Schedule
Week 1: Introduction (August 29)
This week we’ll meet each other and go over the syllabus, which is subject to change through the semester based on our progress and interests. Also, we’ll discuss setting up your course response venues, the use of social media, and some important spots for entering the conversation about digital history.
Readings:
- Start Julie C. Meloni and Michael Morrison, Sams Teach Yourself HTML and CSS in 24 Hours (SAMS, 2009).
Sites:
- Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media
- DHNow
- ProfHacker
- GradHacker
- National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities
Tools:
Week 2: Labor Day, No Class (September 5)
Week 3: What is Digital History? (September 12)
Readings:
- Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), “Introduction,” “Exploring the History Web”
- Susan Hockey, “History of Humanities Computing,” A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
- “The Promise of Digital History,” Journal of American History, September 2008.
- Robert Townsend, “How Is New Media Reshaping the Work of Historians?,” Perspectives (November 2010).
Sites:
- American Social History Project|Center for Media and Learning (CUNY)
- Virginia Center for Digital History (UVA)
- Digital History, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
- Network in Canadian History and Environment (NiCHE)
- teachinghistory.org Website Reviews
Tools:
- William Turkle and Alan MacEachern, The Programming Historian, (NiCHE, 2007-2011).
Practicum: History Web Critique
- Documenting the American South, UNC Chapel Hill Library
- A More Perfect Union: Japanese Americans and the U.S. Constitution, Smithsonian National Museum of American History
- Children and Youth in History, CHNM
- History News Network
- Organization of American Historians
Week 4: Site Planning and Design (September 19)
Readings:
- Jeffrey Zeldman, “Understanding Web Design,” A List Apart (November 20, 2007).
- Keith Laferriere, “Flexible Fuel: Educating the Client on IA,” A List Apart (December 2, 2008).
- Shawn Medero, “Paper Prototyping,” A List Apart (January 23, 2007).
- Jason Santa Maria, “On Web Typography,” A List Apart (November 17, 2009).
- Cohen and Rosenzweig, Digital History, “Getting Started,” “Designing for the History Web,” and “Building an Audience.”
- Metadata Resources
- Mary Elings and Gunter Waibel, “Metadata for all: Descriptive Standards and Metadata Sharing Across Libraries, Archives, and Museums,” First Monday 12:3 (March 5, 2007).
- Seeing Standards: A Visualization of the Metadata Universe
Sites:
Tools:
- Omeka.org
- Omeka.net
- Omeka Documentation and Screen Casts
- Drupal Gardens
- Web Developer Toolbar
- Firebug
- Photoshop Elements (Educational Discount available)
Late Additions:
- Julie Meloni, “Web Hosting 101,” Profhacker, (August 25, 2009).
Week 5: Public History (September 26)
Readings:
- L. Sprichiger and J. Jacobson, “Telling an Old Story in a New Way: Raid on Deerfield: The Many Stories of 1704,” (Museums and the Web Proceedings, 2005).
- Complete Meloni and Morrison.
Sites:
Week 6: Digital Collections and Digital Preservation (October 3)
Discussion Leaders:
Readings:
- Plan for the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (2002).
- Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, et al., “Digital Forensics and Born Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections,” CLIR Report (December 2010).
- Alison Babeu, “‘Rome Wasn’t Digitized in a Day’: Building a Cyberinfrastructure for Digital Classicists,” CLIR Report (August 2011).
- Sheila A. Brennan and T. Mills Kelly, “Why Collecting History Online is Web 1.5,” (March 2009).
- Daniel J. Cohen, “The Future of Preserving the Past,” (June 2005).
- Cohen and Rosenzweig, Digital History, “Collecting History Online,” and “Preserving Digital History.”
- The NINCH Guide to Good Practice in the Digital Representation and Management of Cultural Heritage Materials, Chapters V-VIII, XIV.
