Introduction to DH

ENG 429/529: Intro to Digital Humanities

Fall 2013

Christopher M. Ohge

Contact Information

Office: Stevens Hall, Room 325
Office Hours: Tuesdays, 3:15-5pm., and by appointment
Phone: 781-366-2972
Web: http://umaine.edu/umhi/digital-humanities/
Twitter: @cmohge (use hashtag #UMaineDH)

Course Description

This course serves as an introduction to the history, methodologies, and practices of digital humanities (DH). In addition to being a survey of DH as an emerging discipline, the course will show how digital tools enhance or reshape literary and cultural studies, scholarly editing, and the study of material objects in virtual spaces. As DH is a practical enterprise by nature, you will be expected to engage in hands-on projects that use digital tools to enlighten your current research or creative interests.

We will also investigate several technologies relevant to digital scholarship and editing, including eXtensible Markup Language (XML), the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), Adobe Creative Suite, and platforms such as WordPress and Omeka. Each week will be divided into two sessions, the reading/lecture portion (a discussion of readings) and the demo/lab portion (blog responses as well as practical exercises with digital resources).

Texts

Schreibman, Susan, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth, eds. A Companion to Digital Humanities. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.

Schreibman, Susan, and Ray Siemens, eds. A Companion to Digital Literary Studies. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007.

Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374214913/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0374214913&linkCode=as2&tag=ryacorsonlhom-20

The above texts will be supplemented by online and reserve readings.

Blogging

You’re required to do at least six blogs, all of which should be about 500 words and include pointed questions. The list of responses/questions must be posted to the class by 9 p.m the evening before class meets.

Mid-Term Essay

A 2000-word essay. Topics to be determined.

Text Encoding Exercise and Reaction Paper

An exercise in encoding a literary work in TEI and a 500-word paper reflecting on the exercise.

DH Project

A small-scale project using some digital tool, with a 2000-word essay.

Attendance and Participation

Students are expected to attend and participate in class discussions, and turn in assignments on time.

Should you have to miss class, you are required to email me before the class begins. You are responsible for any material that you missed in class; you should ask your fellow classmates for help with the notes, and also feel free to come into my office hours if you need additional assistance.

Schedule

3 September 2013 [Virtual]

Introduction

5 September, Perspectives on DH

Busa, Roberto A. “Foreword: Perspectives on the Digital Humanities.” A Companion to Digital Humanities. Ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/view?docId=blackwell/9781405103213/9781405103213.xml&chunk.id=ss1-1-2.
Hockey, Susan. “The History of Humanities Computing.” A Companion to Digital Humanities. Ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/view?docId=blackwell/9781405103213/9781405103213.xml&chunk.id=ss1-2-1.
Pannapacker on “Big Tent” DH: http://chronicle.com/article/Big-Tent-Digital-Humanities/128434/

10 September, Perspectives

Ramsay, Stephen. “Who’s In and Who’s Out” and “On Building.”
Fish, Stanley. “The Digital Humanities and the Transcending of Mortality”.
Burke, Timothy “The Author Is Human”.

12 September, Applications: Topic Modeling, Distant Reading [Virtual]

Voyant
Mallet
Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review (January–February 2000). http://newleftreview.org/II/1/franco-moretti-conjectures-on-world-literature
LA Review of Books debate: http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/franco-morettis-distant-reading-a-symposium/
Ted Underwood: http://tedunderwood.com/2012/04/07/topic-modeling-made-just-simple-enough
David Blei: http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/2-1/topic-modeling-and-digital-humanities-by-david-m-blei/

17 September, Topic Modeling; Disciplines: Classics [Virtual]

Presentation from last week.
Blevins, Cameron: Topic Modeling Martha Ballard’s diaries: http://historying.org/2010/04/01/topic-modeling-martha-ballards-diary/
Selections from Matthew Jockers’s Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History (2013)
Crane, Greg. “Classics and the Computer: An End of the History.” A Companion to Digital Humanities. Ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/view?docId=blackwell/9781405103213/9781405103213.xml&chunk.id=ss1-2-4.
Crane, Greg. “Cyberinfrastructure for Classical Philology.” Digital Humanities Quarterly. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/1/000023/000023.html.
Homer Multi-Text Project

19 September, Disciplines: History

Thomas, William G., II. “Computing and the Historical Imagination.” A Companion to Digital Humanities. Ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/view?docId=blackwell/9781405103213/9781405103213.xml&chunk.id=ss1-2-5.
Cohen, Daniel J. and Roy Rosenzweig. “Introduction: Promises and Perils of Digital History.” Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2005. http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/introduction/.

24 September, Disciplines: Literary Studies [Virtual]

Borges, Jorge Luis, from Museum, “Exactitude in Science.” In Collected Fictions. Trans. Andrew Hurley. New York: Viking, 1999.
Rommel, Thomas. “Literary Studies.” A Companion to Digital Humanities. Ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/view?docId=blackwell/9781405103213/9781405103213.xml&chunk.id=ss1-2-8

26 September, Disciplines: Literary Studies

Price, Kenneth M. “Edition, Project, Database, Archive, Thematic Research Collection: What’s in a Name?” Digital Humanities Quarterly. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/3/000053/000053.html.
Price, Kenneth M. “Electronic Scholarly Editions.” A Companion to Digital Literary Studies. Ed. Susan Schreibman and Ray Siemens. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/view?docId=blackwell/9781405148641/9781405148641.xml&chunk.id=ss1-6-5&toc.depth=1&toc.id=ss1-6-5&brand=9781405148641_brand.
Ramsay, Stephen. “Algorithmic Criticism.” A Companion to Digital Literary Studies. Ed. Susan Schreibman and Ray Siemens. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/view?docId=blackwell/9781405148641/9781405148641.xml&chunk.id=ss1-6-7.

