Introduction to Digital Humanities

Course Information

DHUM 70000
Fall 2022
MA Program in Digital Humanities
CUNY Graduate Center
Wednesdays 6:30 pm–8:30pm – In person 8/31-9/28, then online via Zoom

Course Blog: http://cuny.is/dhintro2022
Course Group: http://cuny.is/dhintro2022-group
Course Hashtag: #dhintro2022
Email the class: dhintro2022@groups.commons.gc.cuny.edu

Faculty

Dr. Matthew K. Gold
mgold@gc.cuny.edu
http://mkgold.net
@mkgold

Dr. Krystyna Michael
kmichael@hostos.cuny.edu

Advisory Fellows:
Filipa Calado (MA in DH);
Rafael Davis Portela (MS in Data Analysis/Vis)

Course Overview

Building on a recent intro to DH class that approached DH from a Caribbean-studies perspective, this course aims to provide a landscape view of DH, paying attention to how its various approaches embody new ways of knowing and thinking, new epistemologies. What kinds of questions, for instance, does the practice of mapping pose to our research and teaching? How does the concept of mapping change when we begin from the Global South? When we attempt to share our work through social media, how is it changed and who do we imagine it reaches? How can we visually and ethically represent various forms of data and how does the data morph in the representation?

Over the course of this semester, we will explore these questions and others as we engage ongoing debates in the digital humanities, such as the problem of defining the digital humanities, the question of whether DH has (or needs) theoretical grounding, controversies over new models of peer review for digital scholarship, issues related to collaborative labor on digital projects, and the problematic questions surrounding research involving “big data.” The course will also emphasize the ways in which DH has helped transform the nature of academic teaching and pedagogy in the contemporary university with its emphasis on collaborative, student-centered and digital learning environments and approaches.

Central themes in the course will emerge from our focus on the Caribbean — in particular, how various technologies and technical approaches have been shaped by colonial practices; how archives might be decolonized and how absences in the archives might be accounted for; and how concepts like minimal computing might alter the projects we build.

Though no previous technical skills are required, students will be asked to experiment in introductory ways with DH tools and methods as a way of concretizing some of our readings and discussions. Students will be expected to participate actively in class discussions and online postings (including on our course blog) and to undertake a final project that can be either a conventional seminar paper or a proposal for a digital project. Students completing the course will gain broad knowledge about and understanding of the emerging role of the digital humanities across several academic disciplines and will begin to learn some of the fundamental skills used often in digital humanities projects.

Note: this course is part of an innovative “Digital Praxis Seminar,” a two-semester long introduction to digital tools and methods that will be open to all students in the Graduate Center. The goal of the course is to introduce graduate students to various ways in which they can incorporate digital research into their work.

Learning Objectives

• Students will become acquainted with the current landscape of the field of digital humanities and explore its connections to the global south and other parts of hte world.
• Students will become conversant with a range of debates in the field of DH through readings and discussions.
• Students will create a social media presence and begin to prepare their own digital portfolios.
• Students will create a proposal for a digital project for possible development in the Spring.
• Students will become familiar with the resources available at the Graduate Center to support work on digital teaching and research projects.

 

Requirements and Structure:

Students in the course should complete the following work during the semester:

Reading and Discussion (Weekly)

Students should complete and collaboratively annotate all weekly readings in advance of the class meeting and should take an active part in class discussions.

Collaborative Annotations (Weekly)

Many of our readings in this course are from The Debates in Digital Humanities series, the public access version of which is published on Manifold. Manifold is a digital publishing platform in development between the GC, the University of Minnesota Press, and Cast Iron Coding, and features a robust collaborative annotation tool.

We will be annotating our readings in The Debates in the Digital Humanities series together prior to class meetings in which they are discussed. Students should contribute 5? 8-10? Annotations or replies a week that ask and answer questions, summarize or gloss main points, create connections between readings and/ or class discussions, and provide links to relevant websites and resources that will enrich our understanding of these texts and provide a resource you can refer to for your projects or in your future work. If possible, please annotate the reading for the week by the end of the day on Tuesday so that others have time to read and respond before class.

