Science, Spies, and History: 2015

Thursday, December 31, 2015

Syllabus - Digital History (graduate level)

I've been asked in a few interviews lately how I would teach the digital humanities to historians. It's a subject about which I have a lot to say, but sometimes showing is better that writing, so I'm posting a proposed syllabus for a graduate seminar in Digital History.

As someone who actively uses digital humanities methods, and is a visiting assistant professor of digital humanities, and who gets far more interviews for DH jobs than history of science jobs, I'm nonetheless terrified of the hype surrounding DH.

The expectations are too high, which prompts skepticism and frustration among historians who don't use these tools/methods. It also leads to funding for centers for the digital humanities, and emphasis on digital humanities, and interdisciplinary DH-centered work, all of which are very good things - but I'm worried that DH is going to go the way of cliometrics or Holocaust Studies: an important academic pursuit that ends up insular and ghettoized by developing alienating jargon and opaque institutions.

It's already very difficult to use digital tools in a subtle way in historical writing, because historians instantly hone in on the novelty and abandon the customs of measured trust we routinely grant for other types of sources. Historians would not bat an eye if I wrote (to make up an example from whole-cloth) that the US State Department came to care a lot more about Egypt in 1952, and I knew this because I'd read through their archives, they mention Egypt much more, here are a few example citations, and one or two direct quotes from those citations. They would trust that I had, indeed, given the archive due consideration, and anyone disagreeing with my interpretation is free to use that (or another) collection to refute me later. If I made the same claim, based on a digital textual analysis of words used in the State Department archives, combined with having read through that archive myself, I would immediately get extreme doubt. 'How do you know this is representative? You really need to characterize and defend your methodology rigorously, all kinds of things could be hiding in that data' they would say (and have said, in real world article reviews for similar cases). The novelty is threatening, as is the difficulty of accepting evidence based on techniques with which you're not familiar. This is certainly not helped by the frequent, breathless over-hyping employed by digital humanities scholars, claiming their tool will make all previous work obsolete and deliver the sun and moon as earrings to the dean.

Ultimately, digital humanities must be one more set of tools in a historian's toolbag, exactly equal in status and importance to archival research, oral history, quantitative analysis, social science theory, or any other. For some projects digital tools will be the One True Path, for others they will be useless. Most of the time they will need to be combined with traditional archival research, and possibly oral histories, and the result will be greater than the sum of the parts.

All of that is behind my selections for the following syllabus. It's a new creation, so I'd be thrilled to receive feedback. There's no question that it can (and will) be improved and adapted with time. Hopefully even as it is it can be useful for those considering teaching (or taking) a class on digital history circa 2015.

Credit for some of the readings ideas come from other excellent syllabi I've found around the net, including:
Douglas Seefeldt's: http://digitalhistory.unl.edu/syllabi/seefeldt_870_f09.pdf
William Thomas': http://digitalhistory.unl.edu/syllabi/thomas_946_f11.pdf
Jason Heppler's: http://stanford.edu/~jheppler/stanford.syllabus.hist205f.2014f.pdf
___________________

PDF version

History XXX – Digital History

Graduate Level

Spring 2016 | 3 credits

Instructor:

Douglas Michael O'Reagan

[Email]

Office hours: [Office hours]

by appointment, including via Skype/Google Hangouts/email

Hype for the potential of digital tools to revolutionize humanities scholarship has existed for decades, but seems to have grown even greater in recent years. Digital Humanities has become a small, interdisciplinary field in itself, though one famously resistant to simple definition. Methods as disparate as data visualization, text analysis, creation of online archives, public history via podcasts and other digital/social media, network analysis, and maintaining informal blogs all meet at fall under at least many people's idea of Digital Humanities.

