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
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1
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Intro; what is DH? Historical methodology and digital
tools
Ayers,
Edward L. "The Pasts and Futures of Digital History," Virginia
Center for Digital History,
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,
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2
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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
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3
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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
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4
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Digital Archives
Project: The Valley of the Shadow
http://valley.lib.virginia.edu/, including:
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/.
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5
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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)
Project/article:
Simon Rogers, "John Snow's data journalism: The
cholera map that changed the world"
Project: NukeMap
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6
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Network analysis
Project: Mapping the Republic of
Letters
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.
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
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7
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Textual analysis
Project: The Old Bailey Online
Project: Google N-Gram Viewer
Michel et al, "Quantitative
Analysis of Culture using Millions of Digitized Books," Science 331 (2010)
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?
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8
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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
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
|
9
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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
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Public History and Outreach
Project: Omeka
-Specific Omeka-based project:
Bracero History Archive (http://braceroarchive.org/)
Project: "Ranger in Your
Pocket" tours of Manhattan Project sites
"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
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11
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Digital tools for historical research
Project: Zotero
Project: Mendeley
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
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12
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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
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Reinventing Knowledge
McNeely with Wolverton. Reinventing Knowledge: From
Alexandria to the Internet. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008)
|
15
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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
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Wrap-up and Reflection
|
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