Intro to Digital Humanities (draft)

(A working draft of a syllabus for this fall’s graduate course ENG5933-03, Introduction to the Digital Humanities. Preliminaries, policies, and specific dates have been redacted. Major thematic sections are numbered; individual classes are underlined. Any comments, edits, or suggestions are welcome.) [UPDATE: final syllabus version and course site here.]

1. What Is/Are The Digital Humanities?

Introductions
Draft straightaway a 500-word definition of the digital humanities. Submit via email / attachment.

Histories

• Hockey, Susan. “The History of Humanities Computing.” In Companion to Digital Humanities, edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/
• Kirschenbaum, Matthew. “What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?” ADE Bulletin 150, 2010. http://mkirschenbaum.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/ade-final.pdf

Productive Failure

• Unsworth, John. “Documenting the Reinvention of Text: The Importance of Failure.” Journal of Electronic Publishing 3, no. 2 (December 1997). http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=jep;view=text;rgn=main;idno=3336451.0003.201.
• Flanders, Julia. “The Productive Unease of 21st-century Digital Scholarship.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 3, no. 3 (Summer 2009). http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/3/000055.html.

Set up communications platforms: Twitter, HUMANIST, Zotero, RSS reader

Building

• Ramsay, Stephen. “On Building.” Stephen Ramsay, January 11, 2011. http://lenz.unl.edu/papers/2011/01/11/on-building.html.

In-class building project

2. Text and Code

Digital Materiality

• Selections from Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.

Hypertext and Code

• McGann, Jerome J. “The Rationale of Hypertext.” In Radiant Textuality: Literature After the World Wide Web, 53-74. New York: Palgrave, 2001.
• Hayles, N. Katherine. “Speech, Writing, Code: Three Worldviews.” In My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts, 39-61. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Introduction to mark-up languages

Encoding and Markup

• Renear, Allen H. “Text Encoding.” In A Companion to Digital Humanities, edited by Ray Siemens, John Unsworth, and Susan Schreibman. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/.
• Cohen, Dan, and Roy Rosenzweig. “To Mark Up, Or Not To Mark Up.” In Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/digitizing/3.php.

TEI exercise (1)
Reports from the Field (Group 1): Storify essays

Electronic Scholarly Editing

• Smith, Martha Nell. “Electronic Scholarly Editing.” In A Companion to Digital Humanities, edited by Ray Siemens, John Unsworth, and Susan Schreibman. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/.
• Mueller, Martin. Letter. “About the future of the TEI”, August 4, 2011. http://ariadne.northwestern.edu/mmueller/teiletter.pdf.

TEI exercise (2)

3. eBook, Edition, Archive, Database, Hypertext

Google / Books

• Darnton, Robert. “Google and the Future of Books.” The New York Review of Books 56, no. 2 (February 12, 2009). http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22281.
• Cecire, Natalia. “The Visible Hand.” Works Cited, May 3, 2011. http://nataliacecire.blogspot.com/2011/05/visible-hand.html.

Digitization and Rare Books

• Gleick, James. “Books and Other Fetish Objects.” The New York Times, July 16, 2011, sec. Opinion/Sunday Review. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/opinion/sunday/17gleick.html?_r=1.
• Werner, Sarah. “Fetishizing Books and Textualizing the Digital.” sarahwerner.net, July 24, 2011. http://sarahwerner.net/blog/index.php/2011/07/fetishizing-books-and-textualizing-the-digital/.
• ———. “The Serendipity of the Unexpected, or, a Copy is not an Edition.” sarahwerner.net, August 1, 2011. http://sarahwerner.net/blog/index.php/2011/08/serendipity-of-the-unexpected/.

Digitization project with FSU Library Special Collections

Archives: Theory and Practice (1)

• Manoff, Marjorie. “Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines.” portal: Libraries and the Academy 4, no. 1 (January 2004): 9-25.
• Folsom, Ed. “Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives.” PMLA 122, no. 5 (October 2007): 1572-79.

Case studies of selected archives and online collections
Reports from the Field (Group 2): Storify Essays

Archives: Theory and Practice (2)

• Cooper, Andrew, and Michael Simpson. “Looks Good in Practice, but Does It Work in Theory? Rebooting the Blake Archive.” Wordsworth Circle 31, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 63-68.
• Freedman, Jonathan, N. Katherine Hayles, Jerome McGann, Meredith L. McGill, Peter Stallybrass, and Ed Folsom. “Responses to Ed Folsom’s ‘Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives’.” PMLA 122, no. 5 (October 2007): 1580-1612.

