DHCourse

Course outline

Unit 1. Representation and "what is digital?"

Optional Readings

• Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms (excerpts)
• Manovich, The Language of New Media (excerpts)
• Hayles, Writing Machines

• Stan Ruecker
• Bourret, "XML and Databases"
• Hayles

• McCarty on modeling
• Kraus on images
• Duguid
• Wendy Chun on "Sourcery"
• Alan Liu, Critical Inquiry piece

2/1: Introduction and definitions

In advance: students choose a site and consider the following questions:

• what model of audience engagement does the site propose?
• is this site "scholarship"? if so, why? if not, why not?
• is this site "public"? if so, why? if not, why not?
• is this site "digital"? and what does that mean? what do we learn about digitalness by looking at this site?

Questions to entertain in class:

• How do we self-identify with respect to discipline? Ask students to name their "field" and consider what characterizes it

JHF notes

Readings

• Lev Manovich, "What is New Media?" and "Principles of New Media" Manovich

Assignments

Assign close reading of the sites students chose

2/8: Digital scholarship and discipline

Readings

• PMLA cluster
  • Folsom, "Database as Genre"
  • McGann, Hayles, McGill, Stallybrass, and Freedman: Responses to Folsom
• Ayers and Thomas, "The Difference Slavery Made"
• "Going to the Show"

JHF notes

Assignments

• Talk about project, and assign document analysis and project selection
• Assign literature review (due ongoing, at intervals)

2/15: Lab on WordPress

Students will bring short response paper (assignment 1) to class to use in creating WordPress entry

Readings

• Examples of WordPress sites that use plugins in interesting ways
• Reading (ask Trevor/Richard) on information design, blogs, metadata

Assignments

• Close reading due (WP entry)
• Project selection due (WP entry) (on the basis of project selection, identify groups for case study)

Unit 2. Audience and curation

Topics:

• make connection between museums and scholarly publishing, around issues of access, audience, "scholarship", "the public", interactivity and the role of community knowledge

Optional readings:

• Moretti
• Aarseth
• Hall

• Samis, "The Exploded Museum" in Digital Technologies and the Museum Experience: Handheld Guides and Other Media
• Dietz, "Curating (on) the Web"

2/22: Audience and curation

How do public humanities and scholarly resource sites create a sense of audience? What relationships between audience, institution, and curator are visible in (or affected by) the digital interfaces we build?

Readings

• Lunenfeld, The Digital Dialectic (available online via Josiah)
• Graham and Cook, excerpts on materiality, audience, curation, participation (~80 pages)
• steve.museum readings
  • Trant, "Studying Social Tagging and Folksonomy: A Review and Framework
  • Klavans et al., "T3: Text, Tags, Trust" (IMLS grant proposal)

Assignment

• Document/audience analysis due (include some idea of structure, metadata)
• Assign project spec

3/1: Lab: Omeka

Readings

• Tim O'Reilly's site, while mostly about enterprise Web technology and the like contains lots of links to papers / interviews / videos where that touch on larger questions of electronic publishing, audience, the implications of relying on large-scale commercial infrastructure for modern Web technologies, etc.
• Tim O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Meme Map, widely copied around the Web
• Zotero group for Digital Oral History and Metadata (includes guidelines / specs / documentation on metadata as well as some project-specific information)
• Ding and Lin, "Information Architecture: The Design and Integration of Information Spaces" (Full text PDF) -- somewhat technical overview of some of the issues involved in information architecture for the modern Web, largely from a HCI standpoint; the first couple of sections could be useful
• Dan Cohen's Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web

Assignments

• Assign case studies

3/8: Audience and information design

Look at information design issues in light of our work with Omeka and considering how information design affects audience (usage, interaction, contribution, sense of authority, etc.)

