I reserve the right to make amendments to the schedule of readings and discussion topics. Students are expected to read all weekly communications from me.
PART 1 Frameworks for Studying the Digital Archive
Week 1
intro to the course
Tue, Jan 25
paradigms, tools, platforms
Review the syllabus
Set up your Zotero account and Google Site
Jan 27, Thurs
What are archives; what is the Digital Archive?
Archives and power
Datafication and digital archives
Concepts and Ideas of the Week:
archive; data and datafication
Readings due Thurs, 27th:
1) Archives-The Basics: What are archives?
2) Trevor Owens, What Do you Mean by Archive? Genres of Usage for Digital Preservers
3) The Library As a National Memory (short video recording produced by the British Library)
Assignments due Monday, Jan 31:
1) Review the syllabus
2) Watch this tutorial. Download Zotero; create an account; join the class group library.
3) Create your own Google site. You can find a brief how-to tutorial here. Give your site the name DigitalArchiveS22_(a user name you choose). Create a page titled "Response Writings". You will be posting your short response papers here. Once you have your site set up, email me your URL, by Monday 31, 5 pm.
4)Sign-up for the "in-class presentation&discussion leading" assignment
5) Post two discussion questions on the "discussion question chat room" ( you will receive an invite from me to join the chat room; see Assignments&Grading for the details about the discussion questions)
Week 2
silences in the digital archive
Tue, Feb 1
What data/record is 'missing'?
Classification
Hands-on:
1) Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade
2) The Library of Missing Datasets : Art installations v1 and v2; at Github
3) Max Kreutzberger Palestine Collection
Follow up on Zotero+Google Site
Thrus, Feb 3 Discussion/ in-class presentation 1
Algorithmic Culture
Concepts and Ideas of the week:
silences in the archive; classification; crowd; information; algorithm
Readings to be completed by Tuesday:
1) Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein, Data Feminism, pp.32-39
2)Adele Perry, "The Colonial Archive on Trial" in Archive Stories, Fact, Fictions and The Writing of History, pp.325-351 [The article is a fascinating and eye-opening work and I encourage you to read the entire piece; however, our in-class discussion will focus mainly on the introduction section of the article(first three pages)]
3) Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook, “Archives, Records and Power: The Making of Modern Memory” pp.1-2; 13-15.
Readings to be completed by Thursday:
1) Ted Striphas, ‘Algorithmic Culture’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 18.4–5 (2015): 395–412.
2) Safiya Noble, Algorithms of Oppression, pp.135-148
Response writing 1, due Friday 5 pm: Archival silences
Week 3
archiving the internet
Tue, Feb 8
web archiving platforms, curatorial choices, and ethical concerns
Hands-on:
-Library of Congress Twitter Archive
Thurs, Feb 10 Discussion/ in-class presentation 2
"The Internet never forgets": The Demise of Forgetting and "the Right to be Forgotten"
Concepts and ideas of the week:
born-digital archives; digitized archives; the wayback machine; 'right to be forgotten'
Readings (and videos) to be completed by Tuesday:
1) Nora Caplan-Bricker, Toward an Ethical archive of the Web, Harper's Magazine, December 2018
2) "Internet history is fragile. This archive is making sure it doesn’t disappear", PBS Newshour, Jan 2017
3) Laurel Wamsley, "Library Of Congress Will No Longer Archive Every Tweet", NPR, December 26, 2017
4) How to use the Internet Archive (YouTube video produced by the Internet Archive)
Readings to be completed by Thursday:
1)Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, “Failing to Forget the ‘Drunken Pirate’ “ in Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, pp. 1-15
2) Right to be Forgotten (Read the 'Conception and Proposal' section, skim through the rest)
Do you want to learn and think more about the questions we discuss this week? Here are some recommended reading(s), video(s), podcasts:
1) How to use the Wayback Machine (YouTube video produced by the Internet Archive)
2) Safiya Noble, Algorithms of Oppression, pp. 121-129
3) Jorge Luis Borges, "Funes, His Memory" in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley, pp. 131-138 (the title of this story has previously been previously translated as Funes the Memorious )
4) Abe Akira, "Peaches", in The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories, pp.191-200
PART 2 Curating and Archiving Self, Family, and Community
Week 4
why and how to curate self, family, and community online; ethical concerns
Tue, Feb 15 Discussion/ in-class presentation 3
self-curation, social media platforms, photo archives
community archives and digital photography collections
who 'owns' your face? : computer vision and facial recognition
Hands-on:
-Indian Memory Project: Tracing the History and Identity of the Indian Subcontinent via Images Found in Personal Archives https://www.indianmemoryproject.com/
-Akkasah Photography Archive https://akkasah.org/en/
- personal photo collections in your social media account(s)
Thurs, Feb 17
Archivist Talks 1: Akkasah Archives talk
(prepare questions for the archivist)
Readings (and podcast) to be completed by Tuesday:
1) Terry Cook, "Evidence, memory, identity, and community: four shifting archival paradigms", in Archival Science, 2013. (I encourage you to read the entire article; however, our conversation is going to focus on the section titled "Community: participatory archiving—the activist-archivist mentors- collaborative evidence- and memory-making", pp. 113-116)
2) Richard Van Noorden, “The ethical questions that haunt facial-recognition research”, in Nature, 18 November 2020.
3) In Machines We Trust Podcast (S1,E2), Land of a Billion Faces, (interview with the CEO of 'Clearview AI')
Do you want to learn and think more about the questions we discuss this week? Here are some recommended reading(s), video(s), podcasts:
1) Emily McManus, Why did this simple Google search get retweeted 3500 times?
Response writing 2, due Sunday Feb 20, 5 pm
Week 5
genealogy platforms
Tue, Feb 22
Genealogy databases
Privacy concerns and ethics of online genealogy data creation
Hands-on:
Thurs, Feb 24 Discussion/ in-class presentation 4
Search for and/or create your own family tree/archive
Explore National Archives and the Internet Archive for genealogical data
Readings to be completed by Tuesday:
1)Jerome de Groot , "Ancestry.com and the Evolving Nature of Historical Information Companies", in The Public Historian, Volume 42, Number 1, February 2020
2) Benjamin E. Berkman, Wynter K. Miller, Christine Grady “Is It Ethical to Use Genealogy Data to Solve Crimes?”, Ann Intern Med. 2018