Archive review assignment

Archives and Exhibits

• Felluga, Dino Franco. “Addressed to the NINES: The Victorian Archive and the Disappearance of the Book.” Victorian Studies 48, no. 2 (2006): 305-319. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/victorian_studies/v048/48.2felluga.html

NINES search, collect, exhibit

Cultural Heritage Informatics
Guest discussion with Professor Paul Marty
Omeka digitization and exhibition assignment

Digital Literature

• Wardrip-Fruin, Noah. “Reading Digital Literature: Surface, Data, Interaction, and Expressive Processing.” In A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, edited by Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companionDLS/.

Game Studies

• Selections from Ballestrini, Kevin, Emily Joy Bembeneck, Shawn Graham, Damien Huffer, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Katy Meyers, Jeremiah McCall, et al. Collaborative Scholarly Blog. Play the Past, 2010-. http://www.playthepast.org/.

Reports from the Field (Group 1): Storify Essays

4. New Forms of Criticism

Algorithmic Criticism

• Ramsay, Stephen. “Algorithmic Criticism.” In A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, edited by Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companionDLS/.

Text analysis exercise (1)

Distant Reading

• Selections from Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for A Literary History. London: Verso, 2005.

Text analysis exercise (2)

Data Mining

• Cohen, Daniel J. “From Babel to Knowledge: Data Mining Large Digital Collections.” D-Lib Magazine 12, no. 3 (March 2006). http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march06/cohen/03cohen.html.
• Witmore, Michael. “Text: A Massively Addressable Object.” Wine Dark Sea, December 31, 2010. http://winedarksea.org/?p=926.

Reports from the Field (Group 2): Storify essays

Culturomics

• Michel, Jean-Baptiste, Yuan Kui Shen, Aviva Presser Aiden, Adrian Veres, Matthew K. Gray, The Google Books Team, Joseph P. Pickett, et al. “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books.” Science 331, no. 6014 (January 14, 2011): 176-182.
• Nunberg, Geoffrey. “Counting on Google Books.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, December 16, 2010, sec. The Chronicle Review. http://chronicle.com/article/Counting-on-Google-Books/125735/.

Ngrams experiments

Digging into Data

• Digging Into Data Challenge. 2009-. http://www.diggingintodata.org/
• Nowviskie, Bethany. “What Do Girls Dig?” Bethany Nowviskie, April 7, 2011. http://nowviskie.org/2011/what-do-girls-dig/.

DiD projects review

FSU data challenge (details TK)

The Spatial Turn

• Selections from Bodenhamer, David, John Corrigan, and Trevor Harris, eds. The Spatial Humanities: GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.

Guest discussion with Professor John Corrigan
Course projects: initial proposals (send email / attachment)

Space and Timelines

• Croxall, Brian. “All Things Google: Google Maps.” Profhacker, April 5, 2011. http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/all-things-google-google-maps-labs/32421.
• ———. “Build Your Own Interactive Timeline.” briancroxall.net, 2010. http://briancroxall.net/TimelineTutorial/TimelineTutorial.html.

Collaborative geospatial timeline projects

5. Pedagogy, Publishing, and the Profession

Learning in a Digital Age

• Carr, Nicholas. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The Atlantic, July/August 2008. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/.
• Selections from Davidson, Cathy N. Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn. Penguin, 2011.

Authorship, Publishing, Peer Review

• Selections from Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy. MediaCommons, 2009. http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/mcpress/plannedobsolescence/.

Participatory crowdsource and open review projects (1)

Scholarship and the Open Web

• Cohen, Dan. “The Ivory Tower and the Open Web: Introduction: Burritos, Browsers, and Books [Draft].” Dan Cohen, July 26, 2011. http://www.dancohen.org/2011/07/26/the-ivory-tower-and-the-open-web-introduction-burritos-browsers-and-books-draft/.
• Becker, Jonathan. “Scholar 2.0: Public Intellectualism Meets the Open Web.” UCEA Review 52, no. 2 (June 16, 2011): 17-19. http://www.ucea.org/special_feature_52_2_pcp/2011/6/16/scholar-20-public-intellectualism-meets-the-open-web.html

Participatory crowdsource and open review projects (2)

Professional Developments

• Selections from Nowviskie, Bethany, ed. Alternative Academic Careers for Humanities Scholars. MediaCommons, 2011. http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/alt-ac/.

Course Projects Review and Lab
Course Projects Due