HIST 703 – Introduction to Digital History
Professor Christopher Church
Department of History
University of Nevada, Reno
Course Description
In the past three decades, our world has become increasingly digitized, and today the use of computers is unavoidable. All humanists today are digital humanists whether they realize it or not. Every day, we use digital tools that we take for granted: search engines and keyword searches, digital databases and online publications, email and scholarly collaboration, and the list goes on. Humanists need to approach the use of these tools critically, because their use has dramatically shaped the course and tenor of our research today.
With an eye to the methodological implications of digital scholarship, this course will provide students with a hand-on introduction to some of the core technologies that are necessary for conducting digital humanities research: databases, text encoding, and scripting. Being versed in these three technologies is vital to engaging with scholarship in the digital age, because all digital information is structured and manipulated using these fundamental tools. The goal of the course is not to become an expert in these technologies, which is not possible in a single 16-week course, but to be exposed to them and to think about their ramifications for the digital humanities.
This course address the historical methodological issues raised by digital scholarship and provide technical training in the core digital tools.
As an independent study, you will be expected to much of the work on a self-guided basis. This means doing the readings, completing practice exercises, formulating project ideas, and blogging on the course’s website. However, we will meet to discuss the readings and check in regarding projects and self-guided study every Monday from 3 to 4pm in the Shared History Lab (MSS 109).
Readings (selections from below)
1. Cameron and Richardson. Using Computers in History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
2. A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Scriebman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion
3. Mark Merry. Databases for Historians: Designing Databases for Historical Research. London: Inst. for Historical Research, 2012. http://training.historyspot.org.uk/mod/book/view.php?id=75
4. Turkel, Crymble and MacEachern, The Programming Historian, 2nd ed. Network in Canadian History & Environment, 2009. http://niche-canada.org/files/programming-historian-1.pdf
5. Salminen and Tompa. Communicating with XML. New York: Springer, 2011.
6. “Learn the TEI”. Text Encoding Initiative. http://www.tei-c.org/Support/Learn/
7. The Virtual Representation of the Past. Ed. Mark Greengrass; Lorna Hughes. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2008.
8. Kristen Nawrotzki; Jack Dougherty. Writing History in the Digital Age. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2013.
http://www.digitalculture.org/books/writing-history-in-the-digital-age/
9. Hacking the Academy. Eds. Dan Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt, 2013. Center for History and New Media, George Mason University.
http://www.digitalculture.org/books/hacking-the-academy-new-approaches-to-scholarship-and-teaching-from-digital-humanities/
10. Todd Presner et al. (2012) Digital_Humanities.
11. Defining Digital Humanities: a Reader. (2013). Edited by Melissa Terras, Julianne Nyhan and Edward Vanhoutte
Recommended Online Companion Courses
Course Assignments
(50%) Online Blog (Annotated Reading List / Responses,
Tool Guides, Outside Readings, Thoughts on Digital History, etc.)
includes: Weekly practice exercises with the digital tools
(50%) A final project using the digital tools to conduct primary source research
Or a comprehensive historiographical / methodological essay on digital history
essay and final can be digital publications
Schedule of Classes
D: Discussion
L: Lab
Week 1 – Introduction to Digital Scholarship
D) What is (digital) history?
Readings:
• Sherman Dorn. “Is (Digital) History More than an argument about the Past?”
• Stefan Tanaka. “Pasts in a Digital Age”
• Lorna Hughes. “Conclusion: virtual representation of the past: new research methods, tools and communities of practice.” Virtual Representation of the Past.
Week 2 – A Critical Approach to the Digital World
D) Who gets to be an historian, and why? History and the Digital Public
Readings:
• Robert S. Wolff. “The Historian’s Craft, Popular Memory, and Wikipedia.”
• Jons Unsworth. “The Crisis of Audience and the Open-Access Solution.”
L) Exploring Blogs and Online Archives
• Creating your own blog (wordpress.com)
• Exploring Online Archives:
• Online Archive of California
• French Revolution Digital Archive
Week 3 – Digital Databases and Database Management Software
D) Historians as information scientists
Readings:
• Tim Hitchcock. “Digital searching and the re-formulation of historical knowledge.” Virtual Representation of the Past.
L) Building an Historical Database in Open Office Base
Readings:
• Mark Merry. Databases for Historians: Designing Databases for Historical Research.
Week 4 – Digital Databases and Database Management Software
D) History as Data?
Readings:
• Gibbs and Owens. “The Hermeneutics of Data and Historical Writing.”
• Donald Spaeth. “Representations of sources and data: working with exceptions to hierarchy in historical documents.” Virtual Representation of the Past.
L) Building an Historical Database in Open Office Base
Readings:
• Mark Merry. Databases for Historians: Designing Databases for Historical Research.
Week 5 – Database Management Software, Data Sets, and Data Analysis
D) Interpreting Historical Data
Readings:
• Fabio Ciravegna et al. “Finding needles in haystacks: data-mining in distributed historical datasets.” Virtual Representation of the Past.
L) Building an Historical Database in Open Office Base
Readings:
• Mark Merry. Databases for Historians: Designing Databases for Historical Research.
Week 6 – XML, Markup Languages, and Textual Data
D) Data, Metadata, and the Stuff of Digital History
• Michael Gramer. “Going Meta on Metadata.” Journal of Digital Humanities. Vol. 3, No. 2. (2014).
L) Activity: Marking Up Text in XML
• (Video) Lynda. What is XML.
Week 7 – HTML, CSS, and the Web
L) Codecademy
• HTML BASSICS I, II, III
L) Codecademy
• CSS: An Overview, Selectors, Positioning
Week 7 – XML and TEI
D) Markup, Historical Preservation, and Interoperabiltiy
Readings:
• “Learn the TEI”. Text Encoding Initiative. http://www.tei-c.org/Support/Learn/
D) History and Born-Digital Sources
Readings:
• Aden Events. “Web 2.0 and the Ontology of the Digital.” Digital Humanities Quarterly. Vol 6, no. 2.
Week 9 – Scripting Programming Languages – Python
D) Do you need to code to be a digital historian?
Readings:
• Lee Ann Ghajar, I code, you code, we code…Why Code?, February 16,
2012
• Michael Widner, Learn to Code; Learn Code Culture.
• Miriam Posner. “Some things to think about before you exhort everyone to code.”
Week 10 – Scripting Programming Languages – Python
L) Intro and Syntax: Codecademy
L) Strings and Console Output: Codecademy
Week 11 – Scripting Programming Languages – Python
L) Conditionals and Control Flow: Codecademy
L) Functions: Codecademy
Week 12 – Scripting Programming Languages – Python (Web Scraping)
L) Lists and Dictionaries: Codecademy
L) Lists and Functions: Codecademy
Week 13 – Scripting Programming Languages – Python (Web Scraping)
L) Loops: Codecademy
L) Programming Historian
• Python Introduction and Installation
• Manipulating Strings in Python
• From HTML to a List of Words (part 1)
• From HTML to a List of Words (part 2)
Week 14 – Practical Applications of Digital Research Tools: Text Mining
D) Text and Data Mining in the Discipline of History
Readings:
• Ted Underwood, “Where to start with Text Mining.”
L) Programming Historian
• Creating and Viewing HTML Files with Python
Week 15 – Practical Applications of Digital Research Tools: Visualizing Data
L) Programming Historian
• Keywords in Context (Using n-grams)
• Output Keywords in Context in HTML File
L) Visualizing Text with Voyant Tools
• Brian Croxall, “Comparing Corpora in Voyant Tools”