Readings

• Fiona Cameron, "Beyond the Cult of the Replicant"
• Dan Cohen -- something from http://www.dancohen.org/publications/
• Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody (selections) and/or short online essays

Sites and resources for analysis:

• CHNM sites
• The Difference Slavery Made
• Exploratorium (the "black box" approach)
• Monticello Flash-based maps
• MassHist Adams diary

Unit 3. Institutions and communities

Optional readings:

• Stuart Moulthrop
• Johanna Drucker
• Mark Poster

3/15: Lab on Simile tools and structured data

Students will bring a small collection of structured data (something as simple as a Google spreadsheet) that contains at least some geographic / time series / event information to use in creating a simple Exhibit. Also look at information map at the outset (enough literature review done by this point to make it meaningful/inspirational to look at it).

Readings

• Huhyn, Karger, and Miller, "Exhibit: Lightweight Structured Data Publishing"
• Jeremy Boggs (of CHNM): brief series on digital humanities design and development process

Assignments

• Project spec due

3/22: Institutions and communities

Compare museum and academic culture with respect to audience cultivation, sense of "public" and responsibility, interactions between creators, curators, and reader/users

Readings

• ACLS report
• Some canonical reading on museums and cultural authority (perhaps Andrea Whitcomb, Reimagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum)
• Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (MIT 2008)
• Reading on linked data

4/5: Institutions and cultural authority

Think about discovery: what are the conditions of cultural visibility, esp. in the digital realm?

Readings

• Kathy Sierra, "The Dumbness of Crowds" Creating Passionate Users

Sites for review:

• Brooklyn Museum
• British Library
• Library of Congress on Flickr?
• Have students bring in sites for discussion

JHF Notes

Unit 4. Social change

Optional readings

• Jensen
• Vaidhyanathan
• Liu, Critical Inquiry piece
• Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
• Jarvis, What Would Google Do?
• Vaidhyanathan, The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry)

4/12

• Case studies
• Project descriptions (lightning round with feedback, discussion)

Assignment

• Case studies due: substantive blog post plus lightning round

4/19

Readings and discussion:

• Kathleen Fitzgerald -- on peer review and the like
• MA in Knowledge and Networks -- Draft Proposal
• Rita Raley -- Tactical Media
• Fusco and Dominiquez (Digital Lunch readings for 10/15/2010)
• HASTAC scholars' forum on "democratizing knowledge"

4/26: Looking back and ahead: what did we learn? what do we do?

Big Ideas -- looking back, what can we do, professional plans... How does this all work together?

Assignment

• Students post draft brief critical analysis of final projects on course blog, comment, etc

Readings

• Show and tell: students bring in good resources for staying current
• DHAnswers, ProfHacker
• Digital Humanities Now

5/10: Final presentations, second round

Assignment

• Final draft of project critical analysis due

Course description

How has the digital turn in the 21st century affected scholarship in the humanities and public humanities? What kind of intellectual and professional landscape is being formed by digital media? In this course, graduate students and advanced undergraduates will have the opportunity to explore what it means to do digital scholarship, broadly speaking: both how we create the resources on which digitally inflected research depends, and how we use those resources. The course will provide a critical framework for this work, focusing on four specific areas:

1. Representation, materiality, medium: how do digital objects represent (simulate, provide access to) physical artifacts? what are the different kinds of representational media in play here and how do they affect the kinds of interactions we can have with these objects? How has their relation to "real objects" been understood in different contexts?

2. Audience and curation: How are audiences constructed or shaped through different kinds of interfaces and digital representations? What kinds of communities and relationships form this way? How is the role of the curator changing?

3. Institutionalization and community: How are the institutional frameworks for public humanities changing, in relation to curation and audience construction? what kinds of institutions are needed to frame digital collections and what role do they play? How do institutions and communities interact? What kinds of counter-institutional trends and activities are emerging? How are the relationships between institutions and audiences changing?

4. Social change: what kinds of political and social change do digital modes of public humanities propose, and what do they actually achieve? What kinds of different models for engagement are available? How do the impulse towards preservation (and the idea of cultural heritage) and the impulse towards change (innovation, progress) interact and influence one another?

