Schedule

Friday, January 24 | Introduction

What is this course? Why is it important?

Monday, January 27 | Data in the Liberal Arts

What is/are data? What is/are data in the humanities?

Readings:

• Sarah Watson, "Data is the New '___'," dis magazine, 2015.
• Trevor Owens, “Defining Data for Humanists: Text, Artifact, Information or Evidence?,” Journal of Digital Humanities 1, No. 1 (2011).

Wednesday, January 29 | Classification & Databases

What are databases?

Readings:

• Stephen Fortune, “A Brief History of Databases,” Avant.org, last modified February 27, 2014.
• Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, “Introduction: To Classify Is Human,” in Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (MIT Press, 1999), pgs. 1-16.

Friday, January 31 | Field trip to DeWitt Wallace Library

Guest speakers: Katy Gabrio and Ellen Holt-Werle

How are library and archival collections built? What does this mean?

Readings:

• Anne Burdick et al., “Two: Energizing Methods & Genres.” and “The Animated Archive,” in Digital_Humanities (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012), 47-49.
• Marlene Manoff, “Archive and Database as Metaphor: Theorizing the Historical Record.” portal: Libraries and the Academy 10, no. 4 (2010): 385–398.

Exploration:

• Please come to class with a question based on your readings and exploration of the collections use dataset and archives for Katy and Ellen.

Monday, February 3 | History of Humanities Computing, DH, and DLA Part I

What is the history of the computerization of cultural heritage collections? What are digital humanities?

Readings:

• Susan Hockey, "The History of Humanities Computing," in A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).
• Anne Burdick et al., “One: From Humanities to Digital Humanities,” in Digital_Humanities (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012), 3-26.

In class:

• Introduction to Personal Data Postcard assignment. Due on 2/19.

Wednesday, February 5 | History of Humanities Computing, DH, and DLA Part II

Readings:

• Miriam Posner, "How Did They Make That? The Video!" 40 minutes, 2014.
• Todd Presner, "Digital Humanities Manifesto," 2009, 14 pages.

In class:

• Introduction to blog post assignments. First blog post: Due on 2/12.

Friday, February 7 | Museum Collections

Readings:

• Everett Ellin, “An International Survey of Museum Computer Activity,” Computers and the Humanities, 3, no.2 (1968): 65-86.
• Mia Ridge, "Mia Ridge explores the shape of Cooper-Hewitt collections," Cooper Hewitt Labs, 2012.
• Institute of Museum and Library Services, Santa Barbara Statement on Collections as Data, https://collectionsasdata.github.io/statement/, 2017.

Exploration:

• Come with a question based on your readings and exploration of the Mia collection.

Monday, February 10 | Invisible Labor and Divisions of Labor

Readings:

• Courtney Rivard, Taylor Arnold, and Lauren Tilton, "Building Pedagogy into Project Development: Making Data Construction Visible in Digital Projects," DH Quarterly 13, no. 2, 2019.
• Matthew Pittman and Kim Sheehan, "Amazon's Mechanical Turk a Digital Sweatshop? Transparency and Accountability in Crowdsourced Online Research," Journal of Media Ethics, 2016.

Additional Resources:

• Marion Crain, Winifred Poster, and Miriam Cherry, Invisible Labor: Hidden Work in the Contemporary World (University of California Press, 2016).

Wednesday, February 12 | Ethical Data Use and Analysis

Due: Blog Post #1: Reverse Engineer a Digital Liberal Arts Project

Readings:

• Juergen Pfeffer, "9. Ethical Considerations," in Social Data: Biases, Methodological Pitfalls, and Ethical Boundaries, 2019.
• Taina Bucher, "Objects of Intense Feeling: The Case of the Twitter API," Computational Culture 3, 2013.
• Mark Andrejevic, "The Big Data Divide," International Journal of Communication 8, 2014.

In class:

• Introduction to second blog post assignment: Due on 2/26.

Friday, February 14 | Lab Day: Using an API

Readings:

• Xavier Adam, "An illustrated introduction to APIs," 2019.
• Rapid API, "What is an API?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLVeSrLQOM8&feature=youtu.be.

Downloads:

• OpenRefine: http://openrefine.org/download.html.

In class:

• API Day
• Tutorial from the Programming Historian

Monday, February 17 | Metadata and Data Standards

Readings:

• Anne Gilliland, "Setting the Stage," in Introduction to Metadata, 2016.
• A: James Coupe, “Art, Surveillance, and Metadata," in Worldmaking as Techné: Participatory Art, Music, and Architecture, 2018, pp. 1-22.
• B: Annette Markham, "Undermining 'data': A critical examination of a core term in scientific inquiry," First Monday 18, no.1, 2013.

