Course Schedule

Schedule Notes

All readings are available online, some through direct links and some in our class Leganto list. If there’s not a direct link in the schedule below, check Leganto to see if the reading is there. You will need to log in to Leganto using your NU credentials.

On Readings:

Each week there are readings listed under Core and Penumbra. The core readings are just that: central to the week’s discussion and lab. Everyone should read these closely and prepare to discuss them. The penumbral readings include some of the many brilliant pertinent readings I could not require because time is, sadly, finite. If at all possible, I encourage you to choose one of the penumbral readings each week, based on your own interests, to read closely and be prepared to discuss in class.

In the week you lead class you should prepare all of the core and penumbral readings, and if you choose to dig into one of these topics for an assignment the penumbral readings are the first place you might turn to begin expanding your thinking.

Week 1 | September 9 | Hello DH World

Core Readings:

To begin understanding the field, we’ll review the editor(s)’s introductions to the Debates in the Digital Humanities anthologies, published between 2012-2019:

• Matthew K. Gold, “The Digital Humanities Moment” (2012)
• Lauren F. Klein and Matthew K. Gold, “Digital Humanities: The Expanded Field” (2016)
• Jacqueline Wernimont and Elizabeth Losh, “Introduction” (2018)
• Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, “A DH That Matters” (2019)
• (browse) Jennifer Guiliano and Roopika Risam, Reviews in Digital Humanities

Penumbral Readings:

• Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth, “The Digital Humanities and Humanities Computing: An Introduction,”from Blackwell Companion to Digital Humanities (2004)
• Susan Hockey, “The History of Humanities Computing,” from Blackwell Companion to Digital Humanities (2004)
• Alan Liu, “Imagining the New Media Encounter,” from Blackwell Companion to Digital Literary Studies (2008)

Lab 1: Version control

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Week 2 | September 16 | Search Histories

Core Readings:

• Roberto Busa, “Why a Computer Can Do So Little,” ALLC Bulletin (1976)
• Kim Gallon, “Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016
• Ted Underwood, “A Genealogy of Distant Reading”, DHQ (2017)
• Roopika Risam, “The Postcolonial Digital Record” from New Digital Worlds (2019)
• Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein, “Introduction: Why Data Science Needs Feminism” and “The Power Chapter” from Data Feminism (2020)

Penumbral Readings:

• Louis T. Milic, “The Next Step,” from Computers and the Humanities 1.1. (1966)
• Rosanne G. Potter, “Literary Criticism and Literary Computing: The Difficulties of a Synthesis” from Computers and the Humanities (1988)
• Yohei Igarashi, “Statistical Analysis at the Birth of Close Reading” from New Literary History (2015)
• Roopika Risam, “Beyond the Margins: Intersectionality and the Digital Humanities”, DHQ (2015)

Lab 2: A domain of your own

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Week 3 | September 23 | Data Basis

Guest: Lauren Klein

Discussion Leader: Nicole

Core Readings:

• Jessica Marie Johnson, “Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads,” Social Text (2018)
• Quinn Dombrowski, “DSC #1 - Quinn’s Great idea” (2019)
• Scott B. Weingart, “The Route of a Text Message, a Love Story” (2019)
• Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein, “Collect, Analyze, Imagine, Teach” and “‘What Gets Counted Counts’” from Data Feminism (2020)

Penumbral Readings:

• Daniel Rosenberg, “Data Before the Fact,” from “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron, MIT Press (2013)
• Melissa Terras and Julianne Nyhan, “Father Busa’s Female Punch Card Operatives” from Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016
• Sarah Allison, “Other People’s Data: Humanities Edition,” Cultural Analytics (2016)
• Sarah Wilson, “Black Folk by the Numbers: Quantification in Du Bois,” American Literary History (2016)
• Julia Flanders and Fotis Jannidis, “Data modeling in a digital humanities context” from The Shape of Data in Digital Humanities (2019)
• Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein, “On Rational, Scientific, Objective Viewpoints from Mythical, Imaginary, Impossible Standpoints” from Data Feminism (2020)

Lab 3: Data and Metadata

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Week 4 | September 30 | A tinu prdolem6

