Category: Class Description

Assignment due: Tool Presentation

After everyone has given their Tool Presentation, we will explore different options for building websites and discuss the readings.

To do before class

• Finish your individual blog post about The Crisis in-class project and post a link to it in the #class-discussion channel in Mattermost by 5pm on Tuesday, October 6.
• Before class on Friday, October 9, provide feedback and comments on 3 of your classmates’ blog posts in Mattermost by replying to their blog post link as a threaded comment.

Readings due

• Creating a Work Plan, PM4DH: Project Management for the Digital Humanities, Emory University
• Choosing and using sources: A guide to academic research, (pdf version of the book)
  • Ch. 2, Types of Sources
  • Ch. 6, Evaluating Sources

This class day will be devoted to our first in-class project. We will use Voyant Tools to analyze text from the early years of The Crisis. Founded by in 1910, The Crisis is the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). W.E.B DuBois was the founding editor, serving from 1910 to 1934, and used the magazine to advocate for social justice and promote Black literature, poetry, and art.

At the end of class, each student will write a blog post on the course website presenting their research question, a visualization they created, and analyzing their results. Post a link to your blog post in the class Mattermost. By the beginning of class next week (10/09), each student will provide feedback and comments on 3 of their classmates’ blog posts in Mattermost by replying to their blog post link as a threaded comment.

Aims of The Crisis project

 Through The Crisis: Analyzing Text at Scale, students will gain: 

1. Experience with text analysis as method
2. Exposure to Voyant as a tool and to experimentation with a tool and critique of a tool
3. Practice making a research question
4. Exposure to TEI
5. Exposure to WordPress
6. Experience working with unstructured data
7. Familiarity with Named Entity Recognition

To do before class

• Post your final project ideas (from the final project brainstorm activity) to #class-discussion (please post this directly as text, not by uploading a file).
• Sign up for MSU Commons (commons.msu.edu/ using your netid) or Humanities Commons (https://hcommons.org/) directly
• Sign up for a tool for the tool presentation
• Explore The Crisis through the Modernist Journals Project
  • Try out the different viewing options
  • Choose one or two issues and read a bit
• Consider these discussion questions:
  • What types of writing/materials are in the issues?
    Editorial, poetry, ads, etc?
  • How are the issues structured? 
    Lots of text? Lots of images? Like a magazine? Like a newspaper?
  • What does it remind you of? Anything you know of or read that’s similar in terms of content/structure?
• Paste a screenshot of your favorite find in the Modernist Journals Project in #class-discussion.

Readings due

• Dzanouni, Lamia, Hélène L. Dantec-Lowry, and Claire Parfait. “From One Crisis to the Other: History and Literature in the Crisis from 1910 to the Early 1920s.” European Journal of American Studies, vol. 11, no. 1, 2016, pp. 47.
• Rambsy, Kenton. “Text-Mining Short Fiction by Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright Using Voyant Tools.” CLA Journal, vol. 59, no. 3, 2016, pp. 251–258. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44325917. [Available through MSU Libraries]
• Definitions, Metadata, Jeffrey Pomerantz, MIT Press, 2015, p. 19-64 [available via MSU Libraries as an ebook]
• TEI: An overview , 2012
• Big? Smart? Clean? Messy? Data in the Humanities, Christof Schöch, Journal of Digital Humanities, 2013

Projects to explore

• Claude McKay’s early poetry (TEI section)
• Harlem Shadows TEI edition

To do after class

• Finish your individual blog post and post a link to it in the #class-discussion channel in Mattermost by 5pm on Tuesday, October 6.
• Before class on Friday, October 9, provide feedback and comments on 3 of your classmates’ blog posts in Mattermost by replying to their blog post link as a threaded comment.

Assignment due: Project Critique 1

In class, we will go over Project Critique 1 and discuss ideas for the final project to set you up for the Final Project Brainstorm assignment. We will also discuss accessibility and audience in DH.

Readings due

• Chapters 1, 6, & 7 in A web for everyone: Designing accessible user experiences, Sarah Horton, Rosenfeld Press, 2013, p. 1-10, 88-99, 104-122, [available via MSU Libraries as an e-book]
• Ch. 9 Making an Argument, Choosing & Using Sources: A guide to academic research

In Class Activity

Final Project Brainstorm

Assignment due: Disciplinary Presentation

We will begin class with the Disciplinary Presentations. Once everyone has presented, we will discuss the readings and how to craft a research question.

Readings due

• PM4DH: Project Management for the Digital Humanities, Emory University
  • Formulating a project’s guiding question
  • Designing a project
  • Defining a project’s scope
• Choosing and using sources: A guide to academic research, (pdf version of the book)
  • Ch. 1, Research Questions

Project to explore

• Navigating the Green book, New York Public Library

We will begin class with a discussion about the Disciplinary Presentation due next week.

In the first half of class, we will discuss what Digital Humanities is and where it came from; in the second half of class, we will discuss the NEH lightning talks and the role of granting bodies in DH.

Readings due (everyone reads):

• “This is why we fight”: Defining the values of the Digital Humanities, Lisa Spiro, Debates in the Digital Humanities, eds. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, University of Minnesota Press 2012
• The humanities, done digitally, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Debates in the Digital Humanities, 2012

Readings due (each student only reads one):

• The history of humanities computing, Susan Hockey, A Companion to Digital Humanities, 2004
• Safiya Umoja Noble, Toward a Critical Black Digital Humanities, Debates in the Digital Humanities, eds. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, University of Minnesota Press, 2019
• Isabel Galina Russell, “Geographical and linguistic diversity in the Digital Humanities,” Literary and Linguistic Computing, Volume 29, Issue 3, September 2014, Pages 307–316.
• Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein, “Chapter One: Bring Back the Bodies” Data Feminism, MIT Press, 2020
• Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein, “Ch. 7: Show Your Work” Data Feminism, MIT Press, 2020, p. 173-202

Projects to examine:

• Around DH in 80 Days (original version)
• Around DH 2020

Activity to do in advance of class:

Chose one lightning round video from the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Office of Digital Humanities to watch, and post a comment about it in the #class-discussion Mattermost channel before class. What is the project and what is it trying to accomplish?

National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities Lighting Round Videos

We will begin our first class with introductions, an overview of the syllabus, and tutorials of the technologies you will need for this course.

As a class, we will create a set of community agreements and norms for operating throughout the semester. We will review and discuss the resources below and use them to brainstorm and co-write the community agreement for our class.

1. Emory University Project Charter
2. UCLA Collaborators’ Bill of Rights
3. DH@MSU Community Agreements

At the end of class, we will go over the Disciplinary Presentation assignment.