Week 3: Teaching Digital History

1. Week 3 Overview
2. Week 3 Reading and Discussion
3. Week 3 Lab: Low-Barrier Approaches to Digital History
4. Project-goal word barf

Week 3 Overview

Teaching Digital History

When we work with digital history, especially as novices, it helps to understand how one might teach digital history. In addition to being a great introduction to the field broadly, this includes a lot of strategies for communicating the stakes of digital history to the novice audiences digital historians encounter outside of the digital-history stalwarts (e.g. Digital Humanities Quarterly, Journal of Digital History).

Reading: Guiliano, A Primer for Teaching Digital History. How can we use digital-history pedagogy to understand the field from both a research and teaching perspective? See Week 3 Reading and Discussion Copy for the specific chapters to read.

Lab: In two parts, fully described in Week 3 Lab: Low-Barrier Approaches to Digital History. We’ll use a second, short pre-class reading to anchor a 15-minute activity that uses sticky notes to teach topic-modeling algorithms. Then we’ll learn some of the basics of command-line environments–the kind of work software-oriented digital historians like me do–as a gateway to understanding coding “notebooks”, a “virtual machine” with a point-and-click interface that gives non-software-developer digital historians access to run Python code.

Collaborative data management: No student presentation.

Week 3 Reading and Discussion

Reading: Guiliano, A Primer for Teaching Digital History.

• Chapter 1 (Foundations)
• Chapter 4 (the Basics of Digital Methods)
• Chapter 6 (Text and Network Analysis)
• Chapter 7 (Visualization)
• 2 chapters of your choice from Section III on Forms of Digital Scholarship

Discussion:

• How does learning about digital-history pedagogy help a nascent digital-history researcher?
• Which chapter seems most relevant right now to you and why?
• Which chapter/example/specific activity made you stop skimming for class and go back and re-read it deeply?
• What’s your overall takeaway from A Primer about the general considerations you need to keep in mind as you teach and research digital history?

Week 3 Lab: Low-Barrier Approaches to Digital History

Learn how to teach digital history with analogue tools

AT HOME: Read Craig, “Analog Tools in Digital History Classrooms: An Activity-Theory Case Study of Learning Opportunities in Digital Humanities” at https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/ij-sotl/vol11/iss1/7/ .

AT HOME: Think briefly about how you might adapt one of these exercises for a primary source that you love but think might be too complicated for undergraduate reading.

The basics of “computing ecosystems” (and a low-barrier computing

environment for you)

Our aim with the in-class portion of lab is to understand 4 basic computing principles that have a practical outcome for digital historians.

AT HOME: If you’re on a Windows machine, please install Windows Terminal. https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9n0dx20hk701?rtc=1hl=en-usgl=US

You are welcome to read through the “in-class” portion of this, but don’t let it freak you out. I’ve prepped this as my guide and will provide specific examples We’ll do a much more thorough, less scary job of introducing these concepts in class.

IN CLASS:

1. We need to understand how the command line works (15 minutes). “Command line” is a fancy way of saying “the typing-based interface that programmers use to debug and run programs that they’ve built.” Command-line knowledge will help you make sense of the instructions you get in just about any major digital-history tutorial, from the Programming Historian to Stack Overflow.**
   • Reference for after class: https://www.learnenough.com/command-line-tutorial/basics **

