Schedule
Readings are either linked below or located in our course Google drive folder (in the “Course Readings” subfolder). Readings are due – meaning they should be completed – on the dates indicated.
The most accurate and up-to-date version of this calendar can be found on this site. Use this version to check on reading assignments, rather than the printed version of the syllabus, since the print version will not be updated throughout the semester.
I reserve the right to change the course calendar as needed; adequate advance notice will always be given of any changes.
Week 1: Introductions
Wednesday, January 19
Week 2: What is Data? What is Digital Scholarship?
Wednesday, January 26
- Daniel Rosenberg, “Data Before the Fact,” from “Raw Data” is an Oxymoron (2013)
- Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein, “Ch 2: Collect, Analyze, Imagine, Teach,” from Data Feminism (2020)
- Julia Flanders and Trevor Muñoz, “An Introduction to Humanities Data Curation,” from DH Data Curation
- Lara Putnam, “The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast,” The American Historical Review (2016)
- Lab 1, con't: GitHub Pages and Markdown
- Recommended: Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein, “Introduction: Why Data Science Needs Feminism,” from Data Feminism (2020)
Thursday, January 27
- Additional office hours, 11 am - 12 pm
Week 3: An Impossible View from Nowhere (or, on objectivity and quantification)
Wednesday, February 2
- Lab 1 notebook entry and statement of goals due by class
- Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein, “Ch 3: On Rational, Scientific, Objective Viewpoints from Mythical, Imaginary, Impossible Standpoints,” from Data Feminism (2020)
- Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein, “Ch 4: What Gets Counted Counts,” from Data Feminism (2020)
- Sarah Wilson, “Black Folk by the Numbers: Quantification in Du Bois,” American Literary History (2016)
- Jessica Marie Johnson, “Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads,” Social Text (2018)
- Lab 2: Spreadsheets
Thursday, February 3
- Additional office hours, 11 am - 12 pm
Week 4: Collecting, Organizing, and Cleaning Data
Wednesday, February 9
- Lab 2 notebook entry due by class
- Katie Rawson and Trevor Muñoz, “Against Cleaning,” from Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019 (2019)
- Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein, “Ch. 5: Unicorns, Janitors, Ninjas, Wizards, and Rock Stars” from Data Feminism (2020)
- Ryan Cordell, “Why You...Should Care About OCR” (Jan 19, 2019)
- Quinn Dombrowski, “DSC #1: Quinn's Great Idea,” from The Data-Sitters Club (Nov 7, 2019)
- Katherine Bowers and Quinn Dombrowski, “DSC #2: Katia and the Phantom Corpus,” from The Data-Sitters Club (Dec 12, 2019)
- Lab 3: RegEx
- Lab 3 is really long! That’s because, starting with part 3, I’ve tried to write out everything we are going to do, step by step. Before class, it will be to your benefit to skim the entire lab. You should also read through the “Introduction” and “What Are Regular Expressions?” sections.
- Recommended: Katherine Bode, “The Equivalence of ‘Close’ and ‘Distant’ Reading; or, Toward a New Object for Data-Rich Literary History,” Modern Language Quarterly (2017) (in Additional Readings folder)
Thursday, February 10
- Additional office hours, 11 am - 12 pm
Week 5: Understanding Data I
Wednesday, February 16
- Lab 3 notebook entry due by class (Lab notebook check: Lindsay will give individual feedback on labs 1-3 after this class)
- Julia Flanders and Fotis Jannidis, “Data modeling in a digital humanities context” from The Shape of Data in Digital Humanities (2019)
- Sarah Allison, “Other People’s Data: Humanities Edition,” Journal of Cultural Analytics (2016)
- Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein, “Ch. 6: The Numbers Don’t Speak for Themselves” from Data Feminism (2020)
- Maria Sachiko Cecire, “DSC #3: The Truth About Digital Humanities Collaborations (and Textual Variants!)”, from The Data-Sitters Club (Jan 10, 2020)
- Katherine Bowers, “DSC #6: Voyant's Big Day,” from The Data-Sitters Club (Sept 15, 2020)
- Lab 4: Exploratory Data Analysis with Voyant
- Lab 4 is really, really long! That’s because I’ve tried to write out everything we are going to do, step by step. Before class, it will be to your benefit to skim the entire lab. You should also read through the “Why Voyant?” section, and complete steps 1-3 (downloading the corpora, creating a notes document, uploading the corpora to Voyant (and saving the science corpus ID), and saving the humanities corpus browser link). Uploading the corpora to Voyant and saving the corpus IDs and URLs is potentially one of the more fiddly aspects of working with Voyant, but it will save us a lot of time in class. I will be in the room 30 minutes before our class on this date; if you are available and would like to walk through the uploading with me, please feel free to come early.
Thursday, February 17
- Additional office hours, 11 am - 12 pm
Week 6: Understanding Data II
Wednesday, February 23
- Lab 4 notebook entry due
- Benjamin M. Schmidt, “Do Digital Humanists Need to Understand Algorithms?” from Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016
- Taylor Arnold and Lauren Tilton, “New Data? The Role of Statistics in DH,” from Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019
- Jo Guldi, “Critical Search: A Procedure for Guided Reading in Large-Scale Textual Corpora,” Journal of Cultural Analytics (2018)
- Katherine Bowers, Quinn Dombrowski, and Roopika Risam, “DSC #12: The DSC and the New Programming Language” from The Data-Sitters Club (November 2, 2021)
- Lab 5: Python and Jupyter Notebooks
- There’s some reading to prepare for this lab. Before class, please read through the entire Lab 5 page.
