Schedule
A week-by-week breakdown of readings for discussion and blog prompts ⏰
Click on the + icon to expand that week’s schedule
Tuesday, August 25
Discuss:
- Kathleen Fitzpatrick, “The Humanities, Done Digitally,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).
- Sharon M. Leon, “Complicating a “Great Man” Narrative of Digital History in the United States,” in Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and Digital Humanities, edited by Elizabeth Losh and Jacqueline Wernimont (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).
- Lisa Spiro, “This is Why We Fight,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities, 2012.
After class:
- Complete the Tell Me About Yourself! Google Form
Thursday, August 27
In-class Technical Activity: Entering the world of the World Wide Web
- WordPress | Tutorial Guide
- Recommended: Codecademy (take the free courses Learn HTML | Learn CSS )
Explore:
- Web hosting that you control: Reclaim Hosting
- How to purchase a domain name: namecheap.com
- Other ways to boost your digital identity: Knowledge Commons, ORCID, Google Scholar, LinkedIn
- Proprietary website builders: Google Sites, Squarespace, GoDaddy, Wix, WordPress.com
Blog Post 1 (due Sunday by midnight): Write a post introducing yourself. What brings you to this course, and what do you hope to explore in Digital Humanities this semester? Do you have any previous experience with DH, digital tools, or digital scholarship?
This week’s readings ask us to consider how we define Digital Humanities, who it serves, and why it matters. How do you envision yourself in the current landscape of Digital Humanities?
Tuesday, September 1
Discuss:
- Kimberly Christen, “Does Information Really Want to Be Free? Indigenous Information Systems and the Question of Openness.” International Journal of Communication 6 (2012), 2870–2893.
- Deidre Brown and George Nicholas, “Protecting Indigenous Cultural Property in the Age of Digital Democracy: Institutional and Communal Responses to Canadian First Nations and Māori Heritage Concerns,”Journal of Material Culture, 17:3 (2012), 307-324.
- Julia Choucair Vizoso and Chris R. Byrnes, “Abolitionist Creativity: How intellectual property can hack digital power,” 2023.
- Eve Tuck, “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities,” Harvard Educational Review 79, no. 3 (Fall 2009).
Thursday, September 3
Technical Activity: protecting and sharing digital work
- Copyright
- Public Domain
- Fair Use Checklist
- Local Contexts Traditional Knowledge (TK) and Biocultural (BC) Labels
- Creative Commons Licensing
- Try out the “Creative Commons License Chooser”
- Explore: The Blackfoot Digital Library
Blog Post 2: Reflecting on the readings and technical activity from this week, how would you characterize the tension between openness, access, control, and ownership over cultural heritage materials in digital contexts?
Tuesday, September 8
Discuss Review Guidelines:
- MLA Guidelines for Evaluating Work in Digital Humanities and Digital Media
- AHA Guidelines on the Professional Evaluation of Digital Scholarship by Historians
- CAA-SAH Guidelines for the Evaluation of Digital Scholarship in Art and Architectural History
- NCPH Digital History Project Review Guidelines
- And browse: Geoffrey Rockwell, “Short Guide to Evaluation of Digital Work,” Journal of Digital Humanities 1, no. 4, 2012
- Reviews in DH
Wednesday, September 10
In-class Technical Activity: Evaluating Digital Humanities Projects
- Project Critique Activity: From the list provided, please select one project to review using the worksheet. Your answers should reflect your experience as a user/visitor to the project site. (Word version)
Blog Post 3: Drawing on the review guidelines and the project critique worksheet, compose a more developed evaluation of a digital project. In your review, consider the project’s goals, design, usability, and scholarly contributions.
Tuesday, September 15
Discuss:
- Hadley Wickham, “Tidy Data,” Journal of Statistical Software 59, no. 10 (August 2014).
- Katie Rawson and Trevor Muñoz, “Against Cleaning,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities, 2019.
- Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein, “The Power Chapter,” in Data Feminism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2020).
- Jack Dougherty and Ilya Ilyankou, “Chapter 3: Find and Question your Data” and “Chapter 4: Clean Up Messy Data,” in Hands on Data Visualization: Interactive Storytelling from Spreadsheets to Code (updated 2025). https://handsondataviz.org/.
- Explore: Dear Data project
Thursday, September 17
In-class Technical Activity: Data Management and Cleaning
- Zotero (see also: Zotero browser extension) | Zotero Tutorial PDF
- Open Refine | OpenRefine Tutorial from Jack Dougherty and Ilya Ilyankou, “Chapter 4: Clean Up Messy Data”
Blog Post 4: Reflecting on the readings and your experience with data management tools, how does “data” function within or serve humanities research? What are the challenges of data management and cleaning? How does this affect your own research or Digital Humanities interests?