What does all of this mean for history, specifically? This course will take you through examples of many types of digital humanities projects as they're applied to understanding the past. We will be taking a critical eye to these projects, asking above all else the fundamental question of scholarship: "So what?" In each case, we will focus on how, exactly, we can use digital tools – in combination with other methodologies, including oral histories and archival research – to allow us new kinds of insights into the past, or new tools for teaching students and the public about our research. Students should continually reflect on how these tools and examples might connect to your own research.

Course Requirements:

Active participation (60%) – Includes readiness to discuss the assigned readings each week. Most weeks also include a digital project, which you should explore thoroughly.

--Weekly discussion questions – Each week, you will be required to bring in 3-5 discussion questions based on the readings and projects assigned. These should be questions that stimulate conversation, with multiple legitimate possible answers. These will be part of your participation grade.

Reviews of digital projects (10% each = 30% total) – You will be required to find three digital projects, ideally relevant to your own field and research, and review their content and significance. Each review should be between 1-2 pages and discuss the project's significance for its field, and/or for public engagement. These are due on the last day of class, but can be turned in at any point.

Reflection on how you can use digital tools/methods (10%) – This short (~1-2 page) reflection, due on the last day of class, can take a number of forms. It can be a proposal for a new digital humanities project. It can be a blog post for teachers in your field, outlining the best tools/visualizations/digital projects that would be useful in a survey course. It can be a historiographic paper about how DH has changed (or how it has changed your field).

Course Readings:

In addition to the following required readings, I recommend the following as a general guide:

Cohen and Rosenzweig. Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web. (U. Pennsylvania Press, 2006). Online at http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/

