Week 1 (1/8): Introduction

 

Week 2 (1/15): The Digital

Matthew Kirschenbaum, “What is Digital Humanities, and What’s it Doing in English Departments?” (D)

George Anders, “That ‘Useless’ Liberal Arts Degree has Become Tech’s Hottest Ticket”

http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2015/07/29/liberal-arts-degree-tech/print/

Benjamin Peters, “Digital” (D)

Lev Manovich, “Principles of New Media,” from The Language of New Media (D)

 

See also: “The History of Humanities Computing” in A Companion to Digital Humanities (http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/) and any relevant chapters in A Companion to Digital Literary Studies (http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companionDLS/)

 

Week 3 (1/22): Is Poetry Digital?

T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (printed handout). Feel free to use your favorite book or find a version in the library to bring to class. But for today it must be read on a printed medium.

Re-read “Prufrock” in the Catholic Anthology at The Modernist Journals Project (pp. 2-8):

http://modjourn.org/render.php?view=mjp_object&id=1363358435310401

Also check out this illustrated digital comic version:

https://julianpeterscomics.com/page-1-the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock-by-t-s-eliot/

Guiding questions: How is the experience of reading “Prufrock” at MJP different from in print? How does the poem relate to other content in the anthology? Does it have a different meaning in the different medium?

 

Lab: The Structural and Semantic encoding of Prufrock in Extensible Markup Language (XML)

 

Week 4 (1/29): Digital Archives

Marta Werner and Paul Voss, “Introduction to Poetics of the Archive” (D)

De Kosnik, introduction to Rogue Archives (D)

Mark Sample, “Platform Studies as Historical Inquiry; or, Video Games Bleed History”

http://www.playthepast.org/?p=1857

Spend a couple of hours exploring the following digital archives.

• Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 13, Oklahoma: https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn130/?fbclid=IwAR1Mwfhc7Jqut7Gnq_HvSQZ-UMgRoh3G23wgznaoItXwX49vAJtF-tz8dT0
• MITH’s Vintage Computers Archive: http://mith.umd.edu/vintage-computers/
• Modernist Journals Project (MJP): http://modjourn.org
• Virginia Woolf Online: http://www.woolfonline.com/
• Rossetti Archive: http://www.rossettiarchive.org
• Blake Archive: http://www.blakearchive.org
• The Forget-Me-Not Archive: http://www.orgs.miamioh.edu/anthologies/FMN/
• Jane Austen Manuscript Archive: http://www.janeausten.ac.uk/index.html
• The Stolen Time Archive (read editor’s intro and Author Statement, too): http://vectors.usc.edu/projects/index.php?project=10

 

Lab: Searching / Browsing / Reading Digital Archives

 

Week 5 (2/5): Close- and Distant-Reading Periodicals

Read the June 1918 issues of The Crisis , The Egoist, and The Little Review at MJP:

• Crisis: http://modjourn.org/render.php?id=129294798430500&view=mjp_object
• Egoist: http://modjourn.org/render.php?id=1308748206915627&view=mjp_object
• Little Review: http://modjourn.org/render.php?id=1298918465875002&view=mjp_object

Due: Blog post (1-2 paragraphs) List 3 words that stand out to you as being prominent in each magazine. How do they connect to some of the content items and the general thrust of the magazine?

George Bornstein, “How to Read a Page” (D)

Franco Moretti, “Introduction” & “Graphs” from Graphs, Maps, Trees

                     

Lab: Introduction to distant reading with Voyant Tools – http://voyant-tools.org; distant-reading The New Freewoman.

 

Week 6 (2/12): Digital Periodical Studies

Pick three different magazine titles from the Journals page at MJP, and three different issues from across the time span of that magazine’s run. They can be titles we’ve already looked at or different ones that might interest you.

Due: Blog post – By the morning class, please post which magazines and issues you looked at, and post two questions so that we may have a discussion in class. The questions should fall along the following lines:

• What seems to you an important question to ask and answer about these titles?
• What larger question about archives in general or digital archiving do they lead to?

Lev Manovich: “What is Visualization?” (D)

Lab: Finding ways to answer the questions digitally.

 

Week 7 (2/19): Archival Theory

Derrida, Archive Fever (pages TBA)

Foucault, “The Historical A Priori of the Archive” (D)

 

Week 8 (2/26): Visualization Theory

Stephen Ramsay, “In Praise of Pattern” (D)

Matt Jockers, “Revolution” and “Evidence” (D)

 

Week 9 (3/5): Space and Networks

Franco Moretti, “Network Theory, Plot Analysis” (D)

Please install Gephi on your laptop (http://gephi.org)

Lab: Introduction to network graphing with Gephi

 

 

Week 10 (3/12): Mapping Fiction

James Joyce, “Araby” and “Clay” (D)

Franco Moretti, “Maps” from Graphs, Maps, Trees

Lab: Mapping Dubliners with Google Maps

 

Week 11: SPRING BREAK

 

Week 12 (3/26): Putting It all Together

Walter Benjamin: “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (D)

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel” (D)

Lab: Wiki & Omeka Workshop

 

Week 13 (4/2)

Ted Underwood, selection from Why Literary Periods Mattered (D)

Roopika Risam, selection from New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy

 

Week 14 (4/9)

Lauren Klein, selection from The Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemings

Selections from Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and Digital Humanities

 

Week 15 (4/16)

Final project presentations