American Civilization 2220A: Digital Scholarship

Julia Flanders and John Melson Spring 2011

Course Description
How has the digital turn in the 21st century affected scholarship in the humanities and public humanities? What kind of intellectual and professional landscape is being formed by digital media? In this course, graduate students and advanced undergraduates will have the opportunity to explore what it means to do digital scholarship, broadly speaking: both how we create the resources on which digitally inflected research depends, and how we use those resources. The course will provide a critical framework for this work, focusing on four specific areas: 1. Representation, materiality, medium: how do digital objects represent (simulate, provide access to) physical artifacts? What are the different kinds of representational media in play here and how do they affect the kinds of interactions we can have with these objects? How has their relation to "real objects" been understood in different contexts? 2. Audience and curation: How are audiences constructed or shaped through different kinds of interfaces and digital representations? What kinds of communities and relationships form this way? How is the role of the curator changing? 3. Institutionalization and community: How are the institutional frameworks for public humanities changing, in relation to curation and audience construction? what kinds of institutions are needed to frame digital collections and what role do they play? How do institutions and communities interact? What kinds of counter-institutional trends and activities are emerging? How are the relationships between institutions and audiences changing? 4. Social change: what kinds of political and social change do digital modes of public humanities propose, and what do they actually achieve? What kinds of different models for engagement are available? How do the impulse towards preservation (and the idea of cultural heritage) and the impulse towards change (innovation, progress) interact and influence one another? In addition to contextual readings which will provide a grounding in essential concepts as well as a set of critical perspectives, the course will make strong use of case studies in which we examine and reverse engineer specific projects in detail.

Unit 1. Representation and "what is digital?"

Supplemental readings for this unit: Matthew Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines Ronald Bourret, "XML and Databases"

Willard McCarty, Modeling: A Study in Words and Meanings in A Companion to Digital Humanities (Blackwells, 2004) Paul Duguid, "Material Matters", in The Future of the Book (ed. Geoffrey Nunberg, 1996) Wendy Chun, On Sourcery, or Code as Fetish, Configurations 16:3 (Fall 2008), 299-324. Alan Liu, Transcendental Data: Toward A Cultural History and Aesthetics of the New Encoded Discourse. Critical Inquiry 31 (2004): 49-84.

Week 1 (February 1): Introduction and definitions

In preparation for class, students choose a site (a public humanities or scholarly site or resource) and consider the following questions: what model of audience engagement does the site propose? is this site "scholarship"? what do we mean by this term? What are its boundaries and significance? is this site "public" and if so in what sense? What are the boundaries of this term? is this site "digital" in a useful sense? and what does that mean? what do we learn about digitality by looking at this site?

Readings Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, Chapter 1, "What is New Media?" (18-61), on reserve and e-reserve; draft version also available at http://www.manovich.net/LNM/Manovich.pdf.

Assignments Close reading of a site or resource (due 2/15)

Week 2 (February 8): Digital scholarship and discipline

This week: Talk about plan for student projects Discuss what we mean by digital scholarship in relation to specific disciplinary expectations and contexts; consider new modes of scholarship and where the intellectual effort and value may be located (design, data, interface, critique, etc.)

Readings Ed Folsom, "Database as Genre" (PMLA 122.5, October 2007, 1571-1579), available online at http://www.mlajournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1632/pmla.2007.122.5.1571. Responses to Folsom from McGann, Hayles, McGill, Stallybrass, and Freedman, PMLA 122.5, 1580-1612. Available online at http://www.mlajournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1632/pmla.2007.122.5.1580. Ed Ayers and William Thomas, "The Difference Slavery Made", http://www2.vcdh.virginia.edu/AHR/ Documenting the American South, "Going to the Show", http://docsouth.unc.edu/gtts/

Assignments Document analysis (due 2/22) and project selection (due 2/15) Literature review (due ongoing, at intervals)

Week 3 (February 15): Lab on WordPress

This week we will have a hands-on lab focusing on WordPress and some relevant plugins. All written work for the course will be submitted as a WordPress posting, and students will be expected to read and comment on each others work. Students will also provide topical keywords and other metadata about their postings; using various WP plugins, we will also develop some visualizations of the interactions within the class (such as recurring topical clusters, comment exchanges, timelines, and other information mappings). The lab will cover: Discussion of how digital data is structured and exploited through interfaces Introduction of concepts such as metadata, information design, visualization