Wednesday, February 19 | Introduction to Cleaning Data

Due: Personal Data Postcard

Readings:

• Jeni Tennison, "Five stages of data grief," Open Data Institute, 2015.

In class:

• Miniature postcard exhibition for ourselves.

Friday, February 21 | Cleaning Data with Excel and OpenRefine

Readings:

• Katie Rawson and Trevor Muñoz, "Against Cleaning," 2016.
• Marit Brademann and Dyanna Gregory, "Ch. 8: Data Cleaning," Data + Design, pp. 116-122.

Monday, February 24 | No class

Wednesday, February 26 | Introduction to Data Visualization

Due: Final project interest survey

Due: Blog Post #2: Project Critique

Readings:

• Johanna Drucker, "Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display," DH Quarterly 6, no. 1, 2011.
• Georgia Lupi, "Data Humanism, The Revolution will be Visualized," georgialupi, 2017.

Exploration:

• Bring in an example of a data visualization that you feel is effective as well as one that is ineffective (Here are some places to look: newspapers!, https://informationisbeautiful.net/, https://datavizcatalogue.com/, and many places I'm sure you've encountered already)

Friday, February 28 | Introduction to Project Management

Readings:

• Trevor Owens, "Where to Start? On Research Questions in the Humanities," 2014.
• Ohio State University, "Data as Sources," https://ohiostate.pressbooks.pub/choosingsources/chapter/data-as-sources/.

In class:

• Group formation!
• Overview of Project Charter & 5 Preliminary Research Questions Due on 3/13.

Monday, March 2 | The Politics of Representation

Readings:

• Catherine D'Ignazio, "What would feminist data visualization look like?" visionscarto, 2017.
• Amardeep Singh, "The Archive Gap: Race, the Canon, and the Digital Humanities," Amardeep Singh, 2015.
• "The Peril and Promise of Historians as Data Creators: Perspective, Structure, and the Problem of Representation," [bracket] November 24, 2019.
• Marisa Elena Duarte & Miranda Belarde-Lewis, "Imagining: Creating Spaces for Indigenous Ontologies," Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 53, 2015.

Wednesday, March 4 | Evaluating Digital Scholarship

Readings:

• Anne Burdick et al., "How to Evaluate Digital Scholarship," in Digital_Humanities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), pp. 128-129.
• Trevor Owens and Fred Gibbs, "Building Better Digital Humanities Tools: Toward broader audiences and user-centered designs," 6, no.2, 2012.

In class:

• Overview of Data Critique Due on 3/25.

Friday, March 6 | Data Visualization Lab

Reading:

• Maila Hardin, Daniel Hom, Ross Perez, & Lori Williams, "Which chart or graph is right for you?" Tableau, http://www.tableau.com/sites/default/files/media/which_chart_v6_final_0.pdf.

Download:

• Tableau (https://public.tableau.com/en-us/s/)

Monday, March 9 | Data Sculptures and Field Trip to the DRC

Listening:

• Enrico Bertini and Moritz Stefaner, "017- Data Sculptures," Data Stories podcast, 2013.

Wednesday, March 11 | Introduction to Mapping

Readings:

• Shannon Mattern, "Gaps In The Map: Why We're Mapping Everything, And Why Not Everything Can, Or Should, Be Mapped," Words in Space, 2018.
• David J. Bodenhamer, "The Potential of Spatial Humanities," The Spatial Humanities: GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship, ed. David J. Bodenhamer, John Corrigan, and Trevor M. Harris (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), pp. 14-29.

Exploration:

• Please post a map (screenshot, link, etc.) to this slideshow- it should be a map that you've used in your own life (Google Maps, Apple Maps, Strava, etc.)

In class:

• Maps to explore

Friday, March 13 | Mapping Lab

Due: Project Charter and 5 preliminary research questions (** one submission per team**)

Due: Agree on a time for your group to meet with Aisling, and select date/time in Calendly.

Readings:

• Mark Newman, "Maps of the 2016 presidential election results," 2016, http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2016/.
• Jo Guldi, "What is the Spatial Turn," Spatial Humanities, http://spatial.scholarslab.org/spatial-turn/.

Exploration:

• Bring in an example of 3-5 types of data that could be compelling when visualized on a map.