Week
1	Intro; what is DH? Historical methodology and digital tools Ayers, Edward L. "The Pasts and Futures of Digital History," Virginia Center for Digital History, ( http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/PastsFutures.html) Michael O’Malley and Roy Rosenzweig, “Brave New World or Blind Alley?" (http://www.jstor.org/stable/2952737) Carl Smith, “Can You Do Serious History on the Web?” (http://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/february-1998/can-you-do-serious-history-on-the-web) Orville Vernon Burton, “American Digital History” (http://chnm.gmu.edu/essays-on-history-new-media/essays/?essayid=30) Ayers, Edward L. "The Pasts and Futures of Digital History," Virginia Center for Digital History, ( http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/PastsFutures.html)
2	What the H? Digital History vs. Digital Humanities Excerpts from Schreibman, Siemens, and Unsworth, A Companion to Digital Humanities. Blackwell Publishing, 2004. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/ -"The Digital Humanities and Humanities Computing: An Introduction" -"The History of Humanities Computing" -"Computing and the Historical Imagination" -Applications section Stephen Robertson, "The Differences between Digital History and Digital Humanities," blog post at http://drstephenrobertson.com/blog-post/the-differences-between-digital-history-and-digital-humanities/ Scott Paul McGinnis, "DH vs DH, and Moretti's War," blog post at http://majining.com/?p=417
3	Cliometrics (or, All This Has Happened Before) Naomi Lamoreaux, “Economic History and the Cliometric Revolution,” in Molho and Wood, eds., Imagined Histories, pp. 59-84. Robert Fogel, “’Scientific’ History and Traditional History,” in Robert Fogel and G. R. Elton, Which Road to the Past. Two Views of History (New Haven, 1983), pp. 7-70. Jan Willem Drukker, The Revolution that Bit its own Tail: How Economic History Changed our Ideas on Economic Growth, Ch. 1-4
4	Digital Archives Project: The Valley of the Shadow http://valley.lib.virginia.edu/, including: http://valley.lib.virginia.edu/VoS/usingvalley/valleyguide.html At least skim through Ed Ayers, In the Presence of Mine Enemies, paying special attention to the level of detail and sourcing. Read through at least three reviews of the book online. "The Differences Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities" http://www2.vcdh.virginia.edu/AHR/ Kornblith, "Venturing into the Civil War, Virtually: A Review," Journal of American History, Vol. 88, No. 1 (2001) http://www.jstor.org/stable/2674922 Kevin Derksen. "The Differences Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities (review)." Journal of the Early Republic 26.1 (2006): 157-162. Project MUSE. Web. 30 Dec. 2015. https://muse.jhu.edu/.
5	Geo-spatial Mapping Bodenhamer and Corrigan (eds.), The Spatial Humanities: GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship: -Ch. 1, 2, 3, 7, 10 White, Richard. "What is Spatial History?" (working paper, Spatial History Project, 2010) (http://www.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/pub.php?id=29) Project/article: Simon Rogers, "John Snow's data journalism: The cholera map that changed the world" http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/mar/15/john-snow-cholera-map Project: NukeMap http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/
6	Network analysis Project: Mapping the Republic of Letters http://web.stanford.edu/group/toolingup/rplviz/ Vera and Schupp, "Network analysis in comparative social sciences," Comparative Education, Vol. 42, No. 3 (2006), 405-429. Padgett and Ansell, "Robust Action and the Rise of the Medici, 1400-1434," American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 98, No. 6 (May 1993), p.1259-1319 http://home.uchicago.edu/~jpadgett/papers/published/robust.pdf John F. Padgett and Paul D. McLean, “Organizational Invention and Elite Transformation: The Birth of Partnership Systems in Renaissance Florence1,” American Journal of Sociology 111, no. 5 (2006): 1463–1568. http://home.uchicago.edu/~jpadgett/papers/unpublished/econ.soc.ex.5.pdf Peterson, "The conquest of vitalism or the eclipse of organicism: The 1930s Cambridge organizer project and the social network of mid-twentieth-century biology," British Journal of the History of Science, Vol. 47, No. 173 (2014), p.281-304. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24941735
7	Textual analysis Project: The Old Bailey Online http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/ Project: Google N-Gram Viewer https://books.google.com/ngrams Michel et al, "Quantitative Analysis of Culture using Millions of Digitized Books," Science 331 (2010) http://www.sciencemag.org/content/331/6014/176.full.pdf Sullivan, "When OCR Goes Bad: Google's Ngram Viewer & the F-Word" http://searchengineland.com/when-ocr-goes-bad-googles-ngram-viewer-the-f-word-59181 "Google Ngram Viewer: How good is it really?" UH Digital History Blog https://cherylamartinuhdigihist.wordpress.com/2014/03/01/google-ngrams-viewer-how-good-is-it-really/ Sudhahar et al, "Automated analysis of the US presidential elections using Big Data and network analysis," Big Data & Society http://bds.sagepub.com/content/2/1/2053951715572916 -You can skim through much of this one, but look closely at the images. What can they tell us about the history of that time? What limits their effectiveness?
8	Dangers Marie Leca-Tsiomis, “The Use and Abuse of the Digital Humanities in the History of Ideas: How to Study the Encyclopédie,” History of European Ideas 39, no. 4 (2013): 467–76. Project: The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d'Alembert Collaborative Translation Project http://quod.lib.umich.edu/d/did/ G. Williams, "Disability, Universal Design, and the Digital Humanities," http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/44 Cohen and Rosenzweig, Digital History, Introduction, "The Promises and Perils of Digital History" http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/introduction/ Kirsch, "Technology is Taking Over English Departments: The False Promise of Digital Humanities." The New Republic (https://newrepublic.com/article/117428/limits-digital-humanities-adam-kirsch) Roundtable, "The Dark Side of the Digital Humanities." Thinking C21 - http://www.c21uwm.com/2013/01/09/the-dark-side-of-the-digital-humanities-part-1/ - http://www.c21uwm.com/2013/01/09/dark-side-of-the-digital-humanities-part-2/ - http://www.c21uwm.com/2013/01/09/the-dark-side-of-the-digital-humanities-part-3/ - http://www.c21uwm.com/2013/01/09/the-dark-side-of-the-digital-humanities-part-4/