Blogging (7 posts)

Students are responsible for writing seven blog posts on our shared course blog. If possible, please post your writing by the end of day on Tuesday so that others have time to read your work before class.

Required posts:

• one post during the second week of the class;
• two short responses to our weekly readings, collaborative annotation discussions, or in-class discussions. Post your thoughts, reactions, questions, responses;
• one post about a workshop you have attended, with the goal of helping other students understand what they may have missed and/or what you found valuable about it;
• two posts about your praxis assignments;
• one post about your final project.

Students who are not writing blog posts on a given week should comment on and respond to the posts of other students.

Workshops (3 workshops)

In connection with GC Digital Initiatives, we will be offering skills workshops throughout the semester. Students are responsible for attending a minimum of three workshops over the course of the semester. You are free to go to as many as you’d like pending space limitations. To satisfy this requirement, students can also attend workshops offered by the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Program, the Teaching and Learning Center, the GC Library, and the Quantitative Research Center.

Praxis Assignments (Choose 2 of the 4 Assignments Listed below)

During the semester, we will ask you to complete two praxis assignments. These exercises are meant to be beginner-level; our interest in having you complete them lies in getting you to experiment with new tools. Your results do not have to be necessarily significant or meaningful; the important thing is to engage the activity and gain a better understanding of the kinds of choices one must make when undertaking such a project. We ask you to think, too, about both the strengths and the limitations of the tools you are trying out.

Mapping Assignment

Create a map using one of the tools described in “Finding the Right Tools for Mapping.” You can create any map you’d like; we just want you to try to use one of these pieces of mapping software. Should you feel so inspired, we invite you to explore one of the following options:

 

• Create a map that in some way attempts to work against the constraints of maps (generally) or the particular mapping software you are using.
• Create a map of something that is not necessarily (or traditionally thought of as) mappable.
• Create a map related to issues of sovereignty as discussed in the “Visualizing Sovereignty” article.
• Create a map of a novel, an author’s works, or some other data using Google Maps, CartoDB, ARCGIS StoryMaps, or another mapping platform.

 

Please create a blog post describing your experiences.

Visualization Assignment

Create a data visualization using one of the tools described in “Tooling Up For Digital Humanities: Data Visualization” (we suggest starting with Tableau Public or Palladio, especially if you are new to data vis). As with the mapping praxis assignment, you may create any type of visualization you’d like; we just want you to attempt working with one of these pieces of data viz software. Since we’ve already done a mapping praxis assignment, please avoid a geospatial visualization.

Please create a blog post describing your experience(s) creating the data visualization and connect your experience(s) with one or two readings from class thus far, particularly from the “Data and Visualization” week.

Please create a blog post describing your experiences.

Text Analysis Assignment

First, read this overview of text-mining. Second, choose a text or set of texts to explore with Voyant (easiest), Google N-Gram, J-Stor Text Analyzer, Bookworm, MALLET, or another text-mining tool. Third, explore! Fourth, blog about your experiences.
Resources (tool overviews and/or project examples):

• https://libguides.wpi.edu/digital_scholarship/text_analysis (note — some links lead to WPI-restricted resources, but you can find open version of most resources named by googling the tool names)
• http://dh.matrix.msu.edu/research/text-mining/

Please create a blog post describing your experiences.

Analysis of a Digital Humanities Project and Lightning Talk

Familiarize yourself with several “mature” digital humanities projects, and then select one to analyze and critique. You should investigate not only the finished project, but also any supporting materials you can find—blog posts, press releases, early drafts, software documentation, etc.

Create a blog post and prepare a 3 minute lightning talk that presents the project and your critique to the class.

