This course is a strange bird for a History seminar. It is part theory and part practice. But, unlike normal research seminars, it involves a new set of skills outside of the traditional historian’s normal purview. Learning new digital skills is a process of iterative failure. It requires an adventurous spirit, stubbornness, and a researcher’s keen ability to figure out what the right questions to ask are. As such, the assignments for this course will draw on these values. Additionally, Digital History means many things, including research on digital objects, using digital tools to extend traditional methods, and new forms of historical presentation (data visualization, mapping, digital storytelling, archival narrative, etc.). Projects can be as varied as well, and individual or group.
- Reading and participation.
- Demonstrations: 10-15 min demonstration of the tool you wrote about on the course blog.
- Lead discussion: What are the arguments of the readings you wrote on your blog about. Be prepared with three substantiative questions to move discussion for your given week.
- Course blog.
- Everyone must write a series of posts on the course blog. I would encourage you to also open your own space on the web, and write more there or cross-post your writings. This will be particularly helpful for the project posts.
- This course is about doing as much as talking. That begins with writing, and responding, on the web. On the first day of class, I will help you all get started with the course blog and prose.io. You are required to post a minimum of 7 posts during the semester. Twice during your discussion weeks, once on the digital tool or resource that you demonstration, once about a relevant work/resource you found on your own, once about each of your project proposals, and a reflection on your project.
- Though these are blog posts, which by form and nature are shorter and less formal than traditional academic writing, they should be thoughtful, well-written, and sourced. Blog posts are concise, which makes each word more important. Say something meaningful, in just 500-800 words. Invite discussion. Posts for a given week must be on the site the Sunday before class meets.
- Identity
This is a public forum. Your first task is to consider what you want your identity to be. You are welcome to use a psuedonym, your real name, or some combination of the two. I fall, generally, into the latter category. I’m found around the web as parezcoydigo, but I don’t hide the fact that he is me. - Reading and Commenting are requirements too. The course blog is a central hub of activity for this class. Everyone must follow it. Posts should invite conversation, and comments will foster it.
- Semester project.
Each student will write proposals for two different types of projects, and then follow up on one of them. Print projects should result in 2,500-7,000 word journal article-length work, and utilize the digital in subject matter or tools and approach. Digital projects should result in a digital resource and a 1000-word project statement that explains the goals of the project, places it in the larger ecosphere of digital history, and offers a reflection on the work and its process.
For some project ideas, you might look here.
Print Project, study something digital:i
Write something about the digital. This could include using software we discuss to engage with a set of primary sources or exploring born digital material associated with a field you are already familiar. For example, if you are interested in the Civil War you could plan and execute a research project on how a particular Civil War memorial is presented and discussed on Flickr, or compare how it is reviewed on Yelp, or analyze how it is represented in some set of video games, or explore how a particular Civil War site uses Twitter, or use something like Mike Davies’ online corpus of time magazine to explore trends in discussions of the Civil War or a particular historical figure. Whatever you do you need to ground the study in both historiography for whatever topic you work on and incorporate material from our readings on digital history. In short, all of the readings offer potential models for this project. Or, use paper machines or voyant to analyze a set of documents or newspapers from the Civil War.
Digital Project, building something scholarly:
Take one of your interests and develop a digital resource around it. This should explicitly NOT be putting an essay on a webpage. Whatever you propose there should be clear reasons that this should be digital, it should probably draw on something we worked on in class. I would suggest staying away from difficult technical projects. Use ready-built platforms like Omeka, Wordpress, or Drupal, unless you already have the programming chops. To restate this, the goal of this project is not to demonstrate technical competence. Please simplify technology decisions and focus your time on using something that already exists in a novel way. Proposals should connect your design decisions to their desired effects, but also a description of audience, comparison to existing projects, detailed description of the thing to be created, plan for outreach and publicity, plan for how you will evaluate the project. Examples could include starting and curating a Flickr pool focused on collecting and interrupting representations of the American west, in consultation with the DC historical society you might build an Omeka exhibit to complement one of their physical exhibits, you might create an annotated Google map or a set of quests for a mobile app that gives an interpretive tour of the history of Knoxville.