I have update-org-days in my init file. So I just need to iterate after I know the date difference, which I can easily calculate in the table below.
[cite:@LiuImaginingNewMedia2013]
(update-org-days -301)| <2020-07-07 Tue> | <2021-05-04 Tue> | 301 |
| 0 |
| Instructor | Matt Price |
| Course Meetings | Tth 2-5PM SS 561 (see below) |
| Office Hrs: | TTH 11-12 via Zoom (Password: MPOffice ) (Pls make an appointment!) |
| matt.price@utoronto.ca (weekdays 9-5, 48h turnaround) | |
| Slack | Join Here |
Digital Humanities (DH) is a discipline at the intersections of the humanities with computing. DH studies human culture – art, literature, history, geography, religion – through computational tools and methodologies; and, in turn, DH studies digital artifacts through humanist lenses, as complex cultural objects shaped by wider social, political, and philosophical concerns. Digital humanists analyze languages through digital text collections; build digital archives of forbidden books; construct video games to study literature; or resurrect historical cities through digital maps.
We’re taking a hiatus from the usual project theme of “endangered books: fragile, hidden, censored, forbidden.” We will still discuss these themese to some extent, but your projects, and some of our lecture material, will focus instead on plague literature. We’ll discuss this theme throughout your assignments and as a recurring example in class lectures and discussions.
By the end of the course, you will have mastered concepts and technologies you can use in future courses and workplaces: text encoding and data visualization, data analysis and digital exhibit platforms. And you will learn how our stories and cultural conversations work and shapeshift through digital environments.
By the end of the course:
- You will be able to describe the history and intellectual landscape of the digital humanities, including the central concepts, debates, projects, and digital tools current in the discipline.
- You will have developed a set of best practices around datasets, project design and management, and data curation.
- You will have analyzed data and digital artifacts as complex cultural objects, shaped by, and shaping, how we live, think, and know.
Through hands-on workshops:
- You will experiment with text encoding, quantitative text analysis, and text-based videogames as tools of scholarship
- You will create and analyze data visualizations
- You will research and author your own digital exhibit
Course readings will be available either as links in the syllabus or via the course Quercus site each week. You are responsible for checking the Quercus site and ensuring you receive course announcements posted via Quercus.
All technologies used in this course are open-source or, in rare cases, licensed for use by U of T students. You will need access to a working computer to complete the work for this course. With luck, we will be able to complete ourwork in the computer lab, but there is no guarantee. This is once again an unusual year, and things will be a bit different than normal. We will try to keep software installation requirements to a minimum, but some new tools may be inevitable.
Each session we have approximately three hours of class time, which include lecture, discussion, and hands-on work. For now, at least, we will be meeting in person (yay!). In general, our classes will begin with lecture material and end with hands-on work. Most of our time together will be focussed on making progress on course assignments & skill acquisition. Much of your course work will be done in class, in facilitated environments and hands-on workshops. Given the fast pace and praxis-oriented environment, you must come to class on time, all the time: it is all too easy, otherwise, to get lost. If this poses a problem, please let me know as soon as possible.
Because lectures will be delivered asynchronously, synchronous class time will generally be somewhat shorter than 3 hours; I aim to keep us in the confined space of the classroom for no longer than 90 minutes a week. If you have experience with a ”flipped classroom”, this semester’s course format may feel familiar.
| Assignment | % | Due Date |
|---|---|---|
| Short Assignments (3) | 45 | <2020-09-25 Fri>, <2020-10-24 Sat>, <2020-12-01 Tue> |
| Participation | 10 | All semester |
| Project: Consultation | 1 | Oct. 27-Nov 4 by appointment |
| Project: Proposal & Annotated Bibliography | 9 | <2020-11-06 Fri> |
| Project: Digital Exhibit | 35 | <2020-12-11 Fri> |
| Total | 100 |
Every week, you are also responsible for coming to the synchronous class meetings and undertaking the facilitated classwork in a structured environment. This is where you can explore, experiment, fail creatively: all I require is engaged participation—that is, you come to class, do the hands-on computer work, ask questions, and engage in class discussion. If you miss class or are more than ten minutes late for class, you will miss the grades, unless your absence is excused.
You are responsible for writing three short assignments in this course. These include discussions of in-class digital artifacts as well as course readings. You will work on these assignments in class as well as outside class, and you will hand them in via Quercus. They need not be perfect, just done. 900 words approximately.
Your major assignment in this course is to tell the story of a work of plague literature through a digital exhibit. This is a scaffolded assignment with several parts.
Students with diverse learning styles and needs are more than welcome in this course. Please feel free to approach me or Accessibility Services so we can assist you in achieving academic success in this course.
See the A&S Accessibility Website for more details on the Accessibility policy.
I love hearing from you! The best way to contact me is to talk to me in person in office hours. I also answer emails at matt.price@utoronto.ca within 48 hours or fewer on business days, and I monitor Slack as often as I can. However, I do not answer email after 5:00 p.m. or on weekends, and I do not expect you to do so, either. Please email me as soon as possible to make sure you receive your answers in good time.
