Schedule

September 25: Intro and Set up

Activities:

Homework: Theme your portfolio and write a post introducing yourself. Submit the URL for your site through this form so that we can read each other’s work.

September 30 and October 2: Historical Thinking and Research Collections

Reading:

Discussion:

  • What are the key arguments in this section?
  • What new approaches to the history does Schermerhorn present?
  • What do you want to explore further?

Activities: Intro to historical thinking skills [Monday]
Take detailed notes about your thinking process, step by step, as you read and work with the following group of primary sources. Use all of the resources available to you to come to some conclusions based on the information available in the documents. Note the additional questions these documents raise.

Activities: Research Collections [Wednesday]

Homework: Portfolio Activity 1: Research Process Journaling

Considering the reading so far and your interests, form a research question. Carefully document your research process to locate primary sources that might begin to help you answer that question. How might your findings cause you to reframe your question? What can you reasonably answer with the materials available? What materials would you like to access that are not digitized? Where would you find them? What are your next steps? Write a blog post about your preliminary research process in a digital environment.

October 7-9: Metadata and Close Reading of Primary Sources

Reading:

  • Schermerhorn: Chapter 3 and 4
  • Johnson, Jessica Marie. “Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads.” Social Text, 36(4), 2018, 57-79. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-7145658

Activities: Structured Data and Metadata [Monday]

Activities: Annotation [Wednesday]

    Discussion: Revolts and Rebellions

  • For your group’s instance of resistance, discuss the following and take notes:
    • Context/Setting
    • Participants
    • Influences
    • Principles
    • Plan
    • Outcomes
    • How was it different from the others?

    Appoint a scribe, a timekeeper, and a reporter

Primary Source Sets

Homework: Portfolio Activity 2: Create Two Items with Complete Metadata

  1. Locate two related primary sources on a topic of interest that are have rights statements indicating that they are available for your use
  2. Save a copy of the digital file for each item to your hard drive.
  3. In your Omeka Installation, create an item for each source. Craft full and thoughtful Dublic Core and Item Type metadata for each source. Don’t forget to make your items “public” when you are finished.
  4. Do a close reading of the two primary sources (one image and one text) that you created as items in your Omeka installation. Use the annotation tools to mark up your sources so that others can share your understanding of the sources. You can certainly raise research questions in this process. You don’t have to have all the answers.
  5. Draft a short blog post that reflects on the process of item creation and description, and that includes links to the two items that you’ve created. Discuss the ways that annotating sources for a public audience changes your approach to reading. Don’t forget to look around at the work that your classmates have done.

October 14-16: Narrative and Scholarly Communication

Reading:

  • Schermerhorn: Chapter 5 and 6

Activities: Research Questions and Audience [Monday]

Activities:Exhibit Design and Information Architecture [Wednesday]

Homework: Portfolio Activity 3: Website Review

Write a comparative website review of two sites (See the Journal of American History’s Digital History Review criteria: http://jah.oah.org/submit/digital-history-reviews/

October 21-23: Text Analysis

Reading:

Homework: Portfolio Activity 4: Text Analysis: What is it good for?

Write a blog post that critically explores what you see as the research value of computational text analysis (600-800 words). Make an argument about how such methods would be of use to you as an historian. You can and should refer to the “Model of Historical Thinking” document from the Historical Thinking and Research Analysis week to help you form your argument. You can also draft examples and possiblities from our previous reading.

October 28-30: Text Analysis (Construction)

Reading:

  • Schermerhorn: Chapter 9 and 10

Activities: Text Analysis [Monday and Wednesday]

Homework: Portfolio Activity 5: Text Analysis (Construction)

  1. Select a corpus and download it.
  2. Use MALLET to topic model the documents. Select a topic to work with.
  3. Move the documents from that topic to Voyant.
  4. Explore and test some hypotheses about the documents
  5. Write about your findings (600-800 words), contextualizing them with materials from our readings. Don’t forget to post links or images of your visualizations so your readers can follow along with your work and your conclusions.

November 4-6: Geosptial Work

Reading:

Activities: Monday, November 4:

Catherine Knight Steele “Black Feminists Taught Me: Lessons for the Digital Humanities from Digital Black Feminism” 4-5:30PM Green Room, 4th Floor West, MSU Main Library

Activities: Narrative Maps (Critique) and Data Maps (Critique) [Wednesday]

Homework: Portfolio Activity 6: Geospatial work (Critique)

Write a reflective blog post on the ways that geospatial visualization and analysis can change the historical questions we ask, and the ways that we understand the past. What are the potential pitfalls in using these techniques? i.e., How do we sometimes lie with maps?