Discussion Leader: Ben

Core Readings:

• Ryan Cordell, “‘Q i-jtb the Raven’: Taking Dirty OCR Seriously,” Book History (2017)
• Katie Rawson and Trevor Muñoz, “Against Cleaning,” from Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019
• Katherine Bowers and Quinn Dombrowski, “DSC #2: Katia and the Phantom Corpus” (2019)
• Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein, “Unicorns, Janitors, Ninjas, Wizards, and Rock Stars” and “The Numbers Don’t Speak for Themselves” from Data Feminism (2020)

Penumbral Readings

• N. Katherine Hayles, “Media and Materiality” and “Material Metaphors, Technotexts, and Media-Specific Analysis” from Writing Machines (2002)
• Whitney Anne Trettien, “A Deep History of Electronic Textuality: The Case of English Reprints Jhon Milton Areopagitica,” DHQ (2013)
• Ellen Gruber Garvey, “facts and FACTS: Abolitionists’ Database Innovations,” “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron (2013)
• David Mimno, “Data Carpentry” (2015)
• Roopika Risam, “Colonial Violence and the Postcolonial Digital Archive” from New Digital Worlds (2019)

Lab 4: Cleaning data

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Week 5 | October 7 | Algorithm Nation

Discussion Leader: Taryn

Core Readings:

• Ted Underwood, “Seven Ways Humanists Are Using Computers to Understand Text” (2015)
• Benjamin M. Schmidt, “Do Humanists Need to Understand Algorithms?” from Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016
• Jo Guldi, “Critical Search: A Procedure for Guided Reading in Large-Scale Textual Corpora,” Cultural Analytics (2018)
• Maria Sachiko Cecire, “DSC #3: The Truth About Digital Humanities Collaboration” (2020)

Penumbral Readings:

• Stephen Ramsay, “An Algorithmic Criticism” and “Potential Readings” from Reading Machines: Toward an Algorithmic Criticism (2011)
• Choose 2 pieces (they’re all short) from the Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016 forum, “Text Analysis at Scale”
• Annette Vee, “Introduction: Computer Programming as Literacy” from Coding Literacy: How Computer Programming is Changing Writing (2018)
• Taylor Arnold and Lauren Tilton, “New Data? The Role of Statistics in DH,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019

Lab 5: Text as data I

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Week 6 | October 14 | Text Messages

Discussion Leader: Julianna

Core Readings:

• Laura Nelson, “Computational Grounded Theory: A Methodological Framework,” Sociological Methods & Research (2017)
• Jonathan D. Fitzgerald and Ryan Cordell, “Classifying Vignettes, Modeling Hybridity,” from Going the Rounds (2019)
• Laura B. McGrath, “America’s Next Top Novel,” Post45 (2020)
• Anouk Lang, “DSC #4: AntConc Saves the Day.” April 10, (2020)

Penumbral Readings:

• Michael Whitmore, “Text: A Massively Addressable Object,” from Debates in the Digital Humanities (2012)
• Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, “On Nonscalability: The Living World Is Not Amenable to Precision-Nested Scales,” Common Knowledge 18.3 (2012)
• Denis Tenen, “Computational Poetics: An Introduction” and “Metaphor Machines” from Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation (2018)
• Michael Gavin, “Is There a Text in My Data?”, Cultural Analytics (2019)

Lab 6: Text as data II

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Week 7 | October 21 | Do You Visualize?

Discussion Leader: Giorgia

Core Readings:

• Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec, Dear Data (2016)
• Kim Brillante Knight, “Material Data Visualization as Feminist Praxis,” from Bodies of Information (2018)
• Isabel Meirelles, “Visualizing Information” in The Shape of Data in Digital Humanities (2019)
• Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein, “Show Your Work” and “Conclusion: Now Let’s Multiply” from Data Feminism (2020)

Penumbral Readings:

• Hadley Wickham, “A Layered Grammar of Graphics,” Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics (2010)
• Johanna Drucker, “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display,” DHQ (2011)
• Lauren F. Klein, “The Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemings” (2013)

Lab 7: Data visualization

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Week 8 | October 28 | Next: Top Models

Discussion Leader: Emily

Core Readings:

