Image credit: Prof. Hall's photo of notes about project development, April 24, 2023.
This course filled a unique need in the curriculum: an advanced seminar for graduating seniors in two academic programs that might seem unrelated: Italian Studies (IS) and Digital & Computational Studies (DCS). Prof. Hall's early notes for course development listed the following goals for the course:
collaborative, co-authored, evaluative contribution to IS & DCS
multidisciplinary: depth in premodern Italian culture and the DCS analytical framework
use of Italian (and other languages) and DCS tools in iterative exploration of course materials
DH practitioners will note that the first and third goals are inspired by Spiro (2012).
Professor Hall observed at the start of the semester that our experience would be similar to that of what (m)any organization asks: a big project with no predetermined answer, no set steps for arriving at any answer, and a team of people with diverse skills that can contribute to the process. Everyone arrived with different backgrounds in addition to DCS or IS through double majors and minors: Anthropology, Chinese, Computer Science, Economics, Government, and Physics. This was a feature, not a bug! The class was encouraged to use their experiences and backgrounds to inform their reading, critique, and analyses. The idea conceptualization was thus a group effort, presented and evaluated by everyone.
Since the goal was a co-authored documented, all submitted assignments were made available to the entire class. (Grade information was communicated directly.) Shared folders and documents fueled the results posted in other sections of this site. Brainstorming, planning, and discussing drafts happened in class. Our CRediT statement documents how the final project developed.
Students had the agency to choose from a suite of possible digital tools that included citation analysis, content analysis, natural language processing (NLP), network analysis, quantitative analysis, spatial analysis, stylometry, and topic modeling. Professor Hall was a conduit to the materials and instructions for applying the selected tools in service of the questions raise during discussion. The schedule of work in the second half of the semester evolved as the project took direction.
Iteration happened within the confines of the semester, but will necessarily happen if (when!) the course is offered again. We practiced the hermeneutic spiral of digital text analysis (Rockwell & Sinclair 2016), which meant applying new tools, asking new or revised questions, and changing the parameters of the tools used in a previous inquiry. Existing tools were 'hacked' for easier use by novices (i.e. Constellate's coding notebooks) and we (or Prof. Hall) wrote code to refine results for specific questions that existing tools could not answer. The project raised many questions and developed practice in finding methods for arriving at answers. Process, not product, was the goal.