Syllabus—Approaching Digital History 2.0

digital history methods syllabus, fall 2015 @ northwestern university.

Overview

How are digital technologies altering the study of history? What are the new possibilities for digital history, and what are new problems? In this seminar, we will explore new methods, theories, and practices of digital history. Students will read, discuss, blog, complete a final project, and deliver a presentation. No computer programming skills are prerequisites for this course, just an eagerness to dive in and explore how the digital and the historical meet. This course is open to both graduate students and undergraduates. Students will be evaluated based on robust participation in course meetings and online blog, completion of reading assignments, additional smaller assignments, and a larger final project that applies digital history methods to a historical topic of interest for each student (a research project or topic of curiosity; an analysis of existing digital history projects and approaches; or, for graduate students, a project that centers on preparation for comprehensive exams or a digital component of dissertation research).

Course Info

History 393-0-22 (14168)

Tu Th, 3:30–4:50 pm

Parkes Hall 213

Course Websites

• Canvas
• WordPress

Instructor

Dr. Michael J. Kramer

Visiting Assistant Professor, History and American Studies

Co-Director, Northwestern University Digital Humanities Laboratory

Contact: mjk@northwestern.edu

Office hours: Tuesday and Thursday, 2­–3 pm

Office: Harris Hall 212

Schedule

WEEK 1	What Is Digital History?
Tu 9/22	Serious Abundance: Introductions Review course websiteCarl Smith, “Can You Do Serious History on the Web?,” Perspectives on History, February 1998 Roy Rosenzweig, “Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era,” (originally published in American Historical Review 108, 3 (June 2003): 735-762. Ansley T. Erickson, “Historical Research and the Problem of Categories: Reflections on 10,000 Digital Note Cards,” in Writing History in the Digital Age: A Born-Digital, Open-Review Volume, eds. Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013) W. Caleb McDaniel, “Why I Study Digital History,” 31 August 2012
Th 9/24	Digital History: Two Examples Post short summaries on WordPress Continue discussion of Tuesday’s readings. Kate Bagnall and Tim Sherratt, “The Real Face of White Australia” Tim Sherratt, “Exposing the archives of White Australia,” 11 March 2013 Tim Hitchcock, “Big Data for Dead People: Digital Readings and the Conundrums of Positivism,” 9 December 2013
Mo 9/28	Assignment #1 You have been asked to review either Tim Sherratt’s or Tim Hitchcock’s project for a prestigious award. Write a 500-word review, using multimedia elements as part of your narrative, to tell the award committee what the strengths and weaknesses of the project are and, most crucially, what the larger stakes of the project is (why does it matter and how does its digital approach relate to its significance as historical scholarship?). Are these scholars conducting “serious history” as Carl Smith described it in 1998? Are there important points to incorporate into your review from our other introductory readings? What is it about their use of digital technologies and computational approaches that distinguishes their work? How does their work continue to extend pre-digital historical approaches or alter them? Develop a well-reasoned, gracefully written review (see the guidelines below about digital history writing for this course). Your essay should have an enticing introduction and a thesis statement with paragraphs that flow logically and begin with strong topic sentences. Be sure to support your claims with specific evidence. Bring in screen shots, quotations, links, or other elements, or play with text and design in your review to enhance your essay’s argument and narrative. End with a snappy conclusion. Course assignment WordPress website.
WEEK 2
Tu 9/29	Digital History Methodology: Promises (and Problems?) Post short summaries on WordPress. Various authors, “Interchange: The Promise of Digital History,” Journal of American History 95, 2 (September 2008)