9	Digital History's Long View: Data retention and career credit Daniel Cohen & Roy Rosenzweig, “Preserving Digital History,” chapter 8 of Digital History Daniel V. Pitti, “Designing Sustainable Projects and Publications,” http://digitalhumanities.org/companion/view?docId=blackwell/9781405103213/9781405103213.xml&chunk.id=ss1-5-1 Margaret Hedstrom, "Digital preservation: A time bomb for Digital Libraries," http://www.uky.edu/~kiernan/DL/hedstrom.html Catherine Marshall, "Rethinking Personal Digital Archiving, Part 1" http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march08/marshall/03marshall-pt1.html AHA Draft Guidelines for the Professional Evaluation of Digital Scholarship in History http://blog.historians.org/2015/04/draft-guidelines-evaluation-digital-scholarship/
10	Public History and Outreach Project: Omeka http://omeka.org/ -Specific Omeka-based project: Bracero History Archive (http://braceroarchive.org/) Project: "Ranger in Your Pocket" tours of Manhattan Project sites http://www.atomicheritage.org/tours "Project": Sign up for (or in to) Twitter and search for the hashtag #twitterstorians . Read through it for a while, then run the same search a day or two later. Try to get a feel for what people discuss on that hashtag. Also try to find any hashtags specific to your subfield. For history of science, it used to be #histsci, #histtech, and #histmed (science, technology, medicine respectively), before they merged (through community effort) into #histstm. Project: Alex Wellerstein, The Nuclear Secrecy Blog http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/ Sigler, "Podcasting and the Profession," Perspectives on History (May 2008): https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/may-2008/podcasting-and-the-profession Project: Academia.edu www.academia.edu
11	Digital tools for historical research Project: Zotero https://www.zotero.org/ Project: Mendeley http://www.mendeley.com/ Backup -Dropbox https://www.dropbox.com/ -Google Drive https://www.google.com/drive/ -Amazon Cloud Drive https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/home -Dong Ngo, "Digital Storage Basics, Part. 3: Backup vs. Redundancy" http://www.cnet.com/how-to/digital-storage-basics-part-3-backup-vs-redundancy/ Collaborative Research -Google Docs https://www.google.com/docs/about/ -GitHub (https://github.com/) ---Orsini, "GitHub For Beginners: Don't Get Scared, Get Started" http://readwrite.com/2013/09/30/understanding-github-a-journey-for-beginners-part-1 http://readwrite.com/2013/10/02/github-for-beginners-part-2
12	Who Owns History? Daniel Cohen & Roy Rosenzweig, “Owning the Past?” chapter 7 of Digital History Marilyn Deegan and Simon Tanner, “Conversion of Primary Sources” (http://digitalhumanities.org/companion/view?docId=blackwell/9781405103213/9781405103213.xml&chunk.id=ss1-5-2) Darnton, “The New Age of the Book.” The New York Review of Books http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1999/03/18/the-new-age-of-the-book/ Bell. “The Bookless Future: What the Internet is doing to Scholarship.” The New Republic (https://www.press.umich.edu/pdf/9780472031955-ch19.pdf) Townsend, “Google Books: What’s Not to Like?” AHA Today http://blog.historians.org/2007/04/google-books-whats-not-to-like/ Meyer, " How Open-Access Scholarship Improves the Internet," The Atlantic (http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/08/how-open-access-scholarship-improves-the-internet/278371/) Berger and Cirasella, "Beyond Beall's List: Better understanding predatory publishers," College & Research Libraries News, Vol. 76, No. 3 (2015): 132-135 http://crln.acrl.org/content/76/3/132.full
13	Digital Pedagogy Brier, "Where's the Pedagogy? The Role of Teaching and Learning in the Digital Humanities," Debates in the Digital Humanities http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/8 MOOCs Carey, "Here's What Will Truly Change Higher Education: Online Degrees That are Seen as Official," The New York Times, 5 March 2015 (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/08/upshot/true-reform-in-higher-education-when-online-degrees-are-seen-as-official.html) Laurillard, "Five Myths about MOOCS," Times Higher Education (https://www.timeshighereducation.com/comment/opinion/five-myths-about-moocs/2010480.article) Classroom Technology Higgins et al, "The Impact of Digital Technology on Learning: A Summary for the Education Endowment Foundation," Nov. 2012. https://larrycuban.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/the_impact_of_digital_technologies_on_learning_full_report_2012.pdf Tucker, "The Flipped Classroom" http://educationnext.org/the-flipped-classroom/ edSurge, "Blended Learning" https://www.edsurge.com/research/edtech-wiki/blended-learning Duke Center for Instructional Technology, "Active Learning" https://cit.duke.edu/get-ideas/teaching-strategies/active-learning/ Recommended: McKeachie and Svinicki, McKeachie's Teaching Tips (http://www.amazon.com/McKeachies-Teaching-Tips-Wilbert-McKeachie/dp/1133936792) Ambrose et al, How Learning Works: 7 Research-based Principles for Smart Teaching (http://www.amazon.com/How-Learning-Works-Research-Based-Principles/dp/0470484101)
14	Reinventing Knowledge McNeely with Wolverton. Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008)
15	Forms of Knowledge (or, All of This Has Happened Before?) Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. (New York: Metheuen, 1983).
16	Wrap-up and Reflection