Students will bring two short assignments to class (close reading, project description) to use in creating their initial WordPress entries during the lab. Readings Example WordPress sites that use plugins in interesting and provocative ways Reading on information design, blogs, metadata

Assignments Close reading due (WordPress entry) Project selection due (WordPress entry)

Unit 2. Audience and curation

Supplemental readings for this unit: Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, and Trees (Verso, 2005). Partial preview available on Google books. On reserve. Espen Aarseth, Cybertext (Johns Hopkins, 1997). Partial preview available on Google books. On reserve. Peter Samis, "The Exploded Museum" in Digital Technologies and the Museum Experience: Handheld Guides and Other Media (AltaMira Press, 2008). On reserve. Steve Dietz, "Curating (on) the Web", available online at http://www.archimuse.com/mw98/papers/dietz/dietz_curatingtheweb.html

Week 4 (February 22): Audience and curation

This week: How do public humanities and scholarly resource sites create a sense of audience? What relationships between audience, institution, and curator are visible in (or affected by) the digital interfaces we build?

Readings N. Katherine Hayles, "The Condition of Virtuality", in Peter Lunenfeld, The Digital Dialectic (MIT, 2000) (http://site.ebrary.com/lib/brown/docDetail.action?docID=10225301) Erkki Huhtamo, "From Cybernation to Interaction: A Contribution to an Archaeology of Interactivity", in Peter Lunenfeld, ed., The Digital Dialectic (MIT, 2000) http://site.ebrary.com/lib/brown/docDetail.action?docID=10225301 Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook, Rethinking Curation: Art after New Media, "Participative Systems" (112-143), "Introduction to Rethinking Curating" (147-159), "On Interpretation, on Display, on Audience" (162-187), on reserve and e-reserve. Jennifer Trant, "Studying Social Tagging and Folksonomy: A Review and Framework, available online at http://journals.tdl.org/jodi/article/view/269/278. Klavans et al., "T3: Text, Tags, Trust" (IMLS grant proposal), available online at http://steve.museum/index.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_download&gid=43

Assignments Document/audience analysis due (WordPress posting) Assign project design specification (due 3/15)

Week 5 (March 1): Lab: Omeka

This week we will have a hands-on lab on Omeka, in which students will learn the basics of using structured data through this content management system and will begin developing their projects, drawing on their document and audience analysis. Well also consider issues of how information is structured, questions of how metadata and other kinds of information are used in interface functionality, and how we design digital projects of this type. Readings Tim O'Reilly, Web 2.0 Meme Map Zotero group for Digital Oral History and Metadata (includes guidelines / specs / documentation on metadata as well as some project-specific information) Ding and Lin, "Information Architecture: The Design and Integration of Information Spaces" Dan Cohen, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web

Assignments Assign case study (due 4/12)

Week 6 (March 8): Audience and information design

This week: Focus on a critical view of specific resources and sites Look at information design issues in light of our work with Omeka and considering how information design affects audience (usage, interaction, contribution, sense of authority, etc.)

Readings Fiona Cameron, "Beyond the Cult of the Replicant", in Cameron and Kenderdine, eds., Theorizing Digital Cultural Heritage: A Critical Discourse (MIT, 2007). http://site.ebrary.com/lib/brown/docDetail.action?docID=10190483 Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody (on reserve; selections) and/or short online essays Andrea Witcomb, "Developing a Materialist Approach to Understanding Multimedia in Museums", in Cameron and Kenderdine, eds., Theorizing Digital Cultural Heritage: A Critical Discourse (MIT, 2007). Available online at http://site.ebrary.com/lib/brown/docDetail.action?docID=10190483

Sites and resources for analysis: A selection of sites from the Center for History and New Media The Difference Slavery Made The San Francisco Exploratorium Monticello Flash-based maps Massachusetts Historical Society: John Adams diary

Unit 3. Institutions and communities

Supplemental readings for this unit: Stuart Moulthrop, "You Say You Want a Revolution? Hypertext and the Laws of Media" in Essays in Postmodern Culture (2004) and "Rhizome and Resistance: Hypertext and the Dreams of a New Culture" in Hyper/Text/Theory (1994). On reserve. Johanna Drucker, SpecLab. On reserve. Mark Poster, Whats the Matter with the Internet? On reserve.

