Class Schedule
Week 1: What are the Digital Humanities?
Synopsis
- Learn what computers can discover & how they operate
- Discuss what this field is and where we are headed
- See a demonstration of what these methods can do for you
- Discuss some basic concepts
Assignments Due
- First Week, No Assignments
Class Setup
- Check here before every class to see if you need to do anything when you arrive
- Every single class you need to…
- Join the class conference page
- Join the class slack channel
Lesson
- Introduction
- Naive Learning: The Dangers of Big Data
- Bit Dungeon Exercise
- Overview
- Email List, using alternate emails
- What is this Class, What is Digital Humanities?
- What is the end product of this class?
- Setting Up Your Computer, Setting Up for Class
- Demonstration of Methods
- USF News
- Basic Concepts
Week 2: First Steps
Synopsis
- Brief history of computation
- Using class chat program
- Intro to programming concepts
Assignments Due
- Read and be prepared to discuss…
- Textbook, chapter 1, pp. 1 - 36
- Lee Ann Cafferata, “I Code, You Code, We Code… Why Code?”
- Miriam Posner, “Some Things to Think Abou Before you Exhort Everyone to Code”
- James Gottlieb, “Coding and the Digital Humanities”
- Graduate Students Only
- Read Miriam Posner, “Humanities Data: A Necessary Contradiction”
- Read Miriam Posner, “What’s Next, The Radical Unrealized Potential of Digital Humanities”
Class Setup
- Announce Setting Up For Class, Conferences and Checking the Workbook
Lesson
- Lecture: Computational Development
- Slack Features:
- Polls
- Threads
- Other Channels
- Other Features
- Discussion: Why Code?
- Python Basics
- Terminal, navigation, variables, scripts
- Command-line / Script / Compiled code
- Variables, Conditionals
- List, Dictionaries
- Loops, & Functions
- Objects(preview)
Week 3: Python & GitHub
Synopsis
- Synthesize basic programming concepts
- Last questions about programming
- Introduction to Github and Atom
Assignments Due
- Read textbook, chapter 2, pp. 37-72
- Register an account at Codecademy
- Codecademy Python course, Units 1-3 (or as far as you can get). Submit a screenshot showing your completion on Canvas. Here are tutorials on taking screenshots for Windows and Mac.
Class Setup
- Sign up for a Github Account
- On Your Computer in the Lab, install Github Desktop, and Atom
Lesson
- Python
- Comprehension Check
- Lists/Dictionaries/Functions
- Recursion, Factorials
- Example in Action, Getting/Scraping Web Data
- Git/Github / Atom
- Starting a Project, a Git Folder
- Local Repositories
- Remote Repositories
- Branches / Cloning / Forking
- Example in Action, Cloning and Editing this Workbook
- Web Scraper Preview
Week 4: Data Scraping
Synopsis
- Use Webscraper to get historical data
- Discuss the origin of ‘hacking’
- Learn how to visualize data
Assignments Due
- Codecademy Python Course, Complete units 4 & 5 and submit a screenshot on Canvas as before.
- Webscraper
- Install Webscraper, a free Chrome extension
- Do the Webscraper tutorials
- Bonus: Attempt to scrape a site, even if unsuccessful, and post about your results in the assignment-discussion Slack channel
- Graduate Students Only
- Read Thomas Schienfeldt, “Sunset for Ideology, Sunrise for Methodology”
- Read Gary Hall, “Has Critical Theory Run Out of Time for Data-Driven Scholarship?”
Class Setup
- Install Webscraper
Lesson
- Other Uses for Python, Wikipedia & Twitter Scrapers
- Webscraper: Trying Different Sites
- Florida Memory: WPA Churches
- PHI Greek Epigraphy
- Perseus
- Student Finds
- Lecture: History of Hacking
- Visualizing History
- What is Humanities Data?
- Excel & Pivot Tables
-
Tableau
Week 5: Scrubbing and Scraping
Synopsis
- Review Webscraper
- Use OpenRefine to clean mass historical data
- Explore thousands of texts in OverviewDocs
Assignments Due
- Complete all steps on the course Setup Page
Class Setup
- Download the following files
- OpenRefine (download version 2.8 or newer)
- Florida Postcards
- USF News
Lesson
- Data Scrubbing: OpenRefine
- Formulae
- Facets
- Clustering
- Splitting Columns
- View in OverviewDocs
- Webscraper Review
- Try student-found sites Perseus
Week 6: Visualizing the Past
Synopsis
- Learn the top journals, blogs, etc. where discussion happens in the field
- Discuss the race and gender in computation and DH
- Alter and visualize data with Excel
- Learn how modern internet applications work
- Explore our main visualization tool, tableau
Assignments Due
- Read Tara McPherson, “Why Are the Digital Humanities So White? Thinking Histories of Race and Computation”
- Shawn Graham, “Bless Your Little Cotton Socks: Reflecting on Carleton’s Big Data”
- Graduate students only
- Read Dave Parry, “The Digital Humanities or Digital Humanism”
- Read Elizabeth Losh, “Hacktivism and the Humanities: Programming Protest”
- Read Cathy N. Davidson, “Humanities 2.0: Promises, Perils, Predictions”
Class Setup
- Download ESPY Execution Data Cleaned
- Download War Diaries, Baghdad, 2004-2005
Lesson
- Where Are the DH Discussions?