Survey DH projects; here are some directories:

• Maria Popova’s “Digital Humanities Spotlight” (https://www.themarginalian.org/index.php/2011/08/12/digital-humanities-7-important-digitization-projects/)
• Alan Liu’s “Examples of DH Scholarship” (http://dhresourcesforprojectbuilding.pbworks.com/w/page/69244444/Digital%20Humanities%20Examples)

Questions to consider:

Why did the author(s) pursue this project as a digital humanities project? What about this project makes it “DH”?
What does this project tell us about its subject that a “traditional” research project couldn’t?
Why did the author(s) choose these particular tools and methods to complete the project? Do you think the tools were chosen to match the subject matter? Or was the subject matter selected to match the tools?
If the project has gone through multiple iterations, what did the previous versions of the site look like? How has it changed over time. (The Wayback Machine can help you find out.)
What are the strengths of the project? How does it enrich our understanding of the subject?
What are the shortcomings of the project? What additional work could the author(s) do to overcome these problems?

Lightning Talks Examples:
NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grants 2019 Lightning Talks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSsaYltiiiY
DH2019 Pre-conference Lightning Talks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZMFbA8iLSM

Note: this assignment is adapted from one developed by Dr. Quinn Warwick at Virginia Tech. You can view the original assignment here: http://5074.quinnwarnick.com/projectanalysis/

Connected Pedagogy Assignment (required):

Students will have the opportunity to put the pedagogical strategies we will read about and discuss into action in this assignment. Students will use Manifold’s annotation tools to prepare and lead a discussion in the margins of a text being taught at CUNY Hostos Community College. Students will be put in groups of 4 and each group will leave 2-3 annotations on the reading that ask discussion questions, provide definitions and glosses, and generally help contextualize and provide background necessary for a first-year undergraduate to get the most out of the reading. Students will respond to and expand on Hostos students’ annotations and replies.

Final Projects:

Students may choose between a) writing a conventional seminar paper related to some aspect of our course readings; or b) crafting a formal proposal for a digital project that might be executed with a team of students during the spring semester. Guidelines for the assignment are available here.

Grading

Regular participation in discussions across the range of our face-to-face and online course spaces is essential.

• Participation and online assignments (50%)
• Final project (50%)

Accessibility

It is Graduate Center and CUNY policy to provide appropriate accommodations to students with disabilities. Any student with a disability who may need accommodations in this class is advised to speak directly to the manager of Student Disability Services, located in Student Affairs, room 7301, or call 212-817-7400 as early in the semester as possible. All discussions will remain confidential.

While offices are operating remotely, email Clare Wilson at cwilson1@gc.cuny.edu or visit the SDS website, http://cuny.is/disabilityservices .

Accounts

All students should register for accounts on the course group on the CUNY Academic Commons, the Debates in the Digital Humanities Manifold instance — and the course’s reading group — NYCDH, and DH Slack. Though we will not use it in class, students may want to sign up for accounts on Zotero, an open-source citation management system.

Remember that when you register for social-networking accounts, you do not have to use your full name or even your real name. One benefit of writing publicly under your real name is that you can begin to establish a public academic identity and to network with others in your field. However, keep in mind that search engines have extended the life of online work; if you are not sure that you want your work for this course to be part of your permanently searchable identity trail on the web, you should strongly consider creating a digital alias. Whether you engage social media under your real name or whether you construct a new online identity, please consider the ways in which social media can affect your career in both positive and negative ways.

Class Recordings

Students who participate in this class with their camera on or use a profile image are agreeing to have their video or image recorded solely for the purpose of creating a record for students enrolled in the class to refer to, including those enrolled students who are unable to attend live. If you are unwilling to consent to have your profile or video image recorded, be sure to keep your camera off and do not use a profile image. Likewise, students who un-mute during class and participate orally are agreeing to have their voices recorded. If you are not willing to consent to have your voice recorded during class, you will need to keep your mute button activated and communicate exclusively using the “chat” feature, which allows students to type questions and comments live.

Books to Purchase

There are no books to purchase for this course – all texts will be provided to you via links to open educational resources on the web or PDFs available in our course group.
Please check out our course schedule for our list of weekly assignments and readings. Readings marked (PDF) will be made available via the Files section of our course group.

Dataset Resources

Finding Data Guide from the GC Library
NYC Open Data
Data.gov
Datasets for Digital Research (MSU Libraries)
Open Data Repositories
CDC Data
Datasets for Cleaning Practice
National Library of Medicine Datasets