Optional Zoom Check in on Wednesday, April 1st at 1:10 pm CST

✓ View brief lecture on Moodle.

✓ Readings/Viewings for the week:

• Jennifer R. Whitson, "Gaming the Quantified Self," Surveillance & Society, 2013.
• Please view one of these projects (each features a video): https://quantifiedself.com/show-and-tell/.

✓ RESPONSE:

• Post a question or comment about the reading and/or viewing to our Slack channel by Thursday, April 2 at 11:59 am CST.
• Respond to one of your peers' questions or comments by Sunday, April 5 by 11:59 am CST.

✓ Data Diary Week 1: Self-Tracking

I want you to start keeping a data diary. Gather data and write for 15 minutes, for as many days per week as you can, aiming for a minimum of three. I will provide topics/jumping-off points each week, but feel free to diverge from these as needed. You can write by hand on scraps of paper, or a book, or you can type into a document on your computer or tablet or phone. It doesn’t matter what medium you choose, just that you observe and write and collect data. If you have more to gather or say on any given day, you can, of course write for longer! (I've adapted the timing and some structural suggestions from Dr. Andrea Kaston Tange).

Please note that these diaries will eventually play a part in the final project you turn in for this class, but you will NOT be required to turn in everything you write.

TOPIC FOR THIS WEEK

In "Gaming the Quantified Self," Jennifer R. Whitson writes, "Gamification is successfully leveraged as a form of self-surveillance by: i) exposing the minutiae of our everyday lives and delving for meaningful patterns, ii) using this data to improve ourselves, and iii) inciting and maintaining behavior change by making this self-improvement process more pleasurable."

She also states: "This is a form of being alone, together, via the shared rules that are established and upheld by the gamification software. (Simon 2007)".

I've been reflecting on this type of self-surveillance and "being alone, together," particularly during the COVID pandemic. Please respond to the following prompts and questions in your data diary submission for this week:

• Please look through your mobile device and write down which apps you voluntarily or intentionally allow to track your personal data (as far as you know).
• Are you intentionally gathering any personal data right now that is helping you to cope with the COVID-19 crisis?
• If so, what are you gathering? Where or why are you gathering it?
• If not, why not? (I'm not suggesting that you should be!)
• Is there a social component to your data gathering and how it is viewed?
• How is this personal data collection process helpful for you?
• Are you willing to share a snapshot of the data you've collected? (whether an actual screenshot or a snippet of data gathered with pen and paper, etc.)? You can also try visualizing some of your data with Tableau.

✓ Optional Mapping Information

(If you are uncomfortable sharing any of the following, do not worry about it!) Please add your current location- NOT YOUR EXACT LOCATION!- (city, state or city, country or latitude and longitude), the number of people in your current living situation (including yourself), the number and species of animals in your current living situation, and the current temperature at your location: Map Spreadsheet.

✓ Office Hours on Zoom

Please email me to set up office hours by appointment.

• Monday, March 30, 2:30-3:30 PM CST/3:30-4:30 PM EST

✓ Office Hours on Slack

• Thursday, April 2, 11:30 AM-1:00PM CST/12:30-2:00PM EST

Class Zoom Meeting on April 6 at 1:10 pm CST- OPTIONAL

✓ View brief lecture on Moodle.

✓ Readings/Viewings for the week:

• Scott Weingart, "Demystifying Networks, Part I & II," Journal of Digital Humanities 1, no.1, Winter 2011.
• Explore one of the following projects, thinking about the relationships being represented and the purpose of presenting the data this way.
  • Kindred Britain
  • Six Degrees of Francis Bacon
  • Network Analysis of Shakespeare's Tragedies

✓ RESPONSE:

• Post a question or comment about the reading and/or website you explored to our Slack channel by Thursday, April 9 at 11:59 am CST.
• Respond to one of your peers' questions or comments by Sunday, April 12 by 11:59 am CST.

✓ Lab:

• To the best of your ability, please try to complete this lab https://github.com/miriamposner/cytoscape_tutorials by Sunday, April 12. I will not be checking on this, but it is a fun and fairly straightforward exercise in basic network mapping using Cytoscape and we'll briefly talk about how it went for those of you who were able to try it out on Monday, April 13.

✓ Data Diary Week 2: POST EXCERPT HERE

sometime this week, please!

TOPIC FOR THIS WEEK: Visualizing your current social network

Please take these exercises slowly. This is not a race to post to Moodle- it's all about the process. As a reminder, your data diaries should require about 15 minutes of engagement for approximately three days out of each week. These combine data and reflection on the week's topic.