Tuesday, September 22
Discuss:
- Jonathan Schwabish and Alice Feng, “Applying Racial Equity Awareness in Data Visualization,” Preprint, Open Science Framework, August 27, 2020.
- Jessica Marie Johnson, “Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads,” Social Text, 36(4), 2018, 57-79.
- Frederick W. Gibbs, “New Forms of History: Critiquing Data and Its Representations,” The American Historian, 2016.
Thursday, September 24
Technical Activity: Making Data Visualizations with Flourish
Blog Post 5: Using the dataset of your choice, develop a research question and create a visualization in Flourish that addresses this question. Describe your experience in building the visualization and reflect on how the readings influenced this process. How does your visualization respond to or reveal insights about your research question? Are there any limitations or issues? Include an image of your visualization or embed it using the content block “Custom HTML” copy and paste the embed code from Flourish.
Tuesday, September 29
Discuss:
- McArthur Henare Mingon and John Sutton, “Why Robots Can’t Haka: Skilled Performance and Embodied Knowledge in the Māori Haka,” Synthese 199, 2021.
- Leonardo Impett and Fabian Offert, “There Is a Digital Art History,” Visual Resources 38(2), 2022.
- Taylor Arnold, Lauren Tilton, and Annie Berke,“Visual Style in Two Network Era Sitcoms,” Journal of Cultural Analytics, July 19, 2019.
- Jonathon Sterne, “The MP3 as Cultural Artifact,” New Media and Society 8:5 (2006): 825-842.
- Explore: Open Heritage | Closer to Van Eyck
Thursday, October 1
Technical Activity: Exploring Embodiment through Digital Storytelling
Blog Post 6: In the context of digital art and digital art history, reflect on the meaning of “embodiment” and the role it plays in understanding the relationship between ourselves, culture, and the lived environment.
Create a short Sway that represents your daily journey or how you experience a place through one of the five senses. Share the link to your Sway in your post.
Tuesday, October 6
Discuss:
- Mats Dahlström, J. Hansson, & U. Kjellman, “‘As We May Digitize’ — Institutions and Documents Reconfigured,” LIBER Quarterly 21, no. 3-4 (2012).
- Zinaida Manžuch, “Ethical Issues In Digitization Of Cultural Heritage,” Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies 4, no. 4 (2017).
- Samantha Thompson, “Why Don’t Archivists Digitize Everything?” Peeling the Past (Blog), May 31, 2017.
Technical Activity: Managing, organizing, and annotating images of archival/visual materials
Thursday, October 8
No Class, Fall Break
Blog Post 7: How do questions of labor, ethics, access, or cultural sensitivity shape decisions about what is (and is not) digitized? How do these issues resonate with your own research or DH interests?
Tuesday, October 13
Discuss:
- Trevor Owens, “What Do You Mean by Archive? Genres of Usage for Digital Preservers ,” The Signal: Digital Preservation (Blog), (February 27, 2014).
- Tim Sherratt, “It’s All About the Stuff: Collections, Interfaces, Power, and People,” Journal of Digital Humanities 1, no. 1 (Winter 2011).
- Mitchell Whitelaw, “Generous Interfaces for Digital Cultural Heritage Collections,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 9, no. 1 (2015).
- Explore: Colored Conventions Project | September 11th Digital Archive | American Folklife Center Archive | The Bracero Archive
Thursday, October 15
Technical Activity: Digital Exhibits
- Omeka | Items + Exhibits Guide | Neatline Guide
- Class Omeka Website: omeka.jenniferandrella.com
Blog Post 8: What does it mean to create an “archive” in a digital context? Reflecting on your experience using Omeka, how did creating items, collections, and exhibits shape your understanding of what counts as an “archive”? Showcase and link any of your digital items/exhibits as needed!
Tuesday, October 20
Discuss:
- Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor, “From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in the Archives,” Archivaria 81 (Spring 2016): 23–43.
- Caswell and Cifor, “Revisiting an Ethics of Care in Archives: An Introductory Note,” in “Radical Empathy in Archival Practice,” eds. Elvia Arroyo-Ramirez, Jasmine Jones, Shannon O’Neill, and Holly Smith, Special issue, Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 3, no. 2 (2021).
- Kimberly Christen, “Opening Archives: Respectful Repatriation,” American Archivist 74, no. 4 (2011): 185-210.
- Explore: Mukurtu and the project showcase
Thursday, October 22 – No Class
Blog Post 9: Historically, many institutions have amassed large cultural heritage collections through colonialism, imperial expansion, and exploitative collecting practices. Reflect on the idea of digital repatriation of cultural heritage materials. How can digitization and digital archives enable communities to reclaim, reinterpret, or reconnect with cultural materials? What ethical or practical challenges persist in shaping meaningful partnerships between institutions and communities?
Tuesday, October 27
Discuss:
- Richard White, “What Is Spatial History?” The Spatial History Project, February 1, 2010.
- Greg Bensinger, “Google Redraws the Borders on Maps Depending on Who’s Looking.” Washington Post, February 14, 2020.
- Explore: Mapping Inequality | Renewing Inequality
Thursday, October 29
Technical Activity: Georeferencing and Story Maps
Blog Post 10: Reflect on the role of space and mapping in shaping historical and cultural narratives. How do the readings and tools from this week complicate the idea of maps as “objective” representations?
Tuesday, November 3
Discuss:
- Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan, “Search and Replace: Josephine Miles and the Origins of Distant Reading,” M/m (2016).
- Mark Riedl, “A Very Gentle Introduction to Large Language Models Without the Hype,” Medium (2023).
- Ahmet Duzduran, “Ethics of Natural Language Processing” Medium (2023).
- Cate Denial, “Why I’m Saying No to Generative AI” Substack: The Important Work (2025)
- Explore: Mining the Dispatch | An Introduction to Japanese Text Mining | Google Ngram Viewer
Thursday, November 5
Technical Activity: Word Frequencies and Topic Modeling
Blog Post 11: Reflect on the history, significance, and ongoing debates around text analysis (and its many forms) in the humanities. Connect these perspectives to your experience with Voyant; what kinds of patterns or insights emerged, and what cautions should guide how we interpret them?
Tuesday, November 10
Discuss:
- Jan Bender Shetler, “The Mara Cultural Heritage Digital Library: The Implications of the Digital Return of Oral Tradition,” In Searching for Sharing: Heritage and Multimedia in Africa, edited by Daniela Merolla and Mark Turin, 1st ed. (Open Book Publishers, 2017).
- Jim McGrath, “Podcasts and Public History,” History@Work, National Council on Public History, September 11, 2019.
- Judith Moyer, “Step-by-Step Guide to Oral History,” dohistory.org (1999).
Explore: World Digital Library | World Oral Literature Project | Recovering Voices
Thursday, November 12
Technical Activity: Editing Audio and Video
Blog Post 12: Instead of a traditional blog post, create a short audio or video story (3-5 minutes) using Audacity or Microsoft Clipchamp. You might produce a mini-podcast, a brief oral history, or a short narrative highlighting an object of cultural heritage, memory, or personal narrative. Submit your finished recording as a file upload in a post.
Thursday, November 17
Discuss:
- James Coltrain and Stephen Ramsay, “Can Video Games be Humanities Scholarship?” in Debates in the Digital Humanities, 2019.
- John R. Legg, “Searching for Indigeneity in The Oregon Trail,” in Playing at War: Identity and Memory in Civil War Video Games edited by Patrick A. Lewis and James Hill Traeborn III (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2024).
- Chapter two only: Marie-Laure Ryan, “The Interactive Onion: Layers of User Participation in Digital Narrative Texts,” in New Narratives: Stories and Storytelling in the Digital Age, edited by Ruth Page and Bronwen Thomas (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011). Access chapter via USM library.
- Play in class: The Oregon Trail v. When Rivers Were Trails
Thursday, November 19
Technical Activity: Interactive Design
Blog Post 13: Experiment with Twine in the creation of a basic “game” narrative. In your post, reflect on how video games function as modes for interactive storytelling and cultural critique. How do other games likeThe Oregon Trail and When Rivers Were Trails embody different perspectives on history, identity, or cultural memory?
Monday, November 24
Discuss:
- Ryan Cordell, “How Not to Teach Digital Humanities,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities (2016).
- Emily McGinn and Lauren Coats, “Born-Pedagogical DH: Learning While Teaching,” in What We Teach When We Teach DH (2023).
- Miriam Posner, “Here and There: Creating DH Community,” blog, 2014.
- Explore: Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom: A Digital Companion
Wednesday, November 26 – No Class
No blog post this week – work on the 301 final portfolio project or the 501 final pedagogy project
Tuesday, December 1
Discuss:
- Deborah Boyer and Josh Marcus, “Implementing Mobile Augmented Reality Applications for Cultural Institutions,” Museums and the Web 2011 (2011).
- Randy Rieland, “Augmented Reality Livens Up Museums,” Smithsonian Magazine (2012).
- “Reconstructing the destroyed church of San Pier Maggiore, Florence | The National Gallery, London” (7 min video)
Thursday, December 3
Technical Activity: Matterport | Matterport Guide
Blog Post 14: Experiment with Matterport to create a “virtual tour” of a space with a few annotations. How can tools for virtual or augmented reality create immersive, spatial connections with viewers? Reflect on the meaning of “augmented” versus “virtual” reality, and how people are situated within digital environments.
Tuesday, December 1
Final Project remote work day | virtual drop-in help over Webex
Thursday, December 3
501 Pedagogy Project Skill Demonstration Walk-through (~10 min each), 301 offering feedback
Submit your final project + reflection essay by Tuesday, December 8 by 11:59pm