In addition to contextual readings which will provide a grounding in essential concepts as well as a set of critical perspectives, the course will make strong use of case studies in which we examine and reverse engineer specific projects in detail.

The assignments for the course are focused on several goals:

• giving students an opportunity to examine (both in theory and in practice) the changes in scholarly practice that are arising in the digital humanities
• giving students a critical understanding of the relationship between the communicative interfaces of digital scholarly resources and the information structures and scholarly practices that support and produce these resources
• giving students a grounding in current debates on central topics in digital humanities, focused through the four themes of the course

There are five assignments, some of which have associated in-class followup:

1. Close reading of a single page from a digital humanities resource or publication. In this close reading, students are asked, first, to interpret the page and identify as much information as possible that can be inferred or accessed from it; and second, to compare their reading process in this case with their reading process of a traditional printed source, considering what kinds of information they understand to be present, how the information is communicated, how they assess the meaning of the information, etc.

2. Literature review: For this assignment, students are asked to choose a topic or debate of interest and a text from the reading list to use as a starting point. Using that text, students will develop a related bibliography of approximately two dozen items, providing for at least half the items a brief annotation describing the relevance of the item to the debate or topic in question.

2a. In class, we will take the literature review assignments and express them as an information network. Working in small groups (grouped roughly by topic) students will first discuss the items they included in their literature review and how they relate to one another, identifying shared items. Then, we will take the aggregated items from all the groups and create a single networked representation that maps the entire domain covered by the literature review, identifying salient debates and core topics. This information map will later serve as the basis for the call for papers in the final conference.

3. Conference paper proposal: For this assignment, students will develop a short proposal (approximately 300 words) for a paper they plan to deliver at the final conference in the course (see item 5 below).

4. Group case study. For this assignment, students will be formed into groups, each of which will develop a case study of a particular digital humanities publication or resource. The case study will address the resource from the analytical perspective of the four main topic areas (representation, audience/curation, institutions and communities, and social change), considering both how the resource is constructed as digital humanities information, and what model of interaction (scholarship, public engagement, etc.) it produces on the basis of that information.

4a. In class, each group will give a short presentation on their case study.

5. Conference presentation. In the last two weeks of class (during exam period) we will hold an in-class conference to which members of our immediate community will also be invited. Each student will give a brief, pecha-kucha style presentation of approximately 6 minutes, followed by questions and discussion.

6. Final paper. Students will submit a final version of their conference paper and slides.

Course topics

1. Representation, materiality, medium: how do digital objects represent (simulate, provide access to) physical artifacts? what are the different kinds of representational media in play here and how do they affect the kinds of interactions we can have with these objects? How has their relation to "real objects" been understood in different contexts?
2. Audience and curation: think about the triangular relationship between objects, curators, and audiences. How are audiences constructed or shaped through different kinds of interfaces and digital representations? What kinds of communities and relationships form this way? How is the role of the curator changing? Are the creators of digital resources curators? etc.
3. Institutionalization: how are the institutional frameworks for public humanities changing, in relation to curation and audience construction? what kinds of institutions are needed to frame digital collections and what role do they play? What kinds of counter-institutional trends and activities are emerging? How are the relationships between institutions and audiences changing?
4. Social change: what kinds of political and social change do digital modes of public humanities propose, and what do they actually achieve? What kinds of different models for engagement are available? How do the impulse towards preservation (and the idea of cultural heritage) and the impulse towards change (innovation, progress) interact and influence one another?

Course mechanics

The course would include several central components:

• Case studies in which we examine and reverse engineer specific projects in detail, looking both at how they are built/implemented and at how they are used
• Project plans based on student project ideas, in which we develop frameworks and functional plans for projects based on specific collections, objects, or data sets; these would be presented and workshopped in class
• Readings for context: both to provide some conceptual-level understanding of the way the technologies work (rhetorically and structurally) and to provide some critical perspectives on issues of digital representation, etc.