- Texts like Debates in DH
- Scholarly Publications like Digital Humanities Quarterly
- Blogs like this, this, or this
- On the main Digital Humanities Slack Channel
- Sites like the Programming Historian
- Discussions on Twitter
- An Introduction to Excel Pivot Tables
- What Pivot Tables Do
- Crossing Columns and Rows
- Pivot Chars
- Discussion: So, why do the Digital Humanities remain so white?
- Development of UNIX and of Critical Theory
- Modularity in Code and in Global Theory
- Divergence in Computational Scholarship and Historiography
- Radical Data, Can the Subaltern Program?
- Bridging the Digital Divide
- How A Full-Stack App Works
- Sever-side Database
- Sever-side Application
- Client-side Application
- APIs
- Introduction to Tableau
- Some Other Visualization Programs (we won’t be focusing on)
- Raw (General Data)
- Gephi (Network Data)
- Overview Docs (Texts)
- Voyant (Texts)
- Importing Data
- Field Types, Dimensions, and Measures
- Tableau Pivot Tables
- Visualizations and Types
- Customizing Visualizations
- Dashboards
- Stories
- Some Other Visualization Programs (we won’t be focusing on)
Week 7: Managing and Visualizing Data
Synopsis
Assignments Due
- Read textbook, chapter 5, pp. 159-194
- Complete the GitHub Hello World Tutorial
- Skim the GitHub guide on making your code citable in academic worlds.
- Create a post in the [assignment-discussion] Slack Channel (make sure you click the ‘+’ button then choose ‘Post’) that answers at least one of the following prompts…
- Are the Digital Humanities inherently racist or gendered, or, put more gently, is it still affected by racial/gendered assumptions?
- How did racial/gendered assumptions affect the development of the field?
- Can we use digital methods to overcome the influence of the racial/gendered history of the field of digital studies?
- Is the historical racial/gendered bias of DH any different than the racial/gendered bias of the field of history?
Class Setup
Lesson
- Revisit Questions: Is DH racist? Is DH anti-theory?
- Talk About Groups
- Expectations
- Query for Specializations
- Query for Project Ideas, Sites, Datasets, etc.
- Group Together
- Use GitHub to practice submitting the source analysis
- Revisit working with OpenRefine
- Revisit working with Tableau
Week 8: Visualizations
Synopsis
- Edit your Github project, add pages, links, images, and files
- Manage merging and multiple branches
- Explore [tableau] further
Assignments Due
- Review textbook, chapter 5, pp. 159-194
- Complete UCLA’s introductory Tableau Tutorial
- Use sample data files in Tableau
- Use the church survey, espy execution, war diaries, or USF in the News data sets
- Note If you want to know more about your data, remember you can always look into the sources behind the data by googling…
- Try to create several visualization that are connected in some way
- Create a post (300-500 words) explaining what your visualizations ‘mean’ assignment-discussion channel.
Class Setup
- No extra setup
Lesson
- Make Groups Continued
- Expectations
- Query for Specializations
- Query for Project Ideas, Sites, Datasets, etc.
- Group Together
- Project Management
- GitHub
- Cloning, Forking, Branching
- gitignore
- issues, bugs, stats
- Project Starter Template
- Clone and upload to your repo
- How an MkDocs repo works
- Make branches, changes
- Why Visualize?
- Discuss your visualization attempts
- What makes a Good Visualizaiton?