As part of your reflection/diary practice this week, please do the following:

You can sketch a network on paper or on your computer quite easily. Put yourself at the center of your network and then arrange everyone you have been keeping in touch with during the COVID-19 pandemic (family, friends, classes, other groups) around you. Think about degrees of proximity and also connections among the individuals in different parts of your network. How many of them are linked to each other as well as to you? If you can code the lines that connect your various persons to indicate something about the relationship, how does that change the drawing? For example, what method are you using to keep in touch? (email? FaceTime? WhatsApp?, etc.) Maybe you can think about how many times you've been able to contact these individuals per week?

Post a comment, question, idea, a sentence from your data diary, a photo of a drawing, a screenshot, etc. to our Slack channel sometime this week, please do so by Sunday, if possible!

Class Zoom Meeting on April 13 at 1:10 pm CST- OPTIONAL

✓Readings/Exploration for the week:

• Dorothy Kim, "Social Media and Academic Surveillance: The Ethics of Digital Bodies," Model View Culture, 2014.
• Explore this feature from The New York Times called "The Privacy Project: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/opinion/internet-privacy-project.html. There's a lot here, so feel free to only focus on one section. Macalester has an institutional subscription (see how to connect from here: https://www.macalester.edu/library/nyt/), but if you cannot access this content, please let me know.
• Please take a look at the 2010 and 2020 census forms. What are the major differences you see between them? If you're curious, you can step even further back in time and look at forms dating all the way back to 1790 here: https://www.census.gov/history/www/through_the_decades/questionnaires/2000_2.html.

✓ RESPONSE:

• Post a question or comment about the reading and/or website you explored to our Slack channel by Thursday, April 16 at 11:59 am CST.
• Respond to one of your peers' questions or comments by Sunday, April 19 by 11:59 am CST.

✓ Data Diary Week 3: Data Privacy and The 2020 Census

Please take these exercises slowly. This is not a race to post to Slack- it's all about the process. As a reminder, your data diaries should require about 15 minutes of engagement for approximately three days out of each week. These combine data and reflection on the week's topic.

As part of your reflection/diary practice this week, please consider the following. You DO NOT need to address all of the questions. These are food for thought:

• What data about you do you think exists on the Internet? (make a list, maybe!) Do you care that this information is "out there"? What circumstances would change how you feel about this?
• Have you explored the privacy settings on your social media apps, if you use them? For example, if you use Instagram: https://help.instagram.com/196883487377501. Or Twitter: https://twitter.com/settings/account/personalization. Do you care about these settings? Why, or why not?
• Do you want to further protect your phone? Perhaps you could reflect on the process of doing the following? https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/19/opinion/location-tracking-privacy-tips.html.
• Do you want further protection on other devices? Perhaps you could reflect on the process of using tracking/ad blockers? Have you used these kinds of tools before? (like https://privacybadger.org/ or https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock or https://www.torproject.org/download/)
• How do you feel about the data you share for the US Census? (answers submitted for the Census are considered strictly confidential: https://2020census.gov/en/data-protection.html).
• Are there questions that you think the US Census asks that it shouldn't or that it doesn't ask, but should?

Additional Resources:

• A DIY Guide to Feminist Cybersecurity: https://hackblossom.org/cybersecurity/
• Library Freedom Project: https://libraryfreedom.org/
• Electronic Frontier Foundation: https://www.eff.org/
• OpenArchive: https://open-archive.org/

Post a comment, question, idea, a sentence from your data diary, a photo of a drawing, a screenshot, etc. to our Slack channel sometime this week, please do so by Sunday, if possible!

Class Zoom Meeting on April 20 at 1:10 pm CST- OPTIONAL

Don't forget to meet with your partner/trio to discuss these questions about your final project by Sunday, April 26

✓Readings/Exploration for the week:

• Stephen Marche, "Literature is Not Data: Against Digital Humanities," LA Review of Books, 2012, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/literature-is-not-data-against-digital-humanities/.
• Holger S. Syme and Scott Selisker, "In Defense of Data: Responses to Stephen Marche's 'Literature is Not Data,'" LA Review of Books, 2012, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/in-defense-of-data-responses-to-stephen-marches-literature-is-not-data.
• Optional Reading: Alexander Galloway, "Are Some Things Unrepresentable?" Theory, Culture & Society, 28(7-8), 2011, pp. 85-102.