Th 10/1	Digital History Methodology Debates 2: The(se) Data of History Post short summaries on WordPress Trevor Owens, “Discovery and Justification are Different: Notes on Science-ing the Humanities,” 19 November 2012 Trevor Owens, “Defining Data for Humanists: Text, Artifact, Information, or Evidence?,” Journal of Digital Humanities 1, 1 (April 2012) Lev Manovich, “Database as Symbolic Form,” Convergence 5: 80 (1999), available through NU Library database)Seth Denbo, “Data Storytelling and Historical Knowledge,” Perspectives on History, April 2015 Michael J. Kramer, “Digital History As Data Transliteration,” April 2015
WEEK 3	UNIT 1: MEMORY
Tu 10/6	Web of Memory Special Guest: Carl Smith, Franklyn Bliss Snyder Professor of English and American Studies and Professor of History at Northwestern University Post short summaries on WordPress Carl Smith, “Introduction” and “Part One: The Fire,” in Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, the Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 1-98. Carl Smith, Northwestern University, and the Chicago History Museum, The Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory, 2011
Th 10/8	Sonic Memory, Or, Can We Hear What They Heard? Emily Thompson, Design by Scott Mahoy, “The Roaring ‘Twenties: an interactive exploration of the historical soundscape of New York City,” 2013
WEEK 4
Tu 10/13	Memory, Will It Play In Peoria? Post short summaries on WordPress Scott Saul, “Up From Peoria,” in Becoming Richard Pryor (New York: Harper, 2014), 1-110. Scott Saul in collaboration with The Spatial History Project at Stanford University and the D-Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, Richard Pryor’s Peoria, 2015
Th 10/15	What’s the Deal? Post short summaries on WordPress Department of Geography, University of California-Berkeley, The Living New Deal, 2006-2015 Optional: The Knotted Line
Mon 10/19	Assignment #2 Compared to traditional print texts, does the digital allow us to explore memory and history in new ways? If so, how or how not? Chose one or two of the projects we have examined this unit to create an analytic essay of approximately 1000-1500 words in response to this question. Word count is less important than your ability to use text and multimedia to develop a cogent, evidence-supported argument. Develop a well-reasoned, gracefully written essay (see the guidelines below about digital history writing for this course). Your essay should have an enticing introduction and a thesis statement with paragraphs that flow logically and begin with strong topic sentences. Be sure to support your claims with specific evidence. Bring in screen shots, quotations, links, or other elements, or play with text and design in your essay to enhance your its argument and narrative. End with a snappy conclusion. Course assignment WordPress website.
WEEK 5	UNIT 2: TIME
Tu 10/20	Debating Time Scales 1 Post short summaries on WordPressJo Guldi and David Armitage, The History Manifesto (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014; updated 2015)
Th 10/22	Debating Time Scales 2 Post short summaries on WordPress, http://sites.northwestern.edu/approachingdigitalhistory/. Deborah Cohen and Peter Mandler, Jo Guldi and David Ermitage, “AHR Exchange on The History Manifesto,” American Historical Review (April 2015), 527-554 Matthew Francis, “Historians must ask difficult questions, not merely answer them,” Modern British Studies Birmingham Blog, November 2014 Simon Yarrow, “The parable of ends and means, or the sub-optimality of big datasets,” Modern British Studies Birmingham Blog, November 2014 Optional: Additional responses to The History Manifesto from the Modern British Studies Birmingham blog Alex Zukas, “The History Guild Manifesto,” H-Socialisms (October, 2015)
WEEK 6
Tu 10/27	The Time of Revolution Post short summaries on WordPress Vincent Brown, “Icons, Shamans, and Matyrs,” in The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 129-156 Vincent Brown, Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761, 2012
Th 10/29	Visualizing Time Post short summaries on WordPress Lauren Klein, “Visualization as Argument,” 2014 John Theibault, “Visualizations and Historical Arguments,” Writing History in the Digital Age: A Born-Digital, Open-Review Volume, eds. Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013)
WEEK 7	UNIT 3: SPACE
Tu 11/3	Spatial History Gets Railroaded Post short summaries on WordPress Richard White, “What Is Spatial History?,” Spatial History Lab: Working paper; Submitted 1 February 2010 Richard White, “Introduction; 4. Spatial Politics; Appendix,” Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: WW Norton, 2011) Richard White, “Shaping the West,” Spatial History Project, 2015
