Principles of Digital Studies

Course Description

Principles in Digital Studies is an introduction to digital scholarship in the humanities. Students will explore a variety of perspectives on digital research methods including data collection and management, data visualization, network analysis, basic website building, mapping, and digital archival practices through hands-on workshops covering a wide spectrum of tools and digital technologies. No pre-requisites are required. The course will culminate in a final project that puts these explorations into practice.

Objectives

Students will learn:

  • How to plan, develop, and evaluate a digital research project in a humanist context.

  • To critically discuss digital project in light of current methods and theoretical approaches, and to explain how such methods are applied.

  • About different perspectives on digital research and inquiry.

  • To engage with a wide spectrum of tools in order to choose the most appropriate technology not only to facilitate different work in different situations, but also for their final projects.

  • About a range of digital projects and work in the humanities, as well as the ability to evaluate the tools and methods involved in creating those projects.

  • To become more thoughtful, critical, and reflective users of digital tools, technologies, and spaces by understanding that all technologies are complex, socially situated, and political tools through which humans make meaning.

Major Assignments

Project Charter

Create a project charter that commits your group to the work you're going to do and ensures that you're all on the same page. It will be helpful to look at what's required for the final project before you talk to each other about how you might get this done and answer the questions below. 

  1. Choose three words to describe the spirit in which your group will work together.

  2. How will you communicate with each other (e.g., text messaging, email, Google group, Trello, etc.)?

  3. Where will you store your files (e.g., Dropbox, Google Drive, server, etc.)?

  4. When you work on a document collaboratively, how will you ensure that you don’t overwrite each other’s changes?

  5. How often will you meet outside of class? Where will you meet? Do you need a regular meeting time? If you’ll schedule meetings as necessary, what days and times are generally good for people?

  6. When are people planning to be out of town or especially busy? How can you work around this? (Look also at when you have assignments due for other classes).

  7. Assign roles to the project members

Data Critique

Write a data critique that explains fully what information is included in the data set, what information, events, or phenomena your data set can illuminate as is, and what your data set cannot. Think critically about what this data set contains, and what are the possibilities and limitations of the data set.

Once you complete your project of course, you'll have a better idea about how to answer this set of questions, but for now I want you to get started thinking about what those limitations and possibilities might be. You will want to think about specific columns that include dates, artists, medium etc. How is all this data working together? What are some problems with the set you've been given, if any? If your data set were your only source (i.e. you weren't going to do further research on anything it contains), what information would be left out? Be sure to speak in detail and not in generalizations.

Think of this as a build-up to the Annotated Bibliography, where you'll need to do more specific research. 

Here are some things you might consider:

  • describe and summarize the data and what this set contains

  • identify relationships between different sections of the data

  • identify the differences between different sections of the data

  • Make some predictions about relationships

Final Project

For your final project, you will work with a group to create a web-based mini-site that explores and analyzes the Blanton dataset from multiple angles or from one robust angle. We can negotiate what that looks like, but your mini-site must contain the following basic components:

  • A full, annotated bibliography.

  • A narrative of about 2,000 words that describes your research and findings about the topic. Included within the narrative should be:

    • At least three data visualizations that explore clearly defined humanities questions.

    • At least two maps that display some property of your data related to a humanities question.

    • Appropriate, appealing, well-captioned and credited illustrations or photographs.

  • A clear, full “About” page that contains the following information:

    • Full technical descriptions of the three levels of the project (sources, processing, presentation), along with full explanations of your reasoning for making the decisions you made at each level. You should cite relevant class readings to give context for these decisions.

    • Short bios of each team member, along with a full accounting of who was responsible for what.

    • Acknowledgments of the various people who helped you.

  • The data critique

  • Any other information or media that is relevant to your data set


 

Readings

Katherine Hayles. How We Think. University of Chicago Press. 2012.

Anne Burdick , Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner & Jeffrey Schnapp. Digital Humanities. MIT Press. 2016.

Johanna Drucker. “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 5, no 1. 2011.

Grayson Cooke and Amanda Reichelt-Brushett. “Archival Memory and Dissolution.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. 2015.

Final Project, Fall 2018

For the final project, this semester, students investigated the collections at the Blanton Museum using Tableau and found disparities in the collection’s representation.