✓ RESPONSE:

• Post a question or comment about the reading and/or website you explored to our Slack channel by Thursday, April 23 at 11:59 am CST.
• Respond to one of your peers' questions or comments by Sunday, April 26 by 11:59 am CST.

✓ OBJECT LABEL (new this week) by Sunday, April 26 at 11:59 am CST to the Final Projects Slack.

• My video about how to write object labels.
• ADDITIONALLY, I want you to start thinking about how you might write/talk about your data visualizations for your final presentation and reflection. I will post a lecture about this early next week, but to get some practice, please take one of the visualizations you've created for your data diaries thus far and write a short label (100 words) with responses to the following questions written in complete sentences. Please post this to the Final Projects Slack channel.
  • What are we seeing here/looking at?
  • What is it about? Why are we looking at it?
  • What is the significance?

More specifics on what you might want to incorporate:

• Title of the data visualization and date it was created
• A concise interpretation of the visualization:
  • What do you want the viewer to notice?
  • What do you want viewers to understand about your interpretation of the data?
• A description of the data visualization in relation to the data set:
  • What are we seeing in the visualization?
  • What does it mean?
  • Include a concise description of the process of creating the visualization.

✓Data Diary Week 4: Text Analysis

Please take these exercises slowly. This is not a race to post to Slack- it's all about the process. As a reminder, your data diaries should require about 15 minutes of engagement for approximately three days out of each week. These combine data and reflection on the week's topic.

As part of your reflection/diary practice this week, please consider the following. You DO NOT need to address all of the questions. These are food for thought:

• For this week, you could take a clump of writing you've done for the data diaries or examine another "corpus" of writing (a batch of emails or texts you've sent over the past month; research papers you've written; etc.) using the tool Voyant: https://voyant-tools.org/. What did you find out? What words have you been using a lot during the COVID outbreak? Any visualizations you want to share?
• You can add or remove "stop words" from your corpus in Voyant (more information here: http://docs.voyant-tools.org/ui/stopwords/). Stop words are words like "the," "and," etc. that are not particularly meaningful for straightforward text analysis exercises. What does this change about your analysis?

Post a comment, question, idea, a sentence from your data diary, a photo of a drawing, a screenshot, etc. to our Slack channel sometime this week, please do so by Sunday, if possible!

Class Zoom Meeting on April 27 at 1:10 pm CST- OPTIONAL

✓Readings/Exploration for the week:

• A couple of amusing/intriguing food-related data visualization projects:
  • Data Cuisine: http://data-cuisine.net/
  • Stately Sandwiches (do these really represent states?): http://www.statelysandwiches.com/
• Thinking about digital projects and obsolescence. What do you think about these defunct projects? Why might they have disappeared?
  • Killed by Google: https://killedbygoogle.com/.
  • You might enjoy looking at the catalog of the Media Archaeology Lab in Boulder, Colorado: https://mediaarchaeologylab.com/catalogue/.

✓ RESPONSE:

• Post a question or comment about the reading and/or website you explored to our Slack channel by Thursday, April 30 at 11:59 am CST.
• Respond to one of your peers' questions or comments by Sunday, April 26 by 11:59 am CST.

✓Data Diary Week 5: Personal Organization

Please take these exercises slowly. This is not a race to post to Slack- it's all about the process. As a reminder, your data diaries should require about 15 minutes of engagement for approximately three days out of each week. These combine data and reflection on the week's topic.

This is our last week of data diaries so feel free to write/think about something you've been wanting to reflect on but haven't so far. This can be on any topic, really....and/or consider the following:

If we had continued the term in-person, we would have dedicated a couple of days to thinking about digital preservation and trying to figure out reliable sites of project documentation. Since we're not working on group projects and are not where we thought we'd be, physically or mentally, I thought we could think more broadly about organization this week.

• I've found myself spending more time than usual going through my Google Drive and desktop files and trying to organize and make sense of everything. It's a coping mechanism for me, but perhaps not for others. Have you been finding solace in organization? If so, has this occurred on your computer or elsewhere, like in your closet? (I did go through and fold all of my shirts like Marie Kondo taught me)
• If you have been doing some more organizing, how have you decided how to organize things and what to possibly delete, donate, or throw away? How has this been helpful for you?
• If you haven't been doing this, are there other ways you've been thinking about how to prioritize and manage your work right now?

Post a comment, question, idea, a sentence from your data diary, a photo of a drawing, a screenshot, etc. to our Slack channel sometime this week, please do so by Sunday, if possible!