Th 11/5	To The Letter: The Networks of Benjamin Franklin Post short summaries on WordPress Caroline Winterer, “Visualizing Benjamin Franklin’s Correspondence Network,” Mapping The Republic of Letters, Humanities+Design at CESTA, Stanford University, 2012 Caroline Winterer, “Visualizing Benjamin Franklin’s Correspondence Network” Tool, Mapping The Republic of Letters, Humanities+Design at CESTA, Stanford University, 2012 Caroline Winterer, “Where Is America In the Republic of Letters,” Modern Intellectual History 9, 3 (November 2012): 597-623, available through NU Library portal) Jonathan Lyons, “Dear Sir, Ben Franklin Would Like to Add You to His Network Historian: Caroline Winterer’s analysis of Franklin’s letters applies big data to big history,” Smithsonian Magazine, December 2013
WEEK 8
Tu 11/10	Region and Nation Post short summaries on WordPress Cameron Blevins, “Cameron Blevins on His JAH Article,” Process: A Blog for American History, 10 March 2015 Cameron Blevins, “Space, Nation, and the Triumph of Region: A View of the World from Houston,” Journal of American History 101, 1, June 2014, 122-147, on e-reserves. Cameron Blevins, “Mining and Mapping the Production of Space: A View of the World from Houston,” Spatial History Lab, 2014
Th 11/12	TBA
Mon 11/16	Assignment #3 For the last few weeks we have been investigating how digital history methods alter our historical understanding of time and space (or do they?). Your task is to articulate an observation about one to three projects from your explorations. Do digital approaches help us to think about the temporal and the spatial dimensions of history in new ways? Why or why not? Create an analytic essay of approximately 1000-1500 words in response to this question. Word count is less important than your ability to use text and multimedia to develop a cogent, evidence-supported argument. Develop a well-reasoned, gracefully written essay (see the guidelines below about digital history writing for this course). Your essay should have an enticing introduction and a thesis statement with paragraphs that flow logically and begin with strong topic sentences. Be sure to support your claims with specific evidence. Bring in screen shots, quotations, links, or other elements, or play with text and design in your essay to enhance your its argument and narrative. End with a snappy conclusion. Course assignment WordPress website.
WEEK 9	WRAP UP
Tu 11/17	Wrap Up: Digital History Problems and Possibilities Post short summaries on WordPress Sherman Dorn, “Is (Digital) History More Than An Argument about the Past?,” Writing History in the Digital Age: A Born-Digital, Open-Review Volume, eds. Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013) Stefan Tanaka, “Pasts in a Digital Age,” in Writing History in the Digital Age: A Born-Digital, Open-Review Volume, eds. Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013) Tim Sherratt, “It’s all about the stuff: collections, interfaces, power and people,” 1 December 2011 Amanda Grace Sikarskie, “Citizen Scholars: Facebook and the Co-Creation of Knowledge,” in Writing History in the Digital Age: A Born-Digital, Open-Review Volume, eds. Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013)
Th 11/19	Wrap Up: Digital History Problems and Possibilities
FINAL   Fri 12/11	Final Your final assignment is to develop an overarching essay about digital history. What strikes you as its most significant aspects? What are the possibilities and problems with digital historical methods? Do they extend or break with older modes of historical research and the presentation of historical findings and arguments? Chose up to four of the projects we have examined this unit to create an analytic essay of approximately 1500-2000 words in response to this question. Word count precision is less important than your ability to use text and multimedia to develop a cogent, evidence-supported argument. Develop a well-reasoned, gracefully written essay (see the guidelines below about digital history writing for this course). Your essay should have an enticing introduction and a thesis statement with paragraphs that flow logically and begin with strong topic sentences. Be sure to support your claims with specific evidence. Bring in screen shots, quotations, links, or other elements, or play with text and design in your essay to enhance its argument and narrative. End with a snappy conclusion. Course assignment WordPress website.