November 11-13: Geospatial Analysis (Narrative Maps)

Reading:

Activities:Narrative Maps (Construction) [Monday and Wednesday]

 

Homework: Portfolio Activity 7: Narrative Maps (Construction)

Using one of the available tools, build a narrative map that consists of at least five elements (stops, slides, panels, etc.). Tell a rich story about some event related to the reading we’ve been doing about slavery. Make use of the available open access primary sources that we have reviewed in previous weeks to populate your map. When you are finished write a reflective blog post about the process that includes a link or an embed of your story map.

November 18-20: Geospatial Analysis (Data Maps)

Reading:

Activities: Data Maps (Construction) [Monday and Wednesday]

  • Shapefiles: Select a decade of the census to represent in your map
  • Mapshaper: Add all of the files from that decade’s folder to Mapshaper. Export them as GeoJson
  • Flourish: Select the blank map template. Import your GeoJson file as your data by overwriting the current data. Label your Geometry column (“Geometry”)and your Name column (“NHGISNAM”)
  • Data: Select the decade that you want to represent. Open that CSV file, and delete the first row (the one with the codes). Save the CSV under a new name. You may make other edits to limit the columns or rows of data available.
  • Return to Flourish. Import your edited CSV by MERGING it with your existing data. Match up the GISJOIN column headers to create the merge. In the right column, input the column that you would like to represent with the region shading. Select the columns of data you would like to include in the roll-over popup. If you want to us more than one, separate those column ids with commas.
  • Preview your map. Use the options in the right column to adjust the appearance of your map. In particular, pay attention the “Regions Layer” so that you present your data well. Give your map a title and include some header and footer information.
  • Publish your map

Homework: Portfolio Activity 8: Data Maps (Construction)
Create a map or a story in Flourish using the NHGIS census data. Write a blog post about what you were trying to depict in your map and how it helps us understand the history of slavery in the US. Either embed or include a link to your map in you post.

November 25: Data Analysis

Reading:

Activities:Received Data and Derived Data [Monday]

We have two very different data sources to work with today. Nonetheless our plan of investigation should be the same.

    1. Is this a primary or secondary source?
    2. Is this data structured or unstructure?
      • Structured: data that can be parsed into a rectangular form with clear variables?
      • Unstructured: data that is undifferentiated strings (e.g. words and paragraphs with no structural mark-up)
    3. If the data is structured, what kind is it?
      • Received: a primary source that was formed as a data set at its point of historical creation (e.g. census data, financial records, a membership roster, GW’s 1799 list)
      • Derived: a secondary party has examined primary sources and used the information from them to create a data set (e.g. Voyages, the Berry Slave Value Database, and the Mt. Vernon Slavery Database)
      • Metadata: data created by secondary party to describe a particular primary source or group of primary sources (e.g. a library catalog record, metadata for an Omeka item); metadata is a kind of derived data
    4. What is the data’s context of creation?
    5. What kinds of questions does it allow us to ask about history?
    6. What kinds of questiond does it not allow us to ask?

Homework: Portfolio Activity 9: Received Data and Derived Data (Critique)
Reflect on your interaction with our data sources for the week. In what ways are tidy data useful to historians? What is the significance of the form of data received or derived by others? How has interacting with this data changed the way that you think about asking and answering historical questions? How might you interact with contemporary data differently based on these experiences?

December 2-4: Visualizations

Reading:

Activities: Data Visualization (Critique)

Homework: Portfolio Activity 10: Data Visualization (Construction)
Using the data source of your choice to create a visualization in Flourish that is honest and informative. In your blog post, explain your choices in terms of the variables you are representing, the aesthetics your are using, and scale. What historical question does your visualization answer? What other forms of visualization could you have used with this data and why?

Final Portfolio Revision and Reflection Due December 13: (20 points)

[Finish up the Miles book over finals and the break.]

  1. Review your work for the semester. Consider the impact of individual readings and activities on your thinking and your approach to doing history.
  2. Select a construction activity to revise and improve.
  3. Write a 1,000-1,200 post that reflects on the way that your understanding of historical thinking and the use of digital methods has changed over the course of the semester. Explain why your revised activity is an example of those new approaches and perspectives. Finally, consider what kind of work you would like to do and approaches you would like to learn going forward.

If you’ve really enjoyed this semester, you can sign up for History 489 next spring and dedicate yourself to working on a concentrated period of your own research using these and other digital methods.