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Saturday, December 26, 2015

Syllabus - History of Science since Newton (Undergrad)

I recently got some bad news that I won't be able to teach a course I've been preparing, History of Science since Newton, in Spring 2016. Instead, I will be taking over a course on "Peoples of the United States," exploring the different ethnic/social/identity groups in American history, and the tension between multi-cultural and "melting pot" ideals. It will be an exciting opportunity to expand my expertise into an area adjacent to my normal work.

I expect I'll use the history of science syllabus eventually, but in case it can be helpful to anyone else planning a similar course (or anyone in the public interested in good reading on these topics), I thought I would post the syllabus here.

Since this was to be the first time I've taught this particular course, it's a very straight-forward and standard structure: a midterm, paper, and final exam. In a future where I have someone to help with grading, I would love to add another paper (or two) early in the semester, to give students early and frequent feedback, and possibly smaller research-skill-building extra credit assignments as well. An example might be a 'scavenger hunt' for a small list of books and articles that aren't all immediately available in the library, and coordinate with a librarian to ensure the students have guidance on how to acquire them.

I'm especially interested in getting students engaged with a few themes and questions, including:

What is science?: Seeing the many different things that have been called 'science,' how the 'scientific method' described a huge array of techniques, and through this, seeing that we really can (and should) see this big cultural thing called science as something we can't explain away as natural or obvious
What are the ties between science and technology?
What does it mean to say that science is social, human institution? I'm not interested in 'debunking' or putting down science, though sometimes I get students who are very enthusiastic about science and get anxious when we suggest its values aren't often its realities. I am interested in making it clear that the social dimension is fundamental and not something to regret or be overcome. Science is what scientists do.
More concretely, the role of war and national security in shaping science is a recurring theme.

This syllabus emphasizes the 20th century, partly because it's my area of greatest expertise, partly because students often see the connections to the present more readily for the more recent past. In some ways it's better to cover more ground, in others it's better to give more detail about a few topics. I've seen courses like this that went to an extreme of just covering a few episodes in close details (Newton, Darwin, and the Manhattan Project, in that case). I've seen others that try for broader coverage. I think this is a reasonable balance.

Finally, I'm interested in keeping the course as cheap as possible for students. The book I've assigned are available for a total of $57 used from Amazon as of this writing, and possible cheaper with a more thorough search using bookfinder.com and other sources. I think that's reasonable, but it's something to consider. You might be able to get away with something a little cheaper.