• Richard Jean So, “All Models are Wrong” (2017)
• Bethany Nowviskie, “Reconstitute the World” (2018)
• Marisa Parham, “Sample | Signal | Strobe: Haunting, Social Media, and Black Digitality,” from Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019
• Roopika Risam, “Rethinking the Human in Digital Humanities” from New Digital Worlds (2019)
• Eun Seo Jo and Timnit Gebru, “Lessons from Archives: Strategies for Collecting Sociocultural Data in Machine Learning” (2020)

Penumbral Readings:

• Ted Underwood, “Why an Age of Machine Learning Needs the Humanities,” Public Books (2018)
• Taylor Arnold, Lauren Tilton, and Annie Berke, “Visual Style in Two Network Era Sitcoms,” Cultural Analytics (2019)
• Benjamin Charles Germain Lee, Jaime Mears, Eileen Jakeway, Meghan Ferriter, et al, “The Newspaper Navigator Dataset: Extracting And Analyzing Visual Content from 16 Million Historic Newspaper Pages in Chronicling America” (2020)
• Thomas Padilla, Responsible Operations: Data Science, Machine Learning, and AI in Libraries (2019)
• Ryan Cordell, Machine Learning + Libraries: A Report on the State of the Field (2020)

Lab 8: Machine learning

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Week 9 | November 4 | Mental Health Reschedule

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Week 10 | November 11 | No Class — Veteran’s Day

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Week 11 | November 18 | Proceed with Care

Secret Special Visitors

Discussion Leader: Shannon and Joseph

Core Readings:

• Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, “Anatomy of an AI System: The Amazon Echo As An Anatomical Map of Human Labor” (2018)
• Bethany Nowviskie, “Change Us, Too” (2019)
• Safiya Umoja Noble, “Toward a Critical Black Digital Humanities,” from Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019
• Kari Kraus, “The Care of Enchanted Things,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019
• Elisa Beshero-Bondar, Lee Skallerup Bessette, Quinn Dombrowski, and Roopika Risam, “DSC #5: The DSC and the Impossible TEI Quandaries” (2020)

Penumbral Readings:

• Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, “Extreme Inscription: A Grammatology of the Hard Drive,” from Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (2008)
• Charity Hancock, Clifford Hichar, Carlea Holl-Jensen, Kari Kraus, Cameron Mozafari, and Kathryn Skutlin, “Bibliocircuitry and the Design of the Alien Everyday” (2013)
• Jentery Sayers, “I Don’t Know All the Circuitry” from Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (2017)
• Julia Flanders, “Building Otherwise” from Bodies of Information (2018)
• Choose 3-4 pieces (they’re mostly short) from the forum, “Ethics, Series, and Practices of Care” in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019
• Matthew Kirschenbaum, “Bibliologistics: The Nature of Books Now, or A Memorable Fancy,” Post45 (2020)
• Élika Ortega, “The Many Books of the Future: Print-digital Literatures,” Post45 (2020)

Lab 9: Collaborative choice I

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Thanksgiving Break

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Week 12 | December 2 | Chosen by class

Discussion Leader: Kaitlin, Zach, Michael

Core Readings:

• Jo Guldi, “What Is the Spatial Turn?, “The Spatial Turn in Literature,”, and “The Spatial Turn in Sociology,” (2013)
• Laura Herbert, “What Do Maps Really Do?” (2018)
• David Haeselin, “Beyond the Borders of the Page: Mapping The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,”, The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy (2018)
• Sureshi M. Jayawardene, “StoryMap(ping) Black Urban Experiences: Toward an Africana DH Subfield Through Research and Pedagogy,” Journal of African American Studies (2020)

Penumbral Readings:

• Bethany Nowviskie, “‘Inventing the Map’ in the Digital Humanities: a Young Lady’s Primer,” Poetess Archive Journal (2010)
• Susan Schulten, “The Cartography of Slavery and the Authority of Statistics,” Civil War History (2010)
• Tim Wallace, “Kevin Lynch and the Imageable Boston” (2010)

Lab 11: Collaborative choice II

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Week 13 | December 9 | Final Project Discussion/Presentation

Project Proposals DUE - Thursday, December 17th