Logistics
Course Number: IDSC 130, Hacking the Humanities
Instructor: Austin Mason
Schedule: T, TH 01:15PM – 03:00PM
Classroom: Weitz Center for Creativity, Room 138
Office: Weitz Center for Creativity, Room 239B
Office Hours: Monday, 1-3pm and by appointment
Readings
As this is a digital course, the required texts are all available publicly online, with only one or two exceptions which will be distributed as pdfs. In addition to the individual assignments listed on the weekly syllabus, we will occasionally dip into various online “companions” to digital humanities. Feel free to check them out and explore topics that interest you in more depth at your leisure.
- Intro to Digital Humanities, Johanna Drucker, UCLA Center for Digital Humanities
- A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth
- Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew K. Gold
- Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web, Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig
Course Requirements and Grading Breakdown
In Class and Online Participation (30%)
Blog posts
Each week (save one, see below) you will be given a blog prompt and asked to post a thoughtful response of no more than 300 words to the course blog at least 24 hours before class meets each Tuesday. These assignments might ask you to review a digital humanities project website using these guidelines, try out and evaluate a digital tool for research, or engage in an area of debate on the usefulness or potential troubles surrounding particular digital initiatives. Before class, you will begin to engage in discussion by commenting on at least two of your classmates’ posts (using the blog’s comment feature). We will pick up these ideas and continue the discussion in class.
Readings in Diigo
Because all of the course readings are available online we will be exploiting the collaborative potential of the social research tool Diigo. With Diigo installed in your browser, you can highlight, comment on, and tag articles on the live web, sharing all of your annotations instantly with the group. In this way, we can all take notes while we read, allow others to see what we are interested in and begin an online conversation.
Tech Assignments (20%):
These assignments cover basic web skills and key applications and are intended to give you the technical knowledge you need to design and build your final project. They will begin with basic instruction in weekly labs, and must be completed online before the next lab session.
Tutorial Assignment (10%):
On one week near the end of the course, in lieu of the regular blog post, you will be asked to pick a DH tool that we haven’t discussed yet and figure out an interesting use case for it (or, vice versa, pick a use case and figure out a potentially viable DH tool) and create an online tutorial for the rest of us. Tutorials involving screencasts, screen captures, and “1-2-3” step-by-step instructions are not terribly hard to create, and we will go over the basics in class. You will thus begin the (hopefully lifelong!) process of paying forward what you’ve learned in the course and becoming the “local computer expert.”
Group Final Project (40%)
The final projects for the course will revolve around the history of Carleton and its campus as the college nears its sesquicentennial anniversary (that’s the 150). It is much easier, not to mention more satisfying, to learn new skills by applying them to concrete projects rather than arbitrary examples, and the local setting of our college—its physical environment, its buildings, and its historical and literary archives—will constitute our data set. Collectively, we will use new digital technologies to tell stories (well-researched, carefully documented, scholarly sophisticated stories) of how Carleton’s past inhabitants built, inhabited and experienced the spaces that we encounter (or no longer encounter) today.
You and your group will therefore design and execute a DH project using the tools and platforms of your choosing and keyed to your discipline of choice. All projects will make use of local resources, including the holdings of the Carleton College archives, local newspapers from the Northfield historical society, literary works set in the local environment, and environmental data. Part of your research will therefore involve getting out from behind the desk and into the community to gather real world data, a process which we will begin together but you will continue on your own.
Your project will be pitched in week 4, detailed and refined in week 6, published in week 9 and presented in week 10.
Moodle
This course will use WordPress as the primary website platform. Our Moodle site will consist mainly of a list of links to other platforms and will serve primarily as a repository for any PDFs we read.
