During the first eight weeks of the semester, you will complete labs designed to introduce you to some basic technical skills and procedures that humanists who work with data might use. On most of these weeks (as marked in the syllabus), the last hour of each class period will be devoted to beginning the labs together in class. Two central goals of this course are to use our readings and discussions during these weeks to contextualize our applied work in labs, and to use our applied work in labs to enrich and enhance our understanding of concepts from our readings.
You will report on your completion of these labs using your lab notebook, which you will post to your website repository. Your lab notebook entries will vary quite a bit from lab to lab, but in each lab notebook entry, I will expect to find a brief description of the lab activities completed and/or other evidence of having completed the lab. For our coding lab, you will likely integrate code snippets directly into your Markdown file (more on this as that lab approaches), while for other labs you may instead reference external proof of your work, such as screenshots or links to outcomes. Each lab notebook entry will also include a written discussion of/reflection on the lab. For most labs, I will include a prompt to help start your thinking; you should begin the reflective portion of the lab from there. In this portion of the lab, I will expect prose that reflects analytically on the work of the lab, putting it into conversation with one or two readings from the same week of class as the lab (you may also include readings from the larger class or beyond if appropriate). You should integrate the readings explicitly, through direct quotation if possible.
Your final lab notebook entry (lab 6) will be slightly more substantial. For this lab, you will select an existing scholarly dataset that you have not created; answer some questions about its composition, organization, and scope; and discuss its contributions to a particular field(s) and/or subfield(s). You will need to select the dataset you plan to use for this assignment by class on Wednesday, Feb 23, as you will use this dataset in completing lab 5 as well.
During weeks 2-6, we will find a time each week to hold weekly work sessions outside of class. I will be available during this time for drop-in help with the labs and other challenges, and class members can help each other during this time as well.
You will post each lab notebook entry to your website repository as its own Markdown (.md) file. Lab notebook entries are due 1 week after beginning the lab in class (except for labs 1 and 6). I will check each week that you have completed each lab notebook entry, and I will offer feedback on your lab notebook entries as a whole after labs 3 and 6. To emphasize: each lab notebook entry should be saved as a separate file in your GitHub repository.
You should name your lab notebook entries using the following convention: