Fall 2024 | Yale University
The cultural record of humanity is undergoing a massive and epochal transformation into shared analog and digital realities. While we are familiar with the history and realities of the analog record—libraries, archives, historical artifacts—the digital cultural record remains largely unexamined and relatively mysterious to humanities scholars. In this course you will be introduced to the broad field of Digital Humanities, theory and practice, through a stepwise exploration of the new architectures and genres of scholarly and humanistic production in the 21st century.
The course combines a seminar preceded by a brief lecture, and a digital studio. Every week we will move through our discussions in tandem with hands-on exercises that will serve to illuminate our readings and help you gain a measure of computational proficiency useful in humanities scholarship. You will learn about the basics of plain text, file and operating systems, data structures and internet infrastructure. You will also learn to understand, produce and evaluate a few popular genres of Digital Humanities, including, digital editions of literary or historical texts, collections and exhibits of primary sources and interactive maps. Finally, and perhaps the most important lesson of the semester, you will learn to collaborate with each other on a common research project.
General
Readings
Week 1: Everything, Everywhere, All At Once: The (Digital) Cultural Record
Seminar | Wednesday, September 4
To Read:
Borges, Jorge Luis.
[\c] “The Congress”
[\o] “El Aleph”
[\o] Burdick, Anne, et al. Digital_Humanities. MIT Press, 2012.
[\a] Risam, Roopika. “Introduction: The Postcolonial Digital Cultural Record.” New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy. Northwestern University Press, 2018.
[\o] To Explore: Reviews in DH. Edited by Jennifer Guiliano and Roopika Risam.
Exercise: Building the Actual Global Library of All Things
Week 2: Letters: Surface and Depth, WYSIWYG… or not.
Seminar | Monday, September 9
[\a] Hayles, N. Katherine. “Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis”
[\c] Tenen, Dennis. “Introduction.” Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation. Stanford University Press, 2017.
Studio | Wednesday, September 11
What is Plain Text?
Tutorial: Microsoft Visual Studio Code (Please install before class)
Week 3: Documents: Files, Types and Cabinets
Seminar | Monday, September 16
[\c] Bush, Vannevar. “As We May Think.” The Atlantic, July 1945.
[\a] Tagg, John. “The Archiving Machine; Or, The Camera and the Filing Cabinet.” Grey Room, no. 47 (April 1, 2012): 24–37.
[\c] Vismann, Cornelia. “Preface” and “Law’s Writing Lesson.” In Files: Law and Media Technology. translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, Stanford University Press, 2008: 1–38.
[\o] To Skim: Kernighan, Brian W., and Rob Pike. “The File System.” In The UNIX Programming Environment. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1984: 41–65.
To Explore: Your file system and storage
Studio | Wednesday, September 18
Tutorial: Terminal basics
[\o] Tutorial: Pandoc (Please install before class)
Week 4: Editions: The Point is to Change It
Seminar | Monday, September 23
[\o] Sahle, Patrick. “What Is a Scholarly Digital Edition?” In Digital Scholarly Editing: Theories and Practices, edited by Matthew James Driscoll and Elena Pierazzo, Open Book Publishers, 2017, pp. 19–39.
[\a] McGann, Jerome. “Introduction.” Radiant Textuality: Literary Studies after the World Wide Web. 1st edition, Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.
Examine:
[\o] The Rossetti Archive
Studio | Wednesday, September 25
Tutorial: Ed
Tutorial: Markdown
Week 5: Bibliographies: Search Results, Works Cited, Syllabi, Catalogues, Shout-outs and If You Liked This Maybe You Will Like That
Seminar | Monday, September 30
To Read:
[\o] Ahmed, Sara. “Introduction: Bringing Feminist Theory Home.” Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.
[\o] Coman, Jonah. “Trans Citation Practices — a Quick-and-Dirty Guideline.” Medium, March 18, 2021.
[\a] Godin, Benoît. “On the Origins of Bibliometrics.” Scientometrics, vol. 68, no. 1, July 2006, pp. 109–33.
[\c] Tanselle, G. Thomas. “Table of Contents.” Introduction to Bibliography. Book Arts Press, 2002.
To Explore:
[\o] Goldsby, Jacqueline, and Meredith L. McGill. Black Bibliography Project.
Studio | Wednesday, October 2 | Virtual
Ed continued
Zotero
Week 6: Data: Given and Taken, then We Use It as a Brush
Special Guest: Dr. Lauren Klein
Seminar | Monday, October 7
[\o] Klein, Lauren F., et al. “Every Datapoint a Person.” Data by Design, 2024.
[\o] Drucker, Johanna. “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display.” Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 5, no. 1, March 2011.
[\o] Sá Pereira, Moacir P. de. “Representation Matters.” Torn Apart/Separados. June 2018.
[\a] Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe, vol. 12, no. 2, 2008, pp. 1–14.
To Explore:
[\o] Torn Apart/Separados
Studio | Wednesday, October 9
CSVs
YAML
Week 7: Libraries: Exhibits, Archives, Collections, Databases
Seminar | Monday, October 14
[\c] Wilson-Lee, Edward. (Selections). The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Young Columbus and the Quest for a Universal Library. EPub edition, William Collins, 2018.
[\o] da Silva, Natália Marques, et al. “Digitization as Revival: A Case Study of the Musée Ogier-Fombrun.” archipelagos journal, no. 6, March 2020.
[\a] Berry, Dorothy. “Take Me into the Library and Show Me Myself: Toward Authentic Accessibility in Digital Libraries.” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 110, no. 3 (2022): 111–26.
Examine:
Week 8: Algorithmic Approaches to Corpora: Analysis
Seminar | Monday, October 21
[\c] Underwood, Ted. Distant Horizons: Digital Evidence and Literary Change. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2019.
[\o] To Explore: The Viral Texts Project
Studio | Wednesday, October 23
Tutorial: Voyant Tools
Week 9: Algorithmic Approaches to Corpora: Creation
Seminar | Monday, October 28
Borges, Jorge Luis
[\c] “The Library of Babel” (1941)
[\c] “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1940)
[\c] Tenen, Dennis Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write (A Norton Short). [Introduction, chapters 1, 2, 5, and 7]
[\o] Ramsay, Stephen. “Potential Readings.” Reading Machines: Toward an Algorithmic Criticism. University of Illinois Press, 2011.
To Explore:
[\o] Basile, Jonathan. “The Library of Babel” (2015).
[\o] Montfort, Nick, and Stephanie Strickland. “Sea and Spar in Between.” The Winter Anthology 3 (2011).
Tutorial: Co-Pilot
Week 11: Craft: Collaboration, Divisions of Labor, Project Management
Project Work | Monday, November 11, Wednesday, November 13
[\o] To Explore: The Praxis Network
Week 12: Machines: Minimal Computing, Computing a Little
Seminar | Monday, November 18
[\o] Risam, Roopika, and Alex Gil. “Introduction: The Questions of Minimal Computing.” Digital Humanities Quarterly, 16.2, 2022.
To Explore: A replica of the Turing machine
Studio | Wednesday, November 20
A very gentle introduction to algorithmic thinking and practice with Python
Week 13: Exeunt to the World: Workers of the Record, Unite!
Seminar | Monday, December 2
[\c] Benjamin, Ruha. “Default Discrimination.” Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Polity, 2019.
[\o] Examine: SUCHO