- Assignments
- Assignments are generally due at midnight. Late assignments will be penalized two percentage points per day unless you have prior permission from the instructor in writing (email). (Of course, late penalties do not apply when the lateness was caused by illness, bereavement, or other serious circumstances outside students’ control. For religious observances, please notify instructor before the due date.)
- Lab Work
- If you miss a class, you are responsible for catching up with the work and will not receive credit for that class. (Of course, I will not penalize you if your absence is caused by illness, bereavement, religious observances, or other serious circumstances outside students’ control.)
- Documentation needed for extensions
- As a matter of fairness to all students, you may be required to support any request for extensions or makeup test with supporting documentation. For medical issues, documentation consists of UofT’s Verification of Student Illness or Injury form. For non-medical issues, documentation consists of a note from the student’s College Registrar, social worker, clergy etc. Non-medical notes must contain the same information requested on U of T’s Verification of Student Illness or Injury form.
- Re-marking
- The deadline for requesting a re-marking is one week from the date the term work was made available for pickup. Unfortunately, I am unable to accept late re-marking requests.
In this course, you will work with texts, objects, and digital artifacts. As you navigate the world of digital cultural heritage and write for a wider public, you are allowed (indeed, encouraged!) to use the work of others – but you must carefully and conscientiously acknowledge your sources, give credit where credit is due, and respect the University of Toronto’s expectations of academic integrity.
What is “Digital Humanities”? We discuss the range of projects, activities, and concerns of this growing field, and collaboratively survey representative projects from around the world. We discuss DH in relation to the theme of the course, banned books.Tool Workshop: Twine
- How do digital media change possibilities for humanists to express themselves and craft persuasive arguments? We experiment via a popular game-design tool.
Then we’ll discuss the components of digital humanities projects—data, code, tools, platforms, standards and communities of practice—as they manifest across a gallery of projects, living or dead. We investigate success, failure, and sustainability in DH projects. We collaboratively analyze two DH projects, peering “under the hood” of their technical framework and examining their research questions, digital artifacts, user experiences and intended audiences, and disciplinary implications.
- Rens Bod, “Introduction”, in A New History of the Humanities (2013)
- Miriam Posner, “How Did They Make That?” (2013)
- Alan Galey & Stan Ruecker, “How a Prototype Argues” (2010) (in-class discussion)
- Kinds of danger, types of responses
- Using digital methods to discover and highlight new understanding of literary texts
- [cite:@SamuelsDeformanceInterpretation1999a] (in-class discussion)
- [cite:@LiuImaginingNewMedia2013]
- How do digital humanities text analysis tools open new ways of reading literature? We discuss TEI, then experiment with text encoding using JSON data structures, and the text of an early-modern poem.
On Resurrections, Risks, Losses
- [cite:@Nowviskiedigitalhumanitiesanthropocene2014]
- [cite:@PellingmeanngcontagionReproduction2001]
- Poe, ”The Masque of the Red Death”
A very brief intro to Omeka, the framework we’ll use to build your class projects.
Interlude: we discuss our experience of the last year, and how to approach it as a scholar in the humanities
We examine digital archives, discussing creation, preservation, ethical concerns, relationships with communities, and security and environmental issues raised by cloud computing and machine learning. We examine UofT’s guidelines around the ethical and technical management of human research data. We back up and ask: what are data models and algorithms? We discuss how data models, algorithms, and digital platforms inform ways of knowing, learning, and reading. Data as endangered/endangering knowledge.- Johanna Drucker, “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display” (2011).
- Miriam Posner, Data Trouble: Why Humanists Have Problems with Datavis, and Why Anyone Should
- Miriam Posner, Humanities Data: A Necessary Contradiction (2015) Accessed April 30, 2019.
- U of T’s research data management policies, including guidelines on handling sensitive data (including de-identification, i.e. anonymizing your data) and on Canadian funders’ data publication requirements (two of the three federal funding bodies mandate that data created with gov’t funding be made public).
- Cathy O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. (2016)
- Safiya Umoja Noble. Algorithms Of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. (2018)
- An introduction to data, and to data cleaning with OpenRefine
Introduction to data cleaning with OpenRefine, a powerful data cleaning and transformation tool.
This year, well be using the excellent new OpenRefine Online Course from the Map and Data Library. I’ll post a brief online lecture before class introducing the tool and giving suggestions for
In another workshop, we turn to data visualization, using the Tableau software and the publicly-available COVID-19 Dataset from /The Atlantic/
- Workshop Materials Link to be distributed
- Coming Soon!
An earlier version of this syllabus was originally written by Alexandra Bolintineanu, and draws on both Kristen Mapes’ Introduction to Digital Humanities, AL285 and on Miriam Posner’s DH101: Introduction to Digital Humanities Fall 2014, UCLA.