DH101: INTRODUCTION TO DIGITAL HUMANITIES

I taught UCLA’s Introduction to Digital Humanities in Spring 2020. In the summer of 2019, I created an accelerated DH101: Introduction to Digital Humanities course, which was 5 credits and taught over 6 weeks. Students learned theories of DH as well as digital tools to clean, visualization, map, and present data within a DH Website project.

Prior, I had been a Teaching Fellow for the class when it was taught by Dr. Miriam Posner. During that time, I was responsible for the technical lab portion of the class, introducing students of diverse disciplines to tools for data visualization, mapping, network analysis, and digital publishing. Additionally, I taught students the important basics of project management and collaboration, as their groups work with a large digital humanities dataset of over 2,000 records and turn it into a website with two digital maps, three data visualizations, a timeline, and contextualizing written research. See some of the dozens of websites the DH101 students at UCLA have built and my lab resources over the years by exploring the websites created by Dr. Posner below:

DH101 (2017)

DH101 (2016)

DH101 (2015)

DH101 (2014)

The method we teach within UCLA’s DH101: Introduction to Digital Humanities class is to break down a digital project by source, process, and presentation. Examining the sources means understanding what the primary materials are that form the basis of the project. From these sources, the information is harvested to form a data sheet that can be processed in a variety of ways. Processing includes the way the data is formatted – the ontology of the dataset. It also includes how the data is massaged, cleaned, or manipulated to be run through programs to transform it into information that is relevant to the projects research questions. The results may be data visualizations, maps, timelines, network graphs, 3D renderings and the like. The tools used to processes the data have their own biases, strengths, and weaknesses. Understanding the selection of tools for processing data will be critical in the analysis of the project. Finally, the choices that go into presentation can be assessed on two levels: the information architecture and the user interface (UI) design. Information architecture controls where information is placed and how information is connected across the platform. User interface design addresses the overall form and function of the presented material. Often, the information architecture and UI are limited based on the choice of a content management system (CMS). The CMS is a user platform that serves as an intermediary between file storage and content presentation. CMS’s operate via a templating system that utilizes WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) design to help streamline publishing to the Web, so that not every component of the website needs to be coded by hand. Today, CMS’s are designed for various kinds of Web publishing, such as blogging (Wordpress) or collection management (Omeka). By building a digital humanities project from start to finish, my DH101 students learn firsthand about the choices that are made across the elements of sources, processes, and presentation.

TOOLS

Omeka

Scalar

WordPress,

ManyEyes

Voyant

Gephi

Cytoscape

Tableau

Palladio

Google Fusion tables

HTML

HTML5

CSS

Trello

Asana

Kanban

Jira

Doodle

When Is Good

Slack

Facebook

GroupMe

Webex

Zotero

WTF CSV

Getty Vocabularies

Library of Congress of Subject Headings

Excel Pivot Tables

RAW

Quadrigram

Datawrapper

Plotly

Viewshare

Wordl

http://www.visualisingdata.com/resources/,

TimeMapper

Timeline.js

Neatline

MyHistro

D3.js

ImagePlot

OpenRefine

Excel

OneNote

DATE(S)

2014-2020