1 October, Editions and Annotation [Virtual]

Open Annotation: http://hyperstudio.mit.edu/projects/annotation-studio/

3 October, New Media and Materialities

Marshall McCluhan, Introduction to Understanding Media
Response by Christopher Ricks
Kirschenbaum, Matthew. “Introduction: ‘An Awareness of the Mechanism.” Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. 1-23.
Hayles, Katherine N. “Print is Flat, Code is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis.” <http://www.cws.illinois.edu/IPRHDigitalLiteracies/Hayles.pdf>, Poetics Today 25.1: 67-90.

7–10 October, Digital Humanities Week

TEI Workshop [Virtual]

Sperberg-McQueen, Michael and Lou Burnard. “A Gentle Introduction to XML.” from the TEI Guidelines.
XML in 10 Points.
Cummings, James. “The Text Encoding Initiative and the Study of Literature.” A Companion to Digital Literary Studies. London: Blackwell, 2007.
Vanhoutte, Edward. An Introduction to the TEI and the TEI Consortium.
Chapters 1-4 and 7 of the TEI Guidelines.
Chapters 13, 16, and 17 of the TEI Guidelines

15 and 17 October (No class), but continue TEI Projects! And read:

Kirschenbaum, Matthew. “‘Every Contact Leaves a Trace’: Storage, Inscription, and Computer Forensics.” Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. 25-71.

22 October, Materialities; TEI Workshop

24 October, TEI Project Presentations

29 October, TEI Project Presentations

31 October, XSLT

Transforming TEI: A Quick and dirty intro to XSLT

November 1: Mid-Term Essay due

5 November, Digital Curation / Speculative Computing / Scalable Reading

Omeka
Metadata Standards: Dublin Core, RDF, MODS, META
Galey, Alan. “The Human Presence in Digital Artefacts.” Text and Genre Reconstruction: Effects of Digitization on Ideas, Behaviours, Products, and Institutions. Ed. Willard McCarty. Cambridge: OpenBook, 2010. 93-117.
Drucker, Johanna. “The Virtual Codex from Page Space to E-space.” A Companion to Digital Literary Studies. Ed. Susan Schreibman and Ray Siemens. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/view?docId=blackwell/9781405148641/9781405148641.xml&chunk.id=ss1-5-5&toc.depth=1&toc.id=ss1-5-5
Martin Mueller on “Scalable Reading”: https://scalablereading.northwestern.edu/scalable-reading/

~~Speculative Computing & DATA [Virtual]~~

~~Drucker, Johanna.”Introduction: The Background to SpecLab.” SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing. xi-xix.~~
~~Drucker, Johanna.”From Digital Humanities to Speculative Computing.” SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing. 3-30.~~

7 November, Data Visualization

Gephi
D3.js
Zepel, Tara, “Visualization as a Digital Humanities ____? http://www.hastac.org/blogs/tzepel/2013/05/02/visualization-digital-humanities
Tooling Up (Stanford): Visualization, http://toolingup.stanford.edu/?page_id=1247
Schreibman, Susan. “Digital Representation and the Hyper Real.” Poetess Archive Journal 2.1 (2011): n. pag. Web. http://journals.tdl.org/paj/index.php/paj/article/view/7

12 November, E-Lit [Virtual]

E-Lit demonstration

14 November, Spatial Humanities

Nowviskie, Bethany. “‘Inventing the Map’ in the Digital Humanities: A Young Lady’s Primer.” Poetess Archive Journal 2.1 (2011): n. pag. Web. http://www.nowviskie.org/dh2010poster.pdf.
Franco Moretti, “Maps” from Graphs, Maps, Trees.
Neatline demonstration
Non linear mapping: Scalar

19 November, [Virtual]

Projects

Pitti, Daniel. “Designing Sustainable Projects and Publications.” A Companion to Digital Humanities. Ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/view?docId=blackwell/9781405103213/9781405103213.xml&chunk.id=ss1-5-1
Deegan, Marilyn and Simon Tanner. “Conversion of Primary Sources.” A Companion to Digital Humanities. Ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/view?docId=blackwell/9781405103213/9781405103213.xml&chunk.id=ss1-5-2
Nowviskie, Bethany. NEH Grant Proposal: “Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship.” http://www.neh.gov/grants/guidelines/pdf/IATDH_UVa.pdf

21 November, NINES / Publication / Projects and Archives

NINES: Nineteenth-Century Scholarship Online
Wheeles, Dana. “Testing Nines.” Literary and Linguistic Computing 25.4 (2010): 393-403.
Henry III Fine Rolls Project: Ciula, Arianna, Paul Spence, and José Miguel Vieira. “Expressing Complex Associations in Medieval Historical Documents: The Henry Iii Fine Rolls Project.” Literary and Linguistic Computing 23.3 (2008): 311-25.
Melville Electronic Library
Walt Whitman Archive
Samuel Beckett Manuscript Project
MediaCommons
Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. On the Future of Peer Review in Electronic Scholarly Publishing