Syllabus:
GAH 3223: Introduction to Digital Humanities
Spring 2011
Dr. John Theibault
Contact Information:
Office K140a
Phone 609 652-4933
Email John[dot]Theibault[at]Stockton[dot]edu
Office Hours: M 10:00-2:00 or by appointment
Course Website/Blog: http://wp.stockton.edu/gah3223spring2011
Overview:
This course will introduce you to the ways that the computer, and more specifically the internet, are transforming research and teaching in the traditional humanities fields, such as literature, history, art and music history. The term “digital humanities” has become a common way of defining the changes wrought by “new media.” The term digital humanities has two main strands: incorporation of computer methods and digital media in the study and presentation of traditional humanities topics and application of humanities methods to the study of new creative products made possible by new media such as MMOGs.
The course involves both exploration and interpretation of digital humanities projects and hands-on application of some current digital humanities tools. The course does not require any special programming skills.
Assignments:
The grade for this course will be based on four factors, weighted as indicated:
• Regular entries on the course blog including at least four blog posts on assigned topics (ca. 30%)
• An online project applying concepts discussed in this course to a humanities project of your choosing (ca. 40%),
• A final 5-6 page paper (ca. 20%)
• Regular attendance and participation in class discussions (ca. 10%)
For details on assignments see the tab Projects.
Required Reading:
Two books are available for purchase in the campus bookstore:
Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth, eds., A Companion to Digital Humanities (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2004)
Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, eds., Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web (Philaadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006)
However, you are not required to purchase the books, since they are also available online at the following URLs:
Schreibman, et al, available online at: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/
Cohen and Rosenzweig available online at: http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/
Additional readings are noted in the schedule of classes.
Schedule of Classes: (Note: This is a preliminary schedule. I expect to tinker with it frequently during the semester as the course progresses in response to student interest and my own new discoveries. Digital humanities is a rapidly evolving field and is very connected to social media. New readings are likely to emerge during the semester and will be incorporated into the syllabus and noted in the course blog where appropriate.) Readings from A Companion to Digital Humanities (ACDH) and Digital History (DigHist) are listed for he beginning of each week.
Week One: Beginnings and Technical Issues
1/19 Introduction to course
1/21 WordPress CLASS MEETS IN F-222
Week Two: What is Digital Humanities? ACDH Forward, Introduction, and History of Humanities Computing; DigHist Introduction; Three Digital Humanities Manifestoes: http://humanistica.ualberta.ca/bloomsburg-u-undergraduate-manifesto-on-digital-humanities/ http://manifesto.humanities.ucla.edu/2008/12/15/digital-humanities-manifesto/ http://stanford.edu/~schnapp/Manifesto%202.0.pdf
1/24 Digital media in today’s life
1/26 What are the Humanities?
1/28 From Humanities Computing to Digital Humanities
Week Three: ACDH Rest of Part I (Choose any four); DigHist Exploring the History Web
1/31 Social Media Digital Humanities as a network
2/2 Exemplary Projects: New Jersey Digital Highway http://www.njdigitalhighway.org/ PhilaPlace http://www.philaplace.org/
2/4 Exemplary Projects: The Walt Whitman Archive http://www.whitmanarchive.org/
Week Four: ACDH How the Computer Works; DigHist Getting Started, Becoming Digital
2/7 Exemplary Projects: Valley of the Shadow http://valley.lib.virginia.edu/
2/9 Exemplary Projects: Smart History http://smarthistory.org/
2/11 Exemplary Projects: The Taruskin Challenge http://taruskinchallenge.wordpress.com/
Week Five: ACDH Classificaion, Databases, Marking Texts of Many Dimensions, Text Encoding, Electronic Texts, Modeling
2/14 Crowdsourcing Wikipedia
2/16 Analytical Tools Wordle, Google n-grams
2/18 Transcribe Bentham http://www.transcribe-bentham.da.ulcc.ac.uk/td/Transcribe_Bentham
Week Six: ACDH Designing Sustainable Projects, Conversion of Primary Sources, Text Tools, Interface; DigHist Designing for History Web
2/21 Digital Humanities as Collaborative Enterprise
2/23 Database and Narrative
2/25 Research Tools: Zotero http://www.zotero.org/
Week Seven: ACDH Stylistic Analysis, Linguistic Corpora, Scholarly Editing, Textual Analysis, Thematic Research Collections
2/28 The Uses of Metadata
3/2 Text Encoding http://www.tei-c.org/index.xml
3/4 Tools for Building: Omeka http://omeka.org/
Week Eight: ACDH Print and Digital Resources, Digital Media and Film, Cognitive Stylistics
3/7 Visualization
3/9 Visualization
3/11 Digital Media
3/14-3/18 SPRING BREAK
Week Nine: ACDH Intermediation, Digital Libraries
3/21 Maps and GIS
3/23 Google Maps
3/25 Time and Space Simile http://simile.mit.edu/
Week Ten: DigHist Building an Audience, Collecting History Online
3/28 Institutional Frameworks: Teaching, GLAM, Commercial, Personal
3/30 Democratization of Digital Humanities?
4/1 Google Books and HATHI Trust
Week Eleven: DigHist Owning the Past
4/4 NO CLASS – THATCamp
4/6 NO Class – Preceptorial Advising
4/8 Digital Humanities Organizations
Week Twelve: ACDH Multi-variant Narrative, Speculative Computing, Robotic Poetics
4/11 Electronic Literature
4/13 Game Studies
4/15 The Future of the Humanities
Week Thirteen: ACDH Preservation; DigHist Preserving the Past, Final Thoughts
4/18 Projects
4/20 Projects
4/22 Projects
Week Fourteen: Projects
4/25 Projects
4/27 Projects
4/29 NO CLASS
Week Fifteen:
5/2 FINAL PAPER DUE BY 11:00