Course Calendar

Readings not linked to below can be found on Canvas. Go to Files > course-readings.

The most accurate and up-to-date version of this calendar can be found on this site. Use this online calendar to check on reading assignments and other due dates, rather than the pdf or paper version of our syllabus, since those versions of the syllabus 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: We Are All Digital Scholars: Mapping a Field

Wednesday, January 24

Week 2: What is Data?

Wednesday, January 31

  • Please make sure you have created the Google drive folder you will use to house your course work and shared it with me by class time. Please share this folder with lct64 at cornell dot edu.
  • Class visit with Eliza Bettinger and Iliana Burgos
  • Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, “Introduction: To Classify is Human” and Ch 1 “Some Tricks of the Trade in Analyzing Classification,” from Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (1999)
  • 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), https://data-feminism.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/ei7cogfn/release/4?readingCollection=0cd867ef
  • Explore and familiarize yourself with the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, https://www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/database
  • Cadence Cordell, Quinn Dombrowski, and Glen Layne-Worthey, “DSC #18: The Data-Sitters’ HathiTrust Mistake,” from The Data-Sitters Club (Nov 10, 2022), https://datasittersclub.github.io/site/dsc18.html
    • Read “Quinn: What’s HathiTrust?,” “Quinn: The corpus,” “Cadence,” and “Quinn” and skim the rest
  • Lab 1: Spreadsheets

Week 3: An Impossible View from Nowhere

Wednesday, February 7

Week 4: Collecting, Organizing, and Cleaning Data

Douglass Day 2024

Wednesday, February 14, 12-3 pm, Olin Library 107, https://www.library.cornell.edu/about/staff/central-departments/digital-scholarship/colab-programs/annual-douglass-day-celebration/

Wednesday, February 14

Week 5: Data Curation, Context, and Re-use

Wednesday, February 21

Week 6: Data Analysis

Wednesday, February 28

Week 7: Digitization

Wednesday, March 6

  • Lab 5 due
  • Andrew Prescott and Lorna Hughes, “Why Do We Digitize?: The Case for Slow Digitization,” Archive Journal (2018), http://www.archivejournal.net/essays/why-do-we-digitize-the-case-for-slow-digitization/
  • Ryan Cordell, “‘Q i-jtb the Raven’: Taking Dirty OCR Seriously,” Book History 20 (2017)
  • Molly O’Hagan Hardy, “‘Black Printers’ on White Cards: Information Architecture in the Data Structures of the Early American Book Trades,” from Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016 (2016), https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled/section/3c4a647f-8f61-48b6-ab41-5d6e765ac70f#ch31
  • Matthew Kirschenbaum, Ch III “Understanding Assets: File, Version, and Format” and Ch IV “‘They Do Not See the Point of Us’: Academic Interests” from Books.Files: Preservation of Digital Assets in the Contemporary Publishing Industry: A Report (2020)
    • NOTE: I’ve placed the whole report in our course readings folder, but you only need to read chapters 3 and 4
  • Discuss Lab 6. Come to class having selected the dataset you will use for this lab.

Week 8: Digital Archives (/Databases?)

Wednesday, March 13

  • Cassidy Holahan, “Rummaging in the Dark: ECCO as Opaque Digital Archive,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 54.4 (Summer 2021)
  • Jennifer Guliano and Carolyn Heitman, “Difficult Heritage and The Complexities of Indigenous Data,” Journal of Cultural Analytics (2019), https://culturalanalytics.org/article/11041-difficult-heritage-and-the-complexities-of-indigenous-data
  • Charline Jao, “‘We Think Them Worthy’: A Digital Collection of Poetry from New York’s Nineteenth-Century Black Periodicals,” American Periodicals 32.2 (2022)
  • The Colored Conventions Project:
  • Miriam Posner and Marika Cifor, “Generative Tensions: Building a Digital Project on Early African American Race Film,” American Quarterly (2018)
  • You will be assigned one of the 3 above digital archives to focus on for this week’s class. While you should broadly familiarize yourself with all 3 of the digital archives linked above (Periodical Poets, the Colored Conventions Project, and the Race Film Database), for your assigned archive you should bring to class written answers to the following questions:
    • What materials comprise your archive?
    • How many items are in your archive?
    • What are the boundaries and limits (temporal, national, linguistic, etc) of your archive?
    • Look through a few example items/texts in your archive. How are these materials presented to the user? (Are images of originals provided? Transcriptions? Any metadata? Is the item and/or its metadata downloadable? etc)

Week 9: Encounters with Digital Archives

Wednesday, March 20

Week 10: Data and Computation in Literary and Cultural Studies, part 1

Wednesday, March 27

  • Ted Underwood, “A Genealogy of Distant Reading,” Digital Humanities Quarterly (2017), http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/11/2/000317/000317.html
  • Richard Jean So, “Introduction” and “Ch. 1: Production: On White Publishing,” from Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction (2020)
  • Laura B. McGrath, “‘Books About Race’: Commercial Publishing and Racial Formation in the 21st Century,” New Literary History 53.4 (2022)
  • Lore De Greve and Gunther Martens, “#Bookstagram and Beyond. The Presence and Depiction of the Bachmann Literary Prize on Social Media (2007-2017),” Digital Humanities Benelux Journal (2021)
  • Recommended: Matt Warner, “A Queer Way of Counting: Bibliography and Computational Approaches to the Queer Novel,” New Literary History 53.4 (2022)

Week 11

Wednesday, April 3: NO CLASS – SPRING BREAK

Week 12: Data and Computation in Literary and Cultural Studies, part 2

Wednesday, April 10

Friday, April 12: Final project abstract due

Week 13: (How) Do We Know What We Know?

Wednesday, April 17

  • Andrew Piper, “Introduction” and “Evidence,” from Can We Be Wrong?: The Problem of Textual Evidence in a Time of Data (2020)
    • NOTE: I have given you the entire book in our course readings folder, but you only need to read the Introduction and Par and II for our class.
  • Gabi Kirilloff, “Computation as Context: New Approaches to the Close/Distant Reading Debate,” College Literature 49.1 (2022)
  • Katherine Bode, “What’s the Matter with Computational Literary Studies?,” Critical Inquiry 49.4 (2023)

Week 14: AI and the Digital Humanities

Wednesday, April 24

  • Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen, “Excavating AI”, https://excavating.ai/ (2019)
  • Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Shmargaret Shmitchell, “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜”, FAccT ‘21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (March 2021)
  • Minh Hua and Rita Raley, “How to Do Things with Deep Learning Code,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 17.2 (2023), http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/17/2/000684/000684.html
  • Familiarize yourself with the AI for Humanists project, especially the Code Tutorials

Week 15: Presentations

Wednesday, May 1

  • Presentations of final projects in progress
  1. Laila
  2. Juan
  3. Sanghoon

Final project due Tuesday, May 14