Week 7 (March 15): Lab on Simile tools and structured data

This week we will have a hands-on lab focusing on the Simile toolkit and on how we create structured data to be used in visualization tools of this type. Students will bring a small collection of structured data (something as simple as a Google spreadsheet) that contains at least some geographic, time series, or event information to use in creating a simple Exhibit. We will also look at an information map generated from the initial literature review postings to our WordPress blog at the outset. Readings Huhyn, Karger, and Miller, "Exhibit: Lightweight Structured Data Publishing" Jeremy Boggs, Digital Humanities Design and Development Process

Assignments Project design specification due

Week 8 (March 22): Institutions and communities

This week:

We will compare museum and academic culture with respect to audience cultivation, sense of "public" and responsibility, interactions between creators, curators, and reader/users

Readings Our Cultural Commonwealth (ACLS report on cyberinfrastructure for the humanities and social sciences), online at http://www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure/ourculturalcommonwealth.pdf. Andrea Witcomb, Reimagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum (Routledge, 2002), Chapter 1, Unmasking a different museum: Museums and cultural criticism, 13-26, and Chapter 4, A place for all of us? Museums and communities, 79-101, on reserve and ereserve. Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (MIT 2008), online at http://site.ebrary.com/lib/brown/docDetail.action?docID=10173661 Reading on linked data

Week 9 (March 29): Spring Break Week 10 (April 5): Institutions and cultural authority
This week: Taking a critical look at specific sites and resources, we will think about how institutions create and project cultural authority through digital spaces, and what is at stake in that authority How do institution-specific interfaces intersect with broader discovery mechanisms such as search engines and linked data? What are the conditions of cultural visibility in the digital realm?

Readings Kathy Sierra, Creating Passionate Users (blog), "The Dumbness of Crowds" http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2007/01/the_dumbness_of.ht ml

Sites for review: Brooklyn Museum British Library Library of Congress commons on Flickr Students will also bring in sites for discussion

Unit 4. Social change

Supplemental readings for this unit: Michael Jensen, "Authority 3.0": Friend or Foe to Scholars?" (Journal of Scholarly Publishing 39, 207-307) Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (Knopf, 2010). On reserve. Jeff Jarvis, What Would Google Do?

Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry) http://www.googlizationofeverything.com/

Week 11 (April 12): Case studies and class projects

This week: Students will present the results of their case studies as a lightning round (short 2-3 minute summaries) followed by discussion Students will present their project descriptions as a lightning round followed by feedback and discussion

Reading Read blog postings on case studies and student projects

Assignment Case studies due: substantive blog post plus lightning round

Week 12 (April 19): Digital humanities and social action

This week: We will consider how digital humanities and public humanities encourage or problematize forms of social and political engagement

Readings Kathleen Fitzgerald, Scholars Test Web Alternative to Peer Review (New York Times, 8/23/2010) and related materials on this project Daniel Cohen, One Week, One Book: Hacking the Academy Duke University MA in Knowledge and Networks, Draft Proposal Rita Raley, Tactical Media, Chapter 3, Speculative Capital (109-149), on reserve and ereserve. HASTAC scholars' forum on "democratizing knowledge"

Week 13 (April 26): Mapping the professional landscape

This week: As we prepare to make our own professional interventions, what does the landscape of digital scholarship and public humanities look like? What has the class suggested about changes in the profession arising from digital media? How do professionals in the domain of digital scholarship and public humanities remain current, especially on digital and technical topics? What resources are available to us?

Assignment Initial draft of final critical project analysis (WordPress posting)

Readings Class postings of final projects

Show and tell: students bring in their favorite resources for staying current DHAnswers ProfHacker Digital Humanities Now Other sources TBD

Week 14 (May 3): Final presentations, first round

This week: Students give final presentations on their projects in a Pecha-kucha style (5 minutes, 6 slides), followed by discussion

Week 15 (May 10): Final presentations, second round

This week: Students give final presentations on their projects in a Pecha-kucha style (5 minutes, 6 slides), followed by discussion

Assignment Final draft of project critical analysis due