Expectations

Attendance: Students are expected to attend all meetings. If a student misses more than three meetings, the instructor reserves the right to issue a failing grade.

Assignments:

Note: I recommend keeping a version of your Short Summary and Essay Assignment in an MS Word or text file on your computer for safekeeping. You can write directly in WordPress and then periodically cut and paste into a file on your computer. Alternatively, you can write your post as a plain text file and then paste it in to WordPress.

Short Summaries (in WordPress)

The goal of short summaries are to gather and organize your main thoughts about our materials to prepare for class discussion. They need not be masterpieces, but do give them some thought.

Each reading should have its own Short Summary post in WordPress. You can assign your posts with the tag for the respective date of the assignment and add any additional thematic tags using the tags function in WordPress.

Your short summary:

(1) should attempt to summarize each required reading in one sentence. This is no easy task and a good way to crystallize your thoughts about the reading. Think of it as your thesis statement if you were writing an essay or review. You might ask yourself: with whom the author is arguing? What evidence does the author use and why? What method does the author adopt for interpreting this evidence? And what is the author’s major conclusion (the “take away,” as is sometimes now said)?

(2) should pose a question of your own about the reading. What did you not understand or want to know more about?

(3) can offer any other associations: a list of terms, a multimedia link, a miscellaneous observation, a passage you wish to examine; etc.

Essays

Students must complete all assignments to pass the course. These are designed to be fun, but they are also demanding—and perhaps for some, frustrating. Please be aware that historical analysis is not a science in the strict sense of the term. There is no purely objective, machine-like way to develop interpretation within the traditions of historical meaning-making. This means there is not some perfectly standardized way to evaluate your work. There is, however, a craft to this mode of thinking, writing, and reasoning. It is in the improvement of this craft that these assignments and evaluations can help you. Your task is to develop effective and compelling evidence-based arguments informed by historical awareness and thinking. These will often work by applying your judgment and assessment to explain how things connect or contrast to each other and what the larger stakes of those linkages and differences are, which is to say, why they matter or how they matter to our understanding of the past.

Rather than test the breadth of your absorption of course materials, the assignments test your ability to wield knowledge of materials in the course (lectures, readings, viewings) in order to mount effective and compelling evidence-based arguments. If this mode of evaluation is not to your tastes, I recommend that you do not take the course. Your assignments must be well written in order to communicate a convincing, compelling, and precise argument that is driven by our description and analysis of meaning in materials drawn from the course (and other sources if needed). Evaluations are based on the following rubric:

• the presence of an articulated and compelling argument (a thesis statement, see number 4 below for more)
• the presence of evidence and your ability to wield different types of evidence
• the compelling and precise connection of evidence to argument by comparing and contrasting details and their significance to the argument of the essay
• an effective opening introduction that uses (a) a “hook” to (b) frame a precise and compelling question in order to (c) articulate a thesis statement that addresses the question and characterizes how and why it matters to our understanding of the historical topic at hand
• logical flow and grace of prose: the presence of an introduction that ends with a thesis statement (see number 4), clear topic sentences for each paragraph of the essay, the presence of effective transitions from one part of the essay to the next, and a compelling conclusion that restates the thesis in new language and closes with a memorable sense of why the thesis matters to our historical understanding
• an effective use of multimedia elements (embedded images, video, or audio; relevant links; explorations of design such as size and look of type or relationship of text to other media forms) to deepen and advance an evidence based argument online
• where applicable, proper citations in footnote or endnote form (your choice) as per Chicago Manual of Style guidelines (http://libguides.northwestern.edu/content.php?pid=67073&sid=495340)

If you have any questions about evaluation in the course geared at helping you access and develop the craft of historical analysis, please speak with the instructor. Assignments that students submit after the due date without explicit plans for an extension arranged with the instructor and teaching assistant prior to the deadline are subject to reductions in grade.

Academic Integrity: All Weinberg College and Northwestern policies concerning plagiarism and academic dishonesty are strictly enforced in this course. The instructor also reserves the right to assign a failing grade for the course if a student is found to have violated college or university policy concerning academic integrity. See http://www.weinberg.northwestern.edu/handbook/integrity/ for more details.

Special Needs: Students with special needs and disabilities that have been declared and documented through the Northwestern Office of Services for Students with Disabilities (SSD) should meet with the instructor to discuss any specific accommodations. For further information, see the Office of Services for Students with Disabilities (SSD) website: http://www.northwestern.edu/disability.

Evaluation

Participation: 40%

• General discussion contributions: 20%
• Short summaries: 20%

Assignment 1: 10%

Assignment 2: 15%

Assignment 3: 15%

Final: 20%

The instructor will issue a midterm report on your grade for the course in addition to comments on your blog posts and assignments.