Assignment ideas

• Weekly or bi-weekly short response papers, possibly in the form of a wiki or discussion forum post; students alternate between writing response and commenting on the responses
• Short critical reading of a scholarly object (book, web site, other digital media object or resource, etc.), used as the basis for in-class discussion and meta-analysis with partner
• Case studies (group assignment?): analyze an existing project or digital resource
• Critical debate/literature review paper: examine an important point of debate or disagreement, identifying the key participants and offering a brief synopsis of the history of the debate and an analysis of the major positions
• Group assignment following from critical debate papers: each group examines the critical debate/lit. review papers from the whole class to create an information map that (ideally) shows the connections among scholars and the most trenchant points of critical debate in the field
• Final "conference" presentation: each student makes a public presentation at a mini-conference session organized by the class (possibly following an internal CFP?); presentation formation might be one designed for brevity (eg. pecha kucha, lightning talk)
• Critical review of a public humanities publication or resource
• Information flow map (as part of a project plan)
• Grant proposal (as part of a project plan)
• Short paper on rhetoric and audience for proposed project

Possible readings

Kari Kraus on images and textual scholarship? (Forthcoming in Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship)

Kari Kraus on conjectural criticism (perhaps paired with Steve Ramsay?)

Steve Ramsay on algorithmic criticism

Franco Moretti

Ed Folsom, "The database as genre", PMLA October 2007 (and also the "Responses" from Peter Stallybrass, Kate Hayles, Jerome McGann, Meredith McGill, Jonathan Freedman)

Clay Shirkey, Here comes everybody (on crowd-sourcing and folksonomies) or Cognitive Surplus (2010)

James Surowieki, The Wisdom of Crowds ?

Kathy Sierra, "The Dumbness of Crowds" Creating Passionate Users

Wendy Chun, "Sourcery"

Alan Liu (lots of essays to choose from; take a look at Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database but also at the list of essays on his web site) ("Transcendtal Data", for example)

Katherine Hayles

Espen Aarseth, Cybertext (bringing in perspectives on interactivity)

Cathy Davidson, "Humanities 2.0" (PMLA 123.3 May 2008)

Davidson and David Theo Goldberg, report on "The Future of Thinking" (available as free PDF)

Kathleen Fitzgerald, "Obsolescence" (PMLA 123.3 May 2008)

Gary Hall, Digitize This Book! The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now (Minnesota, 2008)

Willard McCarty, chapter on modeling (maybe in conjunction with PMLA cluster and Kirchenbaum)

Johanna Drucker, SpecLab (or one of her articles?)

Paul Duguid, "Material Matters" in The Future of the Book

Geoffrey Nunberg, "Farewell to the Information Age" in The Future of the Book

Stuart Moulthrop (sp?), "You Say You Want a Revolution? Hypertext and the Laws of Media" in Essays in Postmodern Culture (2004) and "Rhizome and Resistance: Hypertext and the Dreams of a New Culture" in Hyper/Text/Theory (1994)

Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook, Rethinking Curating: Art after New Media (MIT 2010)

Rita Raley, Tactical Media

Terry Harpold, Ex-foliations: Reading Machines and the Upgrade Path

Articles in Culture Machine ?

Nick Montfort, Noah Wardrup-Fruin ?

Paul Delaney and George Landow (eds.) Hypermedia and Literary Studies

Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (MIT 2008)

The New Media Reader

Lunenfeld, The Digital Dialectic: Essays in New Media (has Hayles essay "The Condition of Virtuality")

Andrea Whitcomb, Reimagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum.

Mark Poster, What's the Matter with the Internet?

Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Googlization of Everything ?

Michael Jensen, "Authority 3.0": Friend or Foe to Scholars?" (Journal of Scholarly Publishing 39, 207-307)