Schedule

If not specified, all readings are assigned for everyone

Thursday, January 24

Please see the First Day of Class post!

Everyone:

• The Pasts and Futures of Digital History
• Do Digital Natives Exist? (video autoplays)

Grad:

• Is (Digital) History More Than an Argument about the Past?
• Ten Commandments of Grad School
• How I Use Twitter as an Academic

Tuesday, January 29

Everyone:

• The Humanities, Done Digitally
• Lauren F. Klein, “The Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemings.” American Literature 1 December 2013; 85 (4): 661–688. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2367310[download PDF if unavailable through the library]
• How OCR Works
  
• Is Google Knowledge? (video autoplays)

Grad:

• Michel Trouillot 1-31 [PDF download]
• Can Information be Unfettered? Race and the New Digital Humanities Canon

Thursday, January 31

Due: Basic HTML & CSS

Everyone:

• Life on the Outside

Grad:

• [Not available through UAlbany] Brown, D., & Nicholas, G. (2012). Protecting Indigenous Cultural Property in the Age of Digital Democracy: Institutional and Communal Responses to Canadian First Nations and Maori Heritage Concerns. Journal of Material Culture, 17(3), 307–324. Download as PDF: Protecting Indigenous Cultural Property in the Age of Digital Democracy: Institutional and Communal Responses to Canadian First Nations and Maori Heritage Concerns

Tuesday, February 5

Due: Project reviews.  Select one project from Group 1 OR Group 2 AND one project from Group 3.

Group 1 (older projects)

1. UAlbany Campus Buildings Historical Tour
2. The Normal School Company & Normal School Company History
3. State Street Stories
4. Black and Free
5. Valley of the Shadow
6. People of Colonial Albany

Group 2 (misc projects)

1. Mapping the Republic of Letters
   
2. Every3Minutes
3. Coins
4. Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery
5. Forms of Attraction: The Data Behind the Forms We Wear
6. Visual Correspondence
7. [Re]Activate Mama Pina’s Correspondence
8. Mapping Texts
9. Viral Texts
10. Virtual St. Paul’s Cathedral
11. Kindred Britain
12. Six Degrees of Francis Bacon

Group 3 (mapping projects)

1. Arabella Chapman Project
2. Mapping Segregation
3. Mapping Violence
4. Digital Harlem
5. The Negro Traveler’s Green Book
6. Visualizing Emancipation
7. Forced Migration
8. Jamaican Slave Revolt
9. Foreign Born Population
10. Canals 1820-1860
11. The Overland Trails
12. Mapping Occupation
13. Invasion of America
14. Pox Americana
15. Naonaiyaotit Traditional Knowledge Project Atlas
16. Welikia Manahatta Project
17. Layers of London

Thursday, February 7

Everyone:

• “I Nevertheless Am a Historian”: Digital Historical Practice and Malpractice around Black Confederate Soldiers
• The Historian’s Craft, Popular Memory, and Wikipedia
• The Endless Night of Wikipedia’s Notable Women Problem
• Ancestry.com is In Cahoots with Public Records Agencies

Grad:

• Lara Putnam, “The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast,” The American Historical Review, Volume 121, Issue 2, (April 2016): 377–402, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/121.2.377

Tuesday, February 12

Due:Data critique

• Fundamentals of Data Visualization, Intro
• Fundamentals of Data Visualization Ch 2, Visualizing Data
• The Curious Journalist’s Guide to Data: Intro
• The Curious Journalist’s Guide to Data: Quantification, excepting “Sampling” and “The Problem of Measurement Error”

Thursday, February 14

Everyone:

• New Forms of History: Critiquing Data and Its Representations
• Funamentals of Data Visualization Ch 3.1, Cartesian Coordinates (disregard the rest of this chapter)
• Fundamentals of Data Visualization Ch 4, Color Scales

Grad:

• The History Manifesto (excepting chapters 1 and 3)

Tuesday, February 19

Due: Transcriptions

Grad:

• Putting Big Data to Good Use
• Big, Smart, Clean, Messy: Data in the Humanities
• Where are the Individuals in Data-Driven Narratives?
• Reading Digital Sources
• Visualizations and Historical Arguments

Thursday, February 21

Due: Visualization post

• Fundamentals of Data Visualization Ch5, “Directory of Visualizations”
• How Histograms Work
• Exploring Histograms
• Ask the Question, Visualize the Answer
• One Dataset, 25 Ways (Click to view ALL the charts and be prepared to discuss why each does/does not work!)
• Useful for your assignment: DataViz Project and The Data Viz Catalogue

Tuesday, February 26

Due: Data Cleaning

Thursday, February 28

Due: Networks

• The Wisdom And/Or Madness of Crowds
• Maeve Kane, All One People

Grad

• Maeve Kane, “For Wagrassero’s Son: Colonialism and the Structure of Indigenous Women’s Social Connections, 1690–1730.” The Journal of Early American History. (2017) https://doi.org/10.1163/18770703-00702002 [Not available through UAlbany, please download PDF]

These readings are OPTIONAL and may not make a lot of sense at first, since they cover software (Gephi) we’ll use in class. These are more useful as a guide to return to if you decide to work on networks for your final project.

• Introduction to Network Analysis
• Introduction to Network Analysis and Visualization

Tuesday, March 5

Everyone:

• Using Metadata to Find Paul Revere
• Following Up on Paul Revere
• Mapping Shakespeare’s Tragedies

Grad:

• Robert Michael Morrissey, “Archives of Connection.” Historical Methods, 48:2 (2015) https://doi.org/10.1080/01615440.2014.962208

Thursday, March 7

Everyone:

• The four most commonly used map projections, using a human head
• The Oak of Jerusalem
• The Mapping of Massacres in Australia
• The Little-Seen Maps and Stories of Women in Cartography
• Historical Maps Made by 19th Century Women Cartographers
• What is Spatial History?
• Western Railroads and Eastern Capital

Grad:

• Jen Jack Gieseking. “Where Are We? The Method of Mapping with GIS in Digital Humanities.” American Quarterly70, no. 3 (2018): 641-648. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/704349
• Counter-Mapping

Tuesday, March 12

Due: Texts

• Movie NGrams
• Bookworm
• Historic Newspaper Tome
• Mining the Dispatch

Thursday, March 14

Tuesday, March 19

SPRING BREAK – NO CLASS

Thursday, March 21

SPRING BREAK – NO CLASS

Tuesday, March 26

Due: Final Project proposal

Thursday, March 28

Everyone:

• How to Lie with Data Visualization
• Five Ways to Lie With Charts
• How to Spot Visualization Lies
• Avoiding Data Pitfalls
• Useless Data Comparisons
• Goldilocksing Your Graphs

• The Curious Journalist’s Guide to Data: Analysis, excepting “Accounting for Chance,” “Counting Possible Worlds,” “Arguing from the Odds,” and “Statistical Interference”
• The Curious Journalist’s Guide to Data: Communication, excepting “Prediction”

Tuesday, April 2

Thursday, April 4

OPTIONAL Due: Twine

Tuesday, April 9

Due: Final project wireframe

Thursday, April 11

Due: Final project feedback forms

Tuesday, April 16

Workshop day

Thursday, April 18

Workshop day

Tuesday, April 23

Workshop day

Thursday, April 25

Workshop day

Tuesday, April 30

Workshop day

Thursday, May 2

Workshop day

Tuesday, May 7

Final class meeting

Thursday, May 16

Final projects due online by midnight