- Recommended: Laura Nelson, “Computational Grounded Theory: A Methodological Framework,” Sociological Methods & Research (2017); Richard Jean So, “‘All Models are Wrong,’” PMLA (2017) (both in Course Readings folder)
Thursday, February 24
- Additional office hours, 11 am - 12 pm
Week 7: Digital Archives
Wednesday, March 2
- Lab 5 notebook entry due
- Come to class having selected the scholarly dataset you will use for lab 6 (see the last section of Lab 6 for ideas)
- Trevor Owens, “Introduction: Beyond Digital Hype and Digital Anxiety,” from The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation (2018), focus especially on the “Sixteen Guiding Digital Preservation Axioms” (pgs 4-9)
- Andrew Prescott and Lorna Hughes, “Why Do We Digitize?: The Case for Slow Digitization,” Archive Journal (2018)
- Jennifer Guliano and Carolyn Heitman, “Difficult Heritage and The Complexities of Indigenous Data,” Journal of Cultural Analytics (2019)
- Miriam Posner and Marika Cifor, “Generative Tensions: Building a Digital Project on Early African American Race Film,” American Quarterly (2018)
- The Colored Conventions Project:
- Discuss Lab 6
- Recommended: Thomas Padilla, “On A Collections As Data Imperative,” Library of Congress (2017)
Thursday, March 3
- Additional office hours, 11 am - 12 pm
Week 8: Encounters with Digital Archives
Wednesday, March 9
- Matthew Kirschenbaum, “Ch. 1: Archives Without Dust,” from Bitstreams: The Future of Digital Literary Heritage (2021)
- Roopika Risam, “Ch 2: Colonial Violence and the Postcolonial Digital Archive” from New Digital Worlds (2019)
- Lauren F. Klein, “The Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemings,” American Literature (2013)
- Michelle Caswell, Marika Cifor, and Mario H. Ramirez, “‘To Suddenly Discover Yourself Existing’: Uncovering the Impact of Community Archives,” The American Archivist (2016)
- Recommended: Mike Ashenfelder, “The NEH ‘Chronicling America’ Challenge: Using Big Data to Ask Big Questions,” The Signal: A Library of Congress Blog (Aug 4, 2016)
Friday, March 11: Lab 6 and first self-assessment due (Lab notebook check: Lindsay will give individual feedback on labs 4-6 over break)
Week 9
Wednesday, March 16: NO CLASS – SPRING BREAK
Week 10: Data and Computation in Post-45 US Literary Studies
Wednesday, March 23
- Discussion of final project assignment
- Ted Underwood, “A Genealogy of Distant Reading,” Digital Humanities Quarterly (2017)
- Richard Jean So, “Introduction,” from Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction (2020)
- Richard Jean So, “Ch. 1: Production: On White Publishing,” from Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction (2020)
- Laura B. McGrath, “America's Next Top Novel,” Post45 (2020)
- Richard Jean So, “Contemporary Culture After Data Science,” Journal of Cultural Analytics (2021) (introduction to special issue that includes Sinykin and Roland’s article below)
- Dan Sinykin and Edwin Roland, “Against Conglomeration,” Journal of Cultural Analytics (2021)
- By class, please contribute 1 reading to the “Week 11 Reading Suggestions” document in our class Google drive folder; see instructions in the document for more information.
Week 11: Data and Computation in the Humanities
Wednesday, March 30
- Readings set by class and drawn from the “Week 11 Reading Suggestions” document in our class Google drive folder.
- Select 3 readings from the “Week 11 Reading Suggestions” document to read for next week, in addition to the 1 reading you suggested originally (for a total of 4 readings).
- Please come to class with 1-2 questions and/or quotations from each reading you selected to read for this week’s class. You can use the “Week 11 Discussion Questions and/or Quotes” document in our class Google drive folder to list your questions/quotes. See the “Week 11 Discussion Questions and/or Quotes” document for more information.
- Last ~30 min of class: Discuss preliminary final project ideas with class (come to class ready to discuss this)
Week 12: Proceed with Care
Wednesday, April 6
- Final project abstract due
- Nan Z. Da, “The Computational Case against Computational Literary Studies,” Critical Inquiry (2019)
- Also skim the Appendix, especially section 9, “Suggested Guidelines for Reviewing CLS Manuscripts,” pg 25. This is in our course readings folder (on Google drive) as a zip file, titled “Da - Appendix.zip.” Download the zip file and unzip to read.
- “Computational Literary Studies: A Critical Inquiry Online Forum” (March 2019) (these are short responses to Da’s article that were published on Critical Inquiry’s blog shortly after the publication of her article):
- Recommended: Katherine Bowers and Quinn Dombrowski, “Katia and the Sentiment Snobs,” from The Data-Sitters Club (Oct 25, 2021)
Week 13: Futures of Humanities Data Work
Wednesday, April 13
- Kaiama L. Glover and Alex Gil, “On the Interpretation of Digital Caribbean Dreams,” from The Digital Black Atlantic (2021)
- Rachel Mann, “Paid to Do but Not to Think: Reevaluating the Role of Graduate Student Collaborators” from Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019 (2019)
- Christina Boyles, Anne Cong-Huyen, Carrie Johnston, Jim McGrath, and Amanda Phillips, “Precarious Labor and the Digital Humanities,” American Quarterly (2018)
- Select one of the below journals, review their editorial policies, and select a recent article/paper to skim
- Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation
- Recommended: Ted Underwood, “Digital Humanities as a Semi-Normal Thing,” from Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019 (2019); Safiya Umoja Noble, “Toward a Critical Black Digital Humanities,” from Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019 (2019)
Week 14: NO CLASS
Wednesday, April 20
- Lindsay will be available during class time for individual/team meetings about final projects
Week 15: Final Projects
Wednesday, April 27
- Final project presentations and discussion
Final project and final self-assessment due Monday, May 9