Sites:
Week 7: Project Presentation 1 (October 11 — Tuesday)
Readings:
- Cassie McDaniel, “Design Criticism and the Creative Process,” A List Apart (January 11, 2011).
- Draft Project Proposals
Week 8: What Difference does New Media Make? (October 17)
Discussion Leaders: David and John
Readings:
- Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (MIT Press, 2001).
Week 9: Digital Scholarship (October 24)
Discussion Leaders: Geoffrey and Sheri
Readings:
- William Thomas, “Writing a Digital History Article from Scratch: An Account,” University of Nebraska-Lincoln (December 2007).
- American Council of Learned Societies, Our Cultural Commonwealth.
- “Working Together or Working Apart: Promoting the Next Generation of Digital Scholarship,” CLIR Report (March 2009).
- Working Group on Evaluating Public History Scholarship, “Tenure Promotion and the Publicly Engaged Academic Historian,” (June 2010), Report and White Paper.
Sites:
- Journal of American History Special Issues
Week 10: Data Mining/Distant Reading (October 31)
Discussion Leaders: Megan and Jeri
Readings:
- Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History (Verso, 2007).
- Daniel Cohen, “From Babel to Knowledge: Data Mining Large Digital Collections,” (March 2006).
- Gregory Crane, “What do you do with a million books?” D-Lib Magazine 12:3 (2006).
- Daniel J. Cohen, “Initial Thoughts on the Google Books Ngram Viewer and Datasets,” (December 19, 2010).
Sites:
Tools:
- SEASR
- SEASR Analytics for Zotero (only for Ffx 3.6)
- TAPoR
- Voyeur
- Google Books N-Gram Viewer
Week 11: Spatial History and Visualization (November 7)
Discussion Leaders: Richard and Andi
Readings:
- Spatial Technologies and Methodologies, Scholarly Communications Institute 7 (2009).
- Richard White, “What is Spatial History?” Stanford University Spatial History Project.
- Jo Guldi, “What is the Spatial Turn?” Spatial Humanities (Scholars Lab).
- Alan Liu, “When was Linearity? The Meaning of Graphics in the Digital Age,” University of Nebraska-Lincoln (August 2008).
- Martin Jessop, “Digital Visualization as a Scholarly Activity,” Literary and Linguistic Computing, Vol. 23, No. 3, 2008.
Sites:
Tools:
Week 12: Citizen History (November 14)
Discussion Leaders: Scott, Claire, and Chris
Readings:
- Jeff Howe, “The Rise of Crowdsourcing,” Wired, 14:06 (June 2006).
- Roy Rosenzweig, “Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past” (June 2006).
- Martin Kalfatovic, Effie Kapsalis, Katherine Spiess, Anne Van Camp, and Michael Edson, “Smithsonian Team Flickr: a library, archives, and museums collaboration in web 2.0 space,” Archival Science (n.d.).
- “Grappling with the Concept of Radical Trust,” History News, (July 2010).
Sites:
Week 13: Scholarly Communication and Open Access/Open Source (November 21)
Discussion Leaders:
Readings:
- Cohen and Rosenzweig, “Digital History,” “Owning the Past?”
- John Willinsky, The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship, (MIT Press, 2005).
- Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture, “Free Content.”
- “Experimental Approaches to New-Model Scholarly Communication,” Scholarly Communications Institute 8 (2010).
- Elena Giglia, “Open Access, Open Data: Paradigm Shifts in the Changing Scholarly Communication Scenario,” D-Lib Magazine, 17:3/4 (March 2011).
Sites:
- Interview with Abby Smith Rumsey, Digital History at University of Nebraska-Lincoln
- MediaCommons
- PressForward
- Creative Commons
- GNU General Public License
- Digital Humanities Quarterly
- First Monday
Week 14: Project Presentations 2 (November 28)
Week 15: What Difference Does New Media Make to Doing History?: Wrap-up and Semester Reflections(December 5)
Projects Due (December 16)