Daumé III, and Kate Crawford. “Datasheets for Datasets.” Communications of the ACM 64, no. 12 (November 19, 2021): 86–92. https://doi.org/10.1145/3458723.
• Mahoney, Jennifer, Roopika Risam, and Hibba Nassereddin. “Data Fail: Teaching Data Literacy with African Diaspora Digital Humanities.” The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, December 10, 2020. https://jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/data-fail-teaching-data-literacy-with-african-diaspora-digital-humanities/.
• Krause, Eunice. “Data Biographies: Getting to Know Your Data.” Global Investigative Journalism Network, March 27, 2017. https://gijn.org/2017/03/27/data-biographies-getting-to-know-your-data/.

Workshop Assignments (to be completed prior to class)

• Complete the Data Creation & Discovery Assignment

Additional Resources

• M. H. Beals, “Transforming Data for Reuse and Re-publication with XML and XSL,” Programming Historian 5 (2016). https://doi.org/10.46430/phen0097.
• Seth van Hooland, Ruben Verborgh, and Max De Wilde, “Cleaning Data with OpenRefine,” Programming Historian 2 (2013). https://doi.org/10.46430/phen0023.
• Doug Knox, “Understanding Regular Expressions,” Programming Historian 2 (2013). https://doi.org/10.46430/phen0033.
• Evan Peter Williamson, “Fetching and Parsing Data from the Web with OpenRefine,” Programming Historian 6 (2017). https://doi.org/10.46430/phen0065.