How are history and computing related? How does computing support or change the goals of historians, in terms of theory, methodology, pedagogy and publication? How does history inform computing practices? This class is designed as a graduate-level introduction to some of the debates, historiographic challenges, and practical undertakings that arise when these two worlds combine.
People and Resources
Week 1: Intro and Text Mining (2015-01-14)
A practical application of text mining designed to jumpstart a conversation about:
- the affordances of human vs digital distributed cognition
- what it means to do digital history and/or digital humanities
Reading
In class
Resources/Practicum After Class
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Twitter: Sign up, find a few historians to follow (using the hashtag #twitterstorians, and use our class hashtag #DHIntro16 in your class-relevant Tweets this term.
Week 2: Messy Evidence vs Clean Data (2015-01-21)
Is evidence different than data? How do we know? How do we get data? How do we navigate the difference between aggregate and anecdotal? How do we navigate different data sets ranging from small-scale personal archival collection to large paywalled data to public data scraping? What form should these data take? How are these definitions and approaches affected by distributed-cognition approaches (human or computer) that help us collect, transcribe and clean data?
Reading
- Shawn Graham, Ian Milligan, Scott Weingart, “The Third Wave of Computational History” in The Historian’s Macroscope – working title (Under contract with Imperial College Press. Open Draft Version, Autumn 2013, http://themacroscope.org; accessed May 22, 2015)
- Trevor Owens, “Defining Data for Humanists: Text, Artifact, Information or Evidence?“, Journal of Digital Humanities, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Winter 2011, accessed May 24, 2015).
- Christof Schöch, “Big? Smart? Clean? Messy? Data in the Humanities” in Journal of Digital Humanities, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Winter 2013, accessed May 24, 2015).
- Trevor Muñoz, “Data Curation as Publishing for the Digital Humanities“, Journal of Digital Humanities, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Summer 2013, accessed May 24, 2015).
- Geoffrey Rockwell, "Crowdsourcing the Humanities", section on Distributed Knowing (pp 149-153), in Collaborative Research in the Digital Humanities (2012): https://books.google.com/books?id=uPqC6o2pqLgC&pg=PA150&lpg=PA150&dq=distributed+cognition+digital+humanities&source=bl&ots=NN60RgkNwl&sig=kqjIiwev9ORaxBLSHwIwH3Xen1E&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjw_s2vn7bKAhWhloMKHcgaBZIQ6AEIHTAA#v=onepage&q=distributed%20knowing&f=false (pp 151/2 are unavailable on Google Books but a quick skim is really the point)
Tasks Before Class
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Download a text editor (http://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/ for Mac or http://www.sublimetext.com/2 for either Mac or Windows)
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Find/explore a collection of digitized sources in your subfield (can be your own). How would you reduce these sources to a set of rows and columns in a spreadsheet? To text documents? What kinds of questions lend themselves to the answers this spreadsheet might provide? What choices do you have to make? Is there an implicit historical argument underlying those choices?
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Find one example of crowdsourcing and document its strengths and weaknesses.
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Bring your own documents. I can provide a sample data set for this week and next, but it's best that you start working with your own documents as early in the semester as possible. If these documents aren't digitized, please email me.
Resources/Practicum After Class
Week 3: Topic Modeling & Corpus Linguistics (2015-01-28)
What can we do with large scale data (once it's clean) from a textual perspective? How does it change how we talk about data (statistics vs anecdote), and/or use interdisciplinary approaches like computational linguistics? How does data mining help us with data cleanup?
Reading
- Shawn Graham, Ian Milligan and Scott Weingart, “Basic Text Mining: Word Clouds, their Limitations, and Moving Beyond Them” in The Historian’s Macroscope – working title (Under contract with Imperial College Press. Open Draft Version, Autumn 2013, http://themacroscope.org; accessed May 22, 2015)
- Johanna Drucker, “5B. Data Mining and Text Analysis” in Intro to Digital Humanities: Concepts, Methods, and Tutorials for Students and Instructors (UCLA Center for Digital Humanities, Sept 2013; accessed May 23, 2015).
- Ben Schmidt, “When you have a MALLET, everything looks like a nail” in Sapping Attention (Nov 2, 2012; accessed May 28, 2015)
- Michelle Moravec, “Corpus Linguistics for Historians” in History in the City (Dec 2013; accessed May 28, 2015)
- OPTIONAL: Under the hood of Topic Modeling's statistical model. http://tedunderwood.com/2012/04/07/topic-modeling-made-just-simple-enough/
Tasks Before Class
Resources/Practicum After Class
- The command-line tutorial for MALLET from Programming Historian. You know the analytical vocabulary now; use that to help make the technical vocabulary more approachable.
Week 4: Named Entity Recognition & Natural Language Processing (2015-02-04)
How can we take basic text mining one step further? What kinds of new data do these processes generate? How do we balance the flexibility of command-line work with the time savings we get from GUI interfaces for this kind of process?
Reading
Tasks Before Class
Resources/Practicum After Class
Week 5: Sustainability and Access (2015-02-11)
How does a digital history project, with all of its moving parts and collaborators, get off the ground? How do we back up our stuff? How do we future-proof our stuff? How do we make sure our stuff is accessible to, and informed by, a variety of potential audiences?