- wtf.viz
- Continuing Visualizing in Tableau
- Merging and Joining Data
- Florida Postcards
- Join Tables
- Data and Reifying Race/Class/Gender
- Worksheets, Dashboards, and Storybooks
Week 9: Networks
Synopsis
- Discuss how to choose the ‘right’ visualizations
- Ask questions about the digital source analysis and group proposal
- Learn to fail well (no really)
- See network analysis demonstration
Assignments Due
- Read textbook, chapters 6 & 7, pp. 195-264
- Read the NY Times article about Bill Gate’s Big History Project
- Start talking to group members in Slack
Class Setup
- No extra setup
Lesson
- Reviewing Visualization Types
- Big Data and Big History: The Possibilities and Dangers
- Groups and Projects: Team Up and Talk on Slack
- The Digital Source Analysis
- The Proposal and Bibliography
- Planning for Failure
- Think out ‘passing the ball’
- Backup plans
- Planning out steps: Assignments and Milestones in Github
- Failing Well: The Role of Failure in Science
- Network Analysis Presentation
- Using Gephi
- Manual Editing
- Data Import, Node/Edge, Adjacency, Matrix, Co-Occurrences
- Finding or Creating Historical Network Data Sets
Week 10: Machine Learning and Linked Data
Synopsis
- Discuss group proposals
- Explore how topic modeling and other methods analyze text
- Learn how ‘AI’ (machine learning) works
- Discuss other types of open-source data
Assignments Due
- Read textbook, chapters 3 & 4, pp. 73-158
Class Setup
- No extra setup
Lesson
- Groups & The Proposal
- Networks Continued
- Topic Modeling
- Theory of LDA
- GUI Tool
- What can it teach us?
- Markov Chains
- Neural Networks
- How They Work
- Biological Model
- Linked Open Data
- RDF, XML
- Authority File
- Ontological Entities
- Problem of Standards
Week 11: GitHub and Markdown Continued
Synopsis
- Manage your project repository
- Advanced Markdown techniques
- Other visualization tools
Assignments Due
- No assignments planned. (May change upon notice)
Class Setup
- No extra setup
Lesson
- Group Project, Cloning Template and Branching Project Leader Repositories
- Markdown Continued
- Markdown Cheatsheet
- Dillinger.io
- Atom’s Markdown Preview
- Linking to local files & images
- GitHub Continued
- GitHub Resources
- Tableau Alternatives
- Troubleshoot your project
Week 12: Reading Period
Synopsis
- Discuss the The Emergence of the Digital Humanities
- Troubleshoot your project
Assignments Due
- Read Steven Jones, The Emergence of the Digital Humanities (as the Network Is Everting)
Class Setup
- No extra setup
Lesson
- Reading Period
Week 13: The Power of the Digital Archive
Synopsis
- Discuss growth of big data
- Convert your repository to a public website
- Learn publication tools
- Explore more advanced tableau techniques
- Troubleshoot your project
Assignments Due
- No assignments planned. (May change upon notice)
Class Setup
- No Extra Setup
Lesson
- Power of the Archive: Constructing Digital Data
- Setting Up
- Group Leaders, sign up for an account at readthedocs
- Net Neutrality
- Undergrad Research Fair
- Running Your Project Workbook in Python
- Publishing on readthedocs
- Using GitHub Org & Classroom
- Digital Ocean
- ‘Hacking’ History - Duct Taping a DH Project Together
- Tableau and Visualization Choices, Continued
- ESPY Data Cleaned
- Eleusis Abridged
- Calculated Fields
- Renaming Columns
- Sets, Bins, Et.c.
- Trouble-Shooting Projects
Week 14: Bringing the Pieces Together
Synopsis
- Discuss your project progress
- Debate the possibilities of digital methods
- Learn to market your skills
- Troubleshoot your project
Assignments Due
- No assignments planned. (May change upon notice)
Class Setup
- Be prepared to have a brief discussion about your project’s progress to date
Lesson
- Project Presentations
- Discuss your project, your process
- Biggest success
- Biggest surprise
- Biggest failure
- What would you do different?
- What are the Digital Humanities, Revisited?
- The Evolution (And Devolution?) of the Field
- Historians and Digital Sources of the Future
- The Coming of the New Digital Economy, Resistance?
- The Influential Power of Data Capta, Separation of Data and Logic
- Modeling Data of Connections, Relationships
- Talking to Humans: Programming Language and Languages Revisited
- Rise of Network Theory in Historical Contexts
- Can Data Ever Be Radical?
- 42 - The Limit with All Quantitative Models
- The Processing Power of the Human Brain
- Marketing Your Skills
- Using Wordpress, on their site or on your own
- My CV
- Kayt Ahnberg’s CV
- Miriam Posner
- Shawn Graham
- Scott Weingart
- Ian Milligan
- Projects Troubleshooting
- How to write online
- Slack channel, opt in/out for the future
- Skills we have learned, and where to go from here on your own
- Trouble-Shooting Projects
Week 15: Publishing Your Projects
Synopsis
- Discussion - Future of DH and ‘Big Data’
- Troubleshooting - Last minute help
Assignments Due
- No assignments planned. (May change upon notice)
Class Setup
- Come ready with a list of issues that need troubleshooting
Lesson
- What is DH?
- The future of ‘big data’ and the future of history
- Humanizing the Digital
- Troubleshooting