Class Schedule
Week 1: Digital Scholarship and its Tools
Introduction to the course and discussion of the syllabus. Showcase of digital scholarship tools and methods.
Week 2: Digital History and Digital Humanities
Exploration of critical debates in digital history and the current and potential impact of digital technologies on the theory and practice of history and related disciplines. Discussion of a data-centric approach to digital scholarship.
Week 3: Public and Online History
A review of issues in public history, such as copyright, intellectual property, information overload, and data curation. Basics of online publication, and discussion of main platforms. Online exhibitions (using Omeka), blogs, and e-publications.
Week 4: Thinking about Data
Discussion of data types and data structures. Introduction to conceptual hierarchies and ontologies that structure data in a way that enables later manipulation and analysis. Introduction to text encoding and metadata. Principles of database design and maintenance.
Week 5: Rethinking Narrative in the Digital Age
Discussion of the ways in which databases and other non-traditional media enable non-linear narratives and new approaches to interacting with an audience. Introduction to FileMaker Pro.
Week 6: Acquiring and Storing Data
Discussion of how to design collection and storage strategies, including data mining and digitization. Finding and using online sources and local repositories. We will cover how to extract data with Kimono and Outwit Hub and how to import it into FileMaker.
Week 7: Organizing and Manipulating Data
Discussion of advanced techniques for the manipulation of data before and after importing it into a database (text parsing, calculations, and scripting). Introduction to Regular Expressions.
Week 8: Modelling and Analyzing Data
Introduction to data modeling, basics of exploratory and inferential data analysis. Exploring the concept of time as an organizing element and how to use timelines effectively. Introduction to the basics of Tableau.
Week 9: Textual Data
Text markup, parsing, and transformations. Introduction to topic modeling and sentiment analysis. Discussion of quantitative corpus linguistics and textual analytics.
Week 10: Spatial Data
Discussion of online spatial data sources and mapping tools, including techniques for the acquisition and organization of vector and raster spatial data. Introduction to the use of Geographic Information Systems.
Week 11: Visualizing Data
Discussion of how to gain insight into a complex dataset by highlighting its key aspects in visually engaging ways. We will cover the use of visualization tools both to enable discovery and support research, and to present data to various audiences.
Week 12: Presenting Data
Discussion of techniques for communicating information clearly and effectively. We will cover how to build narratives; issues of perception, audience, and mediation; and style and aesthetics.
Week 13: Final Project Presentations
Students present their final project to the class to get feedback and workshop problems before final submission.