- Posts on “Digital Historiography and the Archives” in AHA Today (Jan 2014, from a session at the AHA Annual Meeting; accessed May 20, 2015), including in particular
- "2: Metadata and Text Markup", Stanford's Tooling Up for the Digital Humanities
- John Willinsky, “History” (Chapter 13 in The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2006)
- George Williams, “Disability, Universal Design, and the Digital Humanities” in Matthew K. Gold, ed., Debates in the Digital Humanities (University of Minnesota, 2012 Print Edition; accessed May 31, 2015)
- Tara McPherson, “Why Are the Digital Humanities So White? or Thinking the Histories of Race and Computation“, in Matthew K. Gold, ed., Debates in the Digital Humanities (University of Minnesota, 2012 Print Edition; accessed May 31, 2015)
- Optional but good (and a late addition): a 7 minute interview with Ian Milligan, "Preserving digital history is imperative to save cultural history"
Week 6: Maps & spatial history (2015-02-18)
How does space fit into historical analysis? What do maps and cartograms have in common? Are we GIS practitioners or neogeographers (and what is neogeography anyway)?
Reading
Tasks Before Class
Resources/Practicum After Class
- Lincoln Mullen's Spatial History Workshop (shameless editorialization: it is awesome)
- Spatial Data in R: https://pakillo.github.io/R-GIS-tutorial/
Week 7: Networks and Data Viz (2016-02-25)
Does seeing data instead of reading about evidence change how we ask questions? Make arguments? What works and what doesn’t in data visualization?
Readings
- John Theibault, “Visualizations and Historical Arguments” in Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki, eds., Writing History in the Digital Age, final 2013 publisher version (accessed May 22, 2015),
- Scott B. Weingart, “Demystifying Networks, Parts I & II” in Journal of Digital Humanities, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Winter 2011, accessed May 20, 2015).
- An example: Micki Kaufman, “Quantifying Kissinger Intro Video” in “Everything on Paper Will Be Used Against Me:” Quantifying Kissinger (July 2014; accessed May 28, 2015)
- On data visualization
Tasks before class
Resources/practicum after class
Week 8: Images & Augmented Reality (2016-03-03)
How does image processing work? What does it contribute to a study of history? Can augmented reality provide additional substance to the question of historical research?
Reading
Tasks before class
- If you could bring a(n?) historical object to class that students struggle to engage with--because they don't have experience of its usage, size, proportion, feel, emotional effect, whatever--what would it be? Please find several photos and, if possible, line illustrations of it.
- What object do you use every day that drives you nuts, because you have fabulous ideas to improve it if you just had the expertise to make it yourself?
- Think about the not-so-distant past, in which most people were makers. How can you use the concepts behind the maker movement to help students understand material culture in your time period.
- How do you think future historians will fit the maker movement into a history of material culture? Of social history? Of cultural history?
Week 11: Publics and publications (2016-03-31)
How does digital history and its emphasis on distributed knowledge and collaboration change the history profession? How do we approach the scholarly world as digital historians?
Reading
Tasks before class
- How would our long-form work change if it weren't presented in linear textual form?
- Start with your current course project.
- Think about what would need to be included if it were part of a long-form 90,000 word project. What would you include? What would work as linear text and what wouldn't?
- What technical support would you need? A web site? Scalar? Something else?
- How would you think about peer review?
Week 12: DigHist and Analog Pedagogy (2016-04-07)
How do we use digital history to shape teaching and learning? How do the theoretical debates around digital history shape our pedagogical practices? How do technical limitations in university classrooms shape our teaching, digital or analog?
Reading
This week's class:
My goal is to give you an abbreviated sense of what it feels like to participate in a variety of online pedagogical exercises:
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Discussion forums, the most common method of asynchronous interaction in online courses.
- Synchronous chat, one of two common simultaneous interaction options
- 30 minutes.
- Text-based chat about tools that support digital history methodology in both analog and digital classrooms, starting promptly at 6:30 on Thursday.
- The other simultaneous interaction is video conference. Zoom is my favorite of these both for its dependability and functionality, but I'll be sitting in the airport on my way to a conference and I don't want to subject you to all-too-frequent boarding announcements. We can test it for 5 minutes just to play with its screen sharing and notation functions.
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Wikipedia, a common way of staging non-paper-based research projects
- 60-75 minutes
- Choose an educational theory from the diagram at http://www.digitalpedagogylab.com/hybridped/constructionism-reborn/ that addresses one of your classroom concerns/needs (authorship, student ownership, project focus, or collaboration, or a blend). I've built several into our in-class experience already:
- Problem Based Learning (the giant poster paper we wrote on during our work on the primary source list)
- Constructionism (the maker space experience)
- Sociocultural theory (Vygotsky by way of Engestrom in the Activity Theory triangle)
- Find the Wikipedia article on your chosen educational theory. By 8:30 or 9 Thursday night:
- Copy and paste it to a Canvas page.
- Add a short section (200 words ish) on how the theory would inform your redesign of
- an undergraduate lesson in your field using one of the digital history methodologies we've learned this semester.
- one of the online lessons we undertook this week (including this Wikipedia lesson).
- Mark your edits clearly (by changing the text color to blue)
- Back to discussion forums, the most common method of asynchronous interaction in online courses.
Week 14: Project Management and Collaboration (2016-04-21)
How does a digital history project, with all of its moving parts and collaborators, get off the ground? How do we pass our stuff to someone else? At what point in a DH project do we start to think about project management issues?
Reading
Week 15: Final thoughts, or a controversy (2016-04-28)
What's next? How do historians not in this class feel about what's next? Do we agree?
Reading
These are long, and it's the end of the semester. If you're crunched for time, skim the introduction and Lara Putnam's article and focus on the exchange between Cohen/Mandler and Armitage/Guldi.
Week 16: Poster Session (2016-05-05)
You are cordially invited to partake of cheese, dessert, other refreshments, and end-of-term presentations at House Awesomesauce* from 6:30-8:30 pm on Thursday, May 5.
There's plenty of room for everyone to park in the driveway so turn down the cul de sac rather than parking at the top on the street.
* When one of my partner's students asked if he would be taking my name, he responded that we were both changing our last name. His student suggested we become "The Drs. Awesomesauce." It stuck.