Schedule

Note: Dates in brackets indicate that we will not have a class meeting.

January 8-10: Intro and Set up

Activities:

Homework: Portfolio Activity 1: Theme your portfolio and write a post introducing yourself

January 15-17: Historical Thinking

Reading:

Activities: 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
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.

January 22-24: Research Collections

Reading:

Activities:

Homework: Portfolio Activity 2: 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.

January 29-31: Metadata and Close Reading of Primary Sources

Reading:

  • Schermerhorn: Chapter 5 and 6
  • 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

Homework: Portfolio Activity 3: 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. 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.

Feb 5-7: Metadata and Close Reading of Primary Sources

Reading:

  • Schermerhorn: Chapter 7 and 8

Activities: Annotation

Homework: Portfolio Activity 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. Also, if you don’t love the sources that you selected initially, you’re welcome to add new ones. There are some source sets to look at below. Finally, write a blog post that links to your annotated sources and discusses 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.

Feb 12-14: Narrative and Scholarly Communication

Reading:

  • Schermerhorn: Chapter 9 and 10

Activities: Research Questions and Audience

Frederick Douglass Day

Homework: Portfolio Activity 5: 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/

Feb 19-21: Narrative and Scholarly Communication

Reading:

  • Schermerhorn: Chapter 11 and 12, Conclusion

Activities: Exhibit Design and Information Architecture

Homework: Portfolio Activity 6: Information Architecture (Construction)

Feb 26-28: Text Analysis

Reading:

Activities: Text Analysis

Homework: Portfolio Activity 7: Text Analysis (Construction)

March 5-7 (Spring Break)

March 12-14: Geospatial Analysis [March 14 class in 319 Berkey]

Reading:

Activities: Narrative Maps (Critique)

Homework: Portfolio Activity 8: Narrative Maps (Critique)

March [19]-21: Geospatial Analysis

Reading:

  • Miles: Chapter 2

Activities: Narrative Maps (Construction)

Homework: Portfolio Activity 9: 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.

March 26-[28]: Geospatial Analysis

Reading:

Activities: Data Maps (Critique):

Homework: Portfolio Activity 10: Data Maps (Critique)

Write a reflective blog post on the ways that data-driven 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?

April 2-4: Geospatial Analysis [Both classes in 319 Berkey]

Reading:

  • Miles: Chapter 4

Activities: Data Maps (Construction)

Homework: Portfolio Activity 11: Data Maps (Construction)

April 9-11: Data Analysis [April 9 class in 319 Berkey]

Reading:

Activities: Received Data and Derived Data

    Tuesday

  • George Washington’s List of Enslaved People 1799, Mount Vernon: https://www.mountvernon.org/education/primary-sources-2/article/george-washingtons-list-of-enslaved-people-1799/
  • Slavery Database, Mount Vernon: https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/slavery/slavery-database/

    • Thursday
    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 12: 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?

April 16-18: Visualizations [April 16 class in 319 Berkey]

Reading:

Activities: Data Visualization (Critique)

Homework: Portfolio Activity 13: Data Visualization (Critique)
Write a reflective blog post about your process for engaging with and analyzing data visualizations related to history content. How has your process changed? What are the major ways that you see visualizations lying with data?

April 23-25: Visualizations

Reading:

  • Miles: A Note on Historical Conversations and Concepts
  • Graham, Shawn, Ian Milligan, and Scott Weingart. “Principles of Information Visualization.” In The Historian’s Macroscope: Big Digital History, Pre-Draft. London: Imperial College Press, 2015. http://www.themacroscope.org/?page_id=469.

Activities: Data Visualization (Construction)

Homework: Portfolio Activity 14: Data Visualization (Construction)
Using the data source of your choice, create a visualization that is honest and informative.

Final Portfolio Revision and Reflection Due May 3: (15 points)

  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 an 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.