Preliminary Class Business
 |
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- DH events
- Preview of readings and practicum for Class 9
- cf. Rosa Menkman
- Mock Project Prospectuses
- Audience for the "mock" grant proposals: the NEH Digital-Humanities Start-up grants are an appropriate model (web site for Start-up Grants, with Guidelines) (example: RoSE proposal). The audience will be humanists who are also digital humanists. So you'll want to be persuasive about the broader humanistic research significance of the project, but you can assume that your audience already understands that DH methods might be useful (and don't need to be sold on that).
- Your questions and progress?
- Open Questions gathered from our classes: Class 5 | Class 6 (unedited) | Class 7 (unedited)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- Segue from last class: databases and the diagrammatic:
- Relational database theory: E. F. Codd, "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks," Communications of the ACM 13, no. 6 (June 1970): 377-87
- Discussed in Alan Liu, "Escaping History: New Historicism, Databases, and Contingency" [PDF] (originally published 2004; chap. 9 of Liu, Local Transcendence (2008); manuscript version provided here for open access) (read only pp. 317-23 on origins and theory of the relational database)
- Structure of a modern "content management system" (CMS): e.g., WordPress site for The Agrippa Files
- Cf., XSLT ("Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations") for XML: e.g., "Tracker"
|
|
1. Intro to Class:
Time, History, and the Archival / Archaeological in Digital Humanities
 |
 |
 |
|
- The humanities as historical disciplines.
- The DH commitment to historical study:
- Some early, influential examples:
- Rossetti Archive
- The William Blake Archive
- The Walt Whitman Archive
- Brown Women Writers Project
- The Valley of the Shadow
- China Historical GIS
- Recent. state-of-the-art examples from our course:
- Franco Moretti (graphs chapter)
- Ryan Heuser and Long Le-Khac, "A Quantitative Literary History of 2,958 Nineteenth-Century British Novels: The Semantic Cohort Method" [PDF] (2012)
- Matthew L. Jockers, Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History (2013)
- Ted Underwood, "We Don’t Already Know the Broad Outlines of Literary History" (2012)
- Zephyr Frank, "Layers, Flows And Intersections: Jeronymo José De Mello And Artisan Life In Rio De Janeiro, 1840s-1880s" [PDF]
- The DH alliance with cultural institutions in the curatorial / preservational mission:
- The "media archaeology" movement (and analogy of "book studies" or "history of the book")
- Resources for discussion:
- Hippolyte Taine, "Introduction" to History of English Literature (1863) [online in sequential sections: I | II | III | IV | V | VI | VII | VIII]
- Marshall McLuhan, excerpts from Understanding Media (1964)
- Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form [PDF] (1974), pp. 86-87
- Claude Shannon, "The Mathematical Theory of Communication" (1963), excerpts
- Lyotard Auto-Differend Page
- The Agrippa Files
- Amodern special issue on "Network Archaeology"
- Wikipedia article page history (example)
- Internet Archive WayBack Machine (example)
- Drew S. Burk, "Living Network Ecologies: A Triptych on the Universe of Fernand Deligny -- Part 1" (2013)
- Johanna Drucker, Subjective Meteorology (2010)
- Sienna Cordoba's practicum
- Aboriginal Australia Art and Culture Centre, Alice Springs: "Dreamtime," "Meaning of the Dreamtime," "Introduction to Aboriginal Art"
- Luciana Duranti, "Archives as a Place"
- Examples of archives:
- Amsterdam City Archives
- California State Archives
- Conservation History Association of Texas, Texas Legacy Project Records
- U. S. National Archives
- (See other examples of archives with online presences at Kate Theimer's blog, ArchivesNext)
- Annals -- Example from Annals of Saint Gall (discussed in Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation; quoted in A. Liu, "Friending the Past")
- Historismus -- Example from Leopold von Ranke (discussed in Alan Liu, "Friending the Past: The Sense of History and Social Computing")
- Genealogy -- Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" [PDF] (1967)
- (pp. 78-79)
- (pp. 80, 81, 82, 86, 87)
- Respect des fonds (Wikipedia article on Respect des fonds)
| Body | Aboriginal Dance Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" [PDF] |
Scroll |
|
|
Codex
|
|
Typewriter |
|
|
Gramophone
|
|
| Film |
|
Konrad Zuses's Z4 computer with film strip program media
(see Andres Burbano, "Between Punched Film and the First Computers: The Work of Konrad Zuse" [2008]) |
|
3. Practicums
- Timeline practicums:
- Percy Ross's exercise
- Elizabeth Allen's exercise
- Nicole Dib's exercise
- Inez's exercise
- Dalia Bolotnikov's exercise
- Gabe Baker's exercise
- Philip Cortes's exercise
- [The Romantic Chronology, ed. Laura Mandell & Alan Liu]
- Other kinds of practicums:
Readings for this Class (Instructor's Annotated Texts)
- Focal Readings
- Background: a few pieces to provoke thought about the history and intellectual traditions of mediated "pastness":
- Aboriginal Australia Art and Culture Centre, Alice Springs: "Dreamtime," "Meaning of the Dreamtime," "Introduction to Aboriginal Art" (See also Wikipedia article on "Dreamtime")
- Alan Liu, "Friending the Past: The Sense of History and Social Computing" (2011) [paywalled; UCSB students have free access through UCSB Library Proxy server]
- Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" [PDF] (1967)
- David Lowenthal, "Material Preservation and its Alternatives" (1989) [paywalled; UCSB students have free access through UCSB Library Proxy server]
- Browse site of The Long Now Foundation; and read Michael Chabon, "The Omega Glory" [PDF] (02006)
- The Idea of "Archives":
- Luciana Duranti, "Archives as a Place" (1996)
- Kate Theimer, "Archives in Context and as Context" (2012)
- Media Archaeology:
- Friedrich A. Kittler, from Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986, trans. 1999), "Introduction," pp. 1-19 [PDF]
- Wolfgang Ernst, from Digital Memory and the Archive (ed. Jussi Parikka, 2013)
- "Archives in Transition: Dynamic Media Memories" [PDF] [course password required]
- "Experimenting with Media Temporality: Pythagoras, Hertz, Turing" [in course reader]
- Jussi Parikka, from What is Media Archaeology (2012), "Archive Dynamics: Software Culture and Digital Heritage" [in course reader]
- Lisa Gitelman, from Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (2006), "Introduction: Media as Historical Subjects" [in course reader]
- Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, from Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (2008), "'Every Contact Leaves a Trace': Storage, Inscription, and Computer Forensics," pp. 36-50 [in course reader]