Preliminary Class Business
- Enrollment
- (add codes for course?)
- Auditors (students sitting in on the course):
- What work do you wish to do? -- e.g., some of practicums and ideas for possible blog posts (if not the actual posts)?
- Tech support for course
- DH News & Events page
1. Doing DH in This Course: First Steps
-
Introduction to working on the Student Work site for this course
-
Wiki membership (example of invitation to join "workspace")
- The nature of a wiki and "Writer" level user permissions
-
Basic editing, linking, and uploading procedures
- Wiki editing help available in sidebar of site
- Using folders
- Using templates (e.g., student bios in Alan's undergrad course)
- "Page history" (versioning) feature
- Basic Twitter
- List of class members on Twitter: https://twitter.com/alanyliu/lists/english-236-ucsb-f2013
- Twitter clients -- e.g.,
- Tweetdeck
- Twitterific (for iOS)
- Hootsuite
- Twitter tools & search -- e.g.,
- Topsy (search, analytics)
- Hootsuite (scheduled posting, analytics)
- TweetsMap (analyzes and maps geographical location of one's Twitter followers)
- Visible Tweets ("Visible Tweets is a visualisation of Twitter messages designed for display in public space")
- Twitter Best Practices & Protocol:
- Following
- Subscribing to lists
- Retweeting
- Retweeting with modification or commen: "Comment. RT ..."
- Replying
- the "[dot]@username" convention
- Threading posts
- Mentioning (vs. "subtweeting")
- Crediting "via @username" or "HT @username")
- Favoriting
- Common abbreviations: +1, <3, ICYMI, #FF
- Blog / Content Management System Platforms (e.g., WordPress.com, WordPress.org)
- Basic data architecture of a modern "content management system"
- Looking "under the hood" of a WordPress site.
2. State of the Digital Humanities Field
- Focal Question Where is digital humanities? (methodologically, institutionally, socially, geopolitically)
- Focal Readings
[Some of the focal readings from class 1 will be reprised to complement the more professionally-oriented readings of class 2 about the "field."]
- Alan Liu, "The State of the Digital Humanities: A Report and a Critique," Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 11.1-2 (2012): 8-41 [paywalled; UCSB students have free access through UCSB Library Proxy server]
- Matthew Jockers, "Welcome to the Big Tent," DH 2011 conference, Stanford U., 19-22 June 2011.
- Stephen Ramsay, "On Building" (2011)
- Natalia Cecire, "Theory and the Virtues of Digital Humanities" (Introduction to section on "Conversations"), Journal of Digital Humanities 1.1 [PDF] (Winter 2011): 44-53.
- Amanda Phillips, "#transformDH -- A Call to Action Following ASA 2011" (26 October 2011); see also the #transformDH web site
- Postcolonial Digital Humanities (#dhpoco) Open Thread, 10-14 May 2013
- James Smithies, "Speaking Back to America, Localizing DH Postcolonialism" (2013)
- GO::DH (Global Outlook::Digital Humanities) [browse site]
- Other Readings
- Patrik Svensson, "Humanities Computing as Digital Humanities" (2009)
- Melissa Terras / U. College London Digital Humanities, "Infographic: Quantifying Digital Humanities" (2012) [download the PDF infographic]
- DiRT, DARIAH, DHCommons, "Draft for Review: Taxonomy of DH Research Activities and Objects" (2013)
- Browse titles in the tables of contents of the following essay collections or conferences:
- A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth (Blackwell, 2004)
- A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, ed. Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman (Blackwell, 2007)
- Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew K. Gold (University of Minnesota Press, 2012); open access edition, 2013.
- Literary Studies in the Digital Age: An Evolving Anthology, ed. Kenneth M. Price and Ray Siemens (MLA Commons, 2013)
- Digital Humanities 2013 conference, Lincoln, Nebraska, 16-19 July 2013.
- The Dark Side of the Digital conference, U. Milwaukee, 2-4 May 2013.
- Digital Humanities Panels at MLA 2014 (compiled by Mark Sample)
-
Practicum: Getting Started in DH Course "practicums" are hands-on, small-scale exercises that ask students to experiment at a beginner's level with the tools of the digital humanities. The goal is not technical mastery but learning enough about the technologies to think about, and through, their concepts and also to discover which tools might be used in a student's future research. In many cases, experience gained in the practicums will feed directly into discussion of conceptual issues in class. (See Assignments: Practicums).
☞ Where is DH Methodologically?
- Stephen Ramsay, "On Building" (2011) [live site]
- Natalia Cecire, "Theory and the Virtues of Digital Humanities" (Introduction to section on "Conversations"), Journal of Digital Humanities 1.1 [PDF] (Winter 2011): 44-53.
- Tom Scheinfeldt and Ryan Shaw, "Words and Code" (2011)
- Who's right?
- What's at stake in the debate?
{"hacking," coding, making, building} vs. {"yacking," interpreting, theorizing}? - What is the function of the "meta" in "method"? (Etymology of "method": μετα- meta- prefix + ὁδός way)
- Do the humanities (and digital humanities) need method?
- Taezoo Park, Leo Kang and Steven Jackson, Scale (2013)
- The Secret Life of Technology (1999) (A. Liu, UCSB English Dept.)
- Glitch Images
- Where does breaking things fit in the picture of making things?
- Cf. Bruno Latour on "compositionism" -- "An Attempt at a Compositionist Manifesto." New Literary History 41.3 (2010): 471-490 (Latour's "hammer" metaphor quoted by A. Liu here)
- DiRT, DARIAH, DHCommons, "Draft for Review: Taxonomy of DH Research Activities and Objects" (2013)
- What alternative meta-descriptions might there be for DH that frame it on axes different from "hack vs. yack"?
☞ Where is DH Sociopolitically?
- Amanda Phillips, "#transformDH -- A Call to Action Following ASA 2011" (26 October 2011); see also the #transformDH web site
- Postcolonial Digital Humanities (#dhpoco) Open Thread, 10-14 May 2013
- The Dark Side of the Digital conference, U. Milwaukee, 2-4 May 2013.
- Possible historical analogies:
- Tradition of "defenses" of literature
- "The Fugitives" (1922-25)
- Russian Formalism (e.g., Boris Eichenbaum, "The Theory of the 'Formal Method,'" 1926)
☞ Where is DH Geopolitically?
- GO::DH (Global Outlook::Digital Humanities) [browse site]
- Melissa Terras / U. College London Digital Humanities, "Infographic: Quantifying Digital Humanities" (2012) [download the PDF infographic]
- James Smithies, "Speaking Back to America, Localizing DH Postcolonialism" (2013)
☞ Where is DH Institutionally?
- Patrik Svensson, "Humanities Computing as Digital Humanities" (2009):
- "While it is fair to say that the present institutional landscape is rather
diverse and expansive, it is also important to acknowledge that the
ratio of thriving humanities computing environments and initiatives at
universities in Europe and the United States is still very low in relation
to the whole of the Humanities..." - "A related and much-discussed issue – highly relevant to digital
humanities generally and to humanities computing as digital
humanities – concerns whether humanities computing should be
independent and possibly an academic discipline in its own right or
whether it should primarily interrelate with existing humanities
departments." - A. Liu, “'Why I’m In It' x 2 – Antiphonal Response to Stephan Ramsay on Digital Humanities and Cultural Criticism" (2013)