Category: Class Description

Due: Project Proposal

Readings Due

• Disability, universal design, and the digital humanities, George H. Williams, Debates in Digital Humanities, ed. Matt K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, University of Minnesota Press, 2012
• Accessible data viz is better data viz, Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic, Storytelling with Data blog, 2018
• Basic Checklist: Online Content Accessibility, MSU IT

Due: Meet with Instructor

Readings Due

• Sections from PM4DH: Project Management for the Digital Humanities, Emory University, Center for Digital Scholarship, 2016
  • Designing a project
  • Defining a project’s scope
  • Creating a Work Plan
• Sections from Choosing and using sources: A guide to academic research, (Available as an open access ebook and as a pdf. Page numbers indicate pages in the pdf version of the book.)
  • Popular, Professional, and Scholarly [p.40-41]
  • Scholarly articles as sources [p.45-46]
  • News as a source [p. 47-50]
  • Data as sources [p. 51-58]
  • Fair Use [p.185-194]
  • Making an argument section [p.150-161]
  • Thinking about the roles of sources [p. 195-196]

Due: Project Critique Essay

Readings Due

• Choosing a website platform, MSU Digital Fellows Program, Kristen Mapes
• Kenneth D. Crews and Dwayne K. Buttler, “Fair Use Checklist”
• Digital Preservation Checklist, MSU Libraries, 2019

Workshop

In the second half of class, there will be a workshop on setting up a website with WordPress, using MSU Commons. In advance of class, register for MSU Commons. You will not need to setup a new username and password because the platform uses your MSU login information. You will have the option to use the site you create in the workshop for your final project, or you can delete it if you want to host your final project elsewhere.

Due: Project Ideas

Readings due

• Best practice principles of designing your first project, Jennifer Guiliano and Simon Appleford, devdh, 2013 – you must listen to the 28 min audio (located below the slides) and look through the slides
• Formulating a project’s guiding question, PM4DH: Project Management for the Digital Humanities, Emory University, Center for Digital Scholarship, 2016
• Research Questions section, from Choosing and using sources: A guide to academic research, by Teaching & Learning Team, University Libraries, Ohio State University [p.5-26 in pdf version]
  • Note – the link above takes you to the introductory page of the Research Questions section – be sure to click on the “Contents” link in the top left to make sure you read all the pages within that section. You are not required to do the activities, but you are expected to read through them.

Due: Project Critique

Readings due

• Hearing Change in the Chocolate City: Computational Methods for Listening to Gentrification, Alison Martin digital humanities quarterly 15.1, 2021
• Hearing eugenics, Jacqueline Wernimont, Sounding out!, 2016
• London under the microscope, Duncan Greere, 2021

Project Critique Options

• Voices of Gay Rodeo, University of Idaho
• Museum of the World, British Museum

Due: Project Critique

Readings due

• Knowledge creation through recommender systems, Taylor Arnold, Peter Leonard, Lauren Tilton, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 32.2, 2017
• Explore this pilot example of an in-development tool (Access & Discovery of Documentary Images (ADDI)) for recommender systems (the content of the project are the same photos from the Photogrammar project that you see below)
  • Pilot tool to explore
  • In development project explanation/documentation (for reference)
• Methods of Media Visualization, Cultural Analytics, Lev Manovich, MIT Press, 2020, p. 223-244 [available through MSU Libraries as an ebook <– MSU Libraries is undergoing a catalog shift, so if this link goes wonky, ask me for help]

Project Critique options

• Robots Reading Vogue, Yale University
• Photogrammar, Yale University

Workshop

I will demonstrate how Imageplot and ImageJ work as software, and the class will experiment using ImjTool.

Download this folder of images to use during the workshop.

Due: Project Critique

Readings due

• Demystifying Networks, Parts I & II, Scott B. Weingart, Journal of digital humanities 2011 (1.1)
• Network Analysis for DH101, video series, Miriam Posner, 2016
  • Watch part 1 and the first 10 minutes of part 3. You can watch part 2 if you like, but it isn’t necessary. (She speaks at a measured pace, so if you want to watch at 1.25 speed, it may be helpful to adjust the video player settings to do so.)
  • DH101 Network Analysis 1 , Miriam Posner, 2016
  • Network Analysis for DH101, Part 3 , Miriam Posner, 2016

Project Critique Options

• The Networked Catalog, Matt Miller, NYPL Labs, 2014
• Star Wars social networks: The Force Awakens, Evelina Gabasova, 2016
• Linked Jazz, Pratt Institute

Workshop

We will experiment with creating a network and analyzing its meaning using the tool Onodo. In advance of class:

1. Create a free account
2. Watch this tutorial video from the Digital Humanities Initiative at San Diego State University

Due: Project Critique

Readings due

• Gaps in the Map: Why We’re Mapping Everything, and Why Not Everything Can, or Should, be Mapped, Shannon Mattern, September 18, 2015
• Mapping inequality: ‘Big data’ meets social history in the story of redlining, Connolly, N. D. B., Winling, L., Nelson, R. K., & Marciano, R. In The Routledge Companion to Spatial History (pp. 502-524), 2018 [available through MSU Libraries as an ebook]
• All maps are wrong. I cut open a globe to show why, Johnny Harris, Vox. Dec 2, 2016 [5 min video]

Project Critique Options

• Mapping Inequality, Redlining in New Deal America, University of Richmond
• Mapping the Green Book, New York Public Library

Workshop

We will have a workshop on mapping with the tool Flourish. In advance of class, create a free account.

Data for the Flourish workshop comes from the Accused Witches of Scotland project. Download the spreadsheet that we will work with here.

We will discuss the readings together. Then, we will learn about the Digital Project Evaluation template that we will use to analyze DH projects throughout the semester. Finally, we will hold a workshop using two text analysis tools.

Readings due

• Using Google’s N-Gram Viewer for historical textual analysis, Todd R., 2016
• Pitfalls of using Google N-Gram to study language, Wired, 2015
• Rambsy, Kenton. “Text-Mining Short Fiction by Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright Using Voyant Tools.” CLA Journal, vol. 59, no. 3, 2016, pp. 251–258. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44325917. [Available through MSU Libraries]

Workshop

We will experiment with Google N-Grams and Voyant Tools.

We will analyze text from the early years of The Crisis. Founded by in 1910, The Crisis is the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). W.E.B DuBois was the founding editor, serving from 1910 to 1934, and used the magazine to advocate for social justice and promote Black literature, poetry, and art.

Zip folder of issues from The Crisis

We will begin our first class with introductions, an overview of the syllabus, and tutorials of the technologies you will need for this course.

As a class, we will create a set of community agreements and norms for operating throughout the semester.

Reading

• What are the Humanities?, Alan Liu, 4Humanities, 2014
• “This is why we fight”: Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities, Lisa Spiro, Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matt K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, University of Minnesota Press, 2012