**

1. We need to understand “variables” (5 minutes). Variables are placeholders for actual information, and we’ll look at 3 different kinds today:
2. Integers: Think about “solving for X” in algebra. X is an integer variable because it can really only hold a number.
3. Strings: Think about the “first name” field in a shopping cart. “First Name” is a string variable because it holds a series of characters that can be anything.
4. Lists: Lists are complex variables that hold a series of other variables in them. Think about a shopping list. You’ll loop through each thing on the shopping list, top to bottom, and perform the same actions: “Find”, “Put in cart”, “Buy.” Your list can be long or short, and can contain anything.
   • Reference for after class:https://medium.com/@sunidhisinghal/python-data-types-numbers-strings-lists-booleans-tuples-dictionaries-and-sets-41a214745dfb
5. We need to understand scripting vs compiled code (5 minutes). This sounds scary but isn’t. I WILL WALK THROUGH THIS IN CLASS.
6. 90% of digital-history code is scripting-language based. These “scripts” are made of code that is readable to both humans and computers (as long as the computer has the right translator already installed). You can share a script, but your collaborators will need to install a “translator” for the script in order to run, or “execute” it. When you run a script, you’ll get errors along the way that will show you what’s happening and on which line of your script the code failed. (HTML, Javascript, R, Python)
7. Compiled code is written first, then run through a translator–a compiler that is its own app–that transforms your code from human-readable to computer-executable packaged application. You can now share an application with a collaborator that needs no external translator; however, your collaborators will only be able to use, not to edit, what you share with them. When compiled code fails, it can fail at both the compile stage (there’s a file missing) or at the run stage (the app will suddenly shut down and generate an error, but you won’t be able to open the code to see where it went wrong). (C, C++, C#, Unity, used to build applications like the ones you double-click on your computer or phone).
   • Reference for after class: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/whats-the-difference-between-scripting-and-programming-languages/
8. We need a “computing ecosystem” (45 minutes) --a way to use and adapt the technical tools that are floating around on the internet. IN CLASS, we’ll start with Google CoLab, a “notebook” environment that lets you run Python code line by line without having to install anything on your computer.
   • Sample file is here: REDACTED **

**

Optional: Install Conda or Docker and the relevant Jupyter-Notebooks container.

**

Project-goal word barf

What are you focused on in your own research? How would you like this class

to apply to that research?

While these two questions will help guide the rest of the semester, I’m not looking for perfection (or even coherence) at this point in the semester. Instead, I want to get us started by thinking about the first step in scoping project narratives. I want you to learn:

• how to describe what you want in an ideal world with zero limits on time or money. This gives you your long-term goal.
• how to describe what you think is actually feasible, within the boundaries of the time and money you have available. This lets you set short-term deadlines
• How to be flexible about progress toward a short-term deadline. This lets you readjust short-term goals within the scope of the project’s immediate deadlines when things go wrong.

H585: Your final project will be split two-thirds on your project and one- third on a peer’s project. ** For your project , you’ll do an early-stage prototype, an environmental scan, and a sustainability plan. Focus on this part of your semester for today’s assignment.** For your peer’s project , we’ll look at how grant-review panels work, and you’ll write a review-panel- style review, with a consultation reflection that I’ll assess and edit before passing along to your peer.

H699: Your final project will focus on a draft of a Level 1 NEH digital humanities advancement grant (https://www.neh.gov/grants/odh/digital- humanities-advancement-grants), including the project prototype, the environmental scan and sustainability plan above but with an additional narrative section that helps you understand how to take the project prototype and describe it and its future for a grant-review panel.

How to scope your answer to this first “word-barf” assignment

For both sections: Choose a project you’ve already done some original research on; do not start a new project.

1. Start with a 3-sentence description of what you would do in the next year for your current research project, if you had all the funding in the world. This description might include digital methods or not.
2. Ask a 1-sentence research question that is currently driving your thoughts on this project.
   • For example: my big question right now is “Can we use the narrative trends/outliers present in the language of/situations described in ‘deeds of bishops’ sources to understand the patterns of historical change/continuity in the type and source of threats to episcopal power in cities with an extant ‘deeds of bishops’ source?”
3. Bullet-point the primary sources that might contribute to your project. List whatever comes up, as specifically as you can given where you’re at in your graduate career: types of sources, authors you’re interested in, collections you know exist, anything that helps you identify the primary sources you might depend on.
4. Briefly describe, in no more than 2 sentences each, any project you’ve completed previously (seminar papers, undergrad research, research trips) that has helped you understand this current project. Include the start and completion dates for each of these at the end of the 2 sentences.

How to submit assignments in this class

Please use OneDrive or GoogleDrive to create whatever documents you want to share with me. Make sure you’ve shared with craigkl@iu.edu, and then submit the sharing link.

How we’ll treat assignments in this class

Draft assignments will always be due before class. We’ll spend 20 minutes in class doing guided revisions, and then you’ll have another 24-36 hours to revise what’s in the Google doc you initially shared for your submission. I’ll start reading and commenting on Wednesday evening or Thursday morning.

Due at: Sep 9, 2024 at 12am

Grading Type: Points

Points: 0.0

Submitting: Online URL