Anyway, here's the syllabus:

PDF file

_______________________________________________________________

History 382 – History of Science/Technology since Newton

Spring 2016 | 3 credits

Instructor:

Douglas Michael O'Reagan

douglas.oreagan@wsu.edu

Office hours: Mondays 12-1pm, CIC 125K; or

by appointment, including via Skype/Google Hangouts/email

This course addresses how science, technology, and society have mutually influenced one another from the time of Isaac Newton (the 17^th century) through the present. Beginning with the natural philosophy of the Early Modern era, which was the pursuit of a small number of elite Europeans, we will move through science's expansion into a global enterprise under American leadership. Major themes of the course will include the relationship between religion and science; the changing nature of the 'scientist,' as that title came into existence and then came to mean different things; the inherent politics of new technologies; and how national security and state spending have been fundamental in making science what it is today, in terms of both organization and content.

Course Goals:

This course is designed around WSU's Seven Learning Goals, especially:

Critical and creative thinking

· Integrate and synthesize knowledge from multiple sources.

· Assess the accuracy and validity of findings and conclusions.

· Understand how one thinks, reasons, and makes value judgments, including ethical and aesthetical judgments.

· Understand diverse viewpoints, including different philosophical and cultural perspectives.

· Combine and synthesize existing ideas, images, or expertise in original ways.

Scientific Literacy

Identify scientific issues underlying global, national, local and personal decisions and communicate positions that are scientifically and technologically informed.
Recognize the societal benefits and risks associated with scientific and technological advances.

Information Literacy

Determine the extent and type of information needed.
Implement well-designed search strategies.
Access information effectively and efficiently from multiple sources.
Assess credibility and applicability of information sources.
Use information to accomplish a specific purpose.
Access and use information ethically and legally.

Course Requirements:

Weekly reading: Each week, you will be expected to read about 80-100 pages of material. It is crucial that you finish these readings by Friday of each week. Most Fridays will consists of in-class discussion of the readings, and these discussions will weigh heavily in your class participation grade.

Weekly Discussion Questions: Based off of the readings, you will have to submit three discussion questions to Blackboard by Thursday night at 11:59pm. We will discuss what kinds of questions are most effective. Questions with factual answers (e.g. "What element did Lavoisier discover?") are NOT good questions. Questions that inspire debate and discussion (e.g. "Should we consider Lavoisier or Priestley the discoverer of Oxygen?") are much better.

Midterm/final exams: Exams will consist of two sections. In the first section, you will be given a number of key terms or names, and your job will be to define and explain the significance of several of the options, within about 3-5 sentences each. The second section will be a longer essay, drawing on lectures, readings, and discussions.

Research paper: Students will write a 6-8 page paper (double-spaced, 1" margins, 12-point font) on a topic of their choosing, selected in consultation with the instructor.

Due dates: Topic and suggested sources: March 28

Final paper: April 29

Lateness policy: All assignments must be turned in by 12pm on their due-date. Any assignments submitted late will lose 2/3 of a grade per day (for example, a B+ becomes a B-, or a B becomes a C+). In exceptional, rare circumstances, you can pre-arrange an extension with me.

Grading:

Class Participation (40%) – Includes doing readings before class

Midterm exam (15%)

Research paper (20%)

Final exam (25%)

Required Texts:

We will be using the following books in this class. I include the specific pages for you to judge whether it is best to buy a copy or attempt to check a copy out of the library.

· Peter J. Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea, revised (or 25^th anniv.) edition. (p. 1-26, 96-223, 274-324)

· Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (p.1-74, 165-188, 271-281, 287-296, 313-318, 331-338)

· Thomas Hughes, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870-1970. (p. 1-137, 184-248, 353-443)

· Jeffrey P. Moran, The Scopes Trial: A Brief History with Documents. (p. 1-72)

· Audra Wolfe, Competing with the Soviets: Science, Technology, and the State in Cold War America. (entire book)