As we all know, times are tough. This is a demanding course, and while I have tried to adjust the course policies and expectations to account for the times, I’m certain I have not imagined every situation that may arise or accounted fully for every challenge you may be facing this semester. Please know, without a doubt, that your health and the health of your friends and family will always be more important to me than this course. You do not have to apologize to me if we need to find an alternate path for you through this course, or if you need more time to complete something. I want to support you, and I want you to communicate with me about how I can do that better.
For the first two weeks of the semester, we will meet remotely using Zoom. Assuming we return to in-person instruction after that, you will be required to wear a mask covering your mouth and nose at all times during class. You may briefly remove your mask to drink. Each class session, we will take a 10-minute break after the first 75-90 minutes of class. Please try to eat before or after class, or during the break (outside the room), so that you do not need to remove your mask for long periods of time during class.
We will make use of several online systems and program in this course: a course site, a class Google drive folder, and Zoom. The “ENG 612 S22 Digital Infrastructure” doc in our shared class folder on Gdrive will contain the passwords and other information you need to use our course digital systems.
We will use this course site to manage course information and our schedule. You will find an online version of our course calendar here (including the most up-to-date version of reading assignments and due dates), as well as information about all course assignments.
We will also use a shared class Google drive folder to distribute course readings and other materials. Every UM student, staff, and faculty member has free access to Google Drive, but you will need to sign in to Google Drive using your UM email and password. At the beginning of the semester, I will share you into this folder via your UM email address.
To access our class Google drive folder:
We will use Zoom for the first two weeks of classes, as well as for office hours and one-on-one meetings (if not meeting outside). The “ENG 612 S22 Digital Infrastructure” document in our class Google drive folder will contain our class Zoom link and our office hours link.
We will not record class sessions or office hours. Our class meeting room will not have a waiting room, but I will enable a waiting room for office hours. You will enter the waiting room first when signing on via our office hours link. I will then let you into the office hours Zoom room. If I do not let you in right away, this is because I am meeting with another student.
You will also create your own website to which you will post your lab notebook entries and the written portion of your final project. You will begin creating this website on the first day of class, in Lab 1. You will share the address of your website (and its attendant repository) with me so that I can check your progress. For those students who plan on completing the requirements of the Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities, this website can serve as the foundation for your final portfolio (though it doesn’t have to). You will have the option to make your website repository private.
In this class, you will be asked to do and to read new things, things with which you may not have much, or any, experience. This may include learning technical details or processes, including coding, but it will also include learning about concepts and methods in how to collect, curate, organize, analyze, store, and make reproducible humanities datasets. These tasks involve new ways of thinking and will sometimes feel frustrating and hard. There will be times when you get stuck, or when you are confused about what to do in a lab, or when you are wrong. All of that is fine and expected, and I want to encourage all of us to make this class safe for experimentation, error, and failure. I do not expect anyone to walk into or out of this class an expert in work with humanities data. What I do expect is a good-faith effort, a willingness to experiment, and the ability to keep an open mind. Most importantly, please be gentle on yourself without giving up; failure is not a reflection on who you are as a person, student, or scholar – it’s just a reflection of the fact that you are learning something new.
We will be doing some coding in Python in this class, and we will also be working with the command line, GitHub, and Excel. We are doing this technical work for three reasons: 1) To introduce you to what it’s like to work with data in a humanities research context and to communities of humanities scholars who collect and use data in their work; 2) To teach you how you can contribute to these communities (and to your other fields of expertise) by communicating your research and making it reproducible for others; 3) To help you to complete the final project in this class, which will involve creating your own humanities dataset.
About 10 years ago, there was some debate in the digital humanities about whether people “need” to code in order to do DH. You do not need to code to do DH, at all, mainly because “doing DH” involves a wide variety of practices, only a few of which this course will cover. Working with data – including collecting humanities datasets, curating online archives, and doing computational research and/or criticism – by no means constitutes the entirety of “doing DH.” There are also many GUI (graphical-user interface) tools designed to accomplish some tasks in data management and/or analysis (including Excel, ArcGIS, Gephi, the GUI topic modeling tool, etc). Generally speaking, these tools require no coding. However, the argument of this class is that achieving some level of technical literacy, however basic, is advantageous because it gives you a baseline for understanding – and for potentially being able to implement – new and unfamiliar developments in humanities data work. It also (gently, I hope!) encourages you to “get your hands dirty” by trying things out and, inevitably, by experiencing and overcoming failure and frustration.
If you take away only one thing about the technical side of working with data in the humanities from this class, I hope it is that you can absolutely teach yourself the technical skills you need to do the research you want, even if you think you are not a “technical person.” There is no way that I can teach you every technical skill you might need to work with data in the humanities; there are simply too many different things one can do, and technical skills, methods, and platforms change very quickly. However, my hope is that in introducing you to some basics, you will learn that there is nothing special about learning to work with data in the humanities, and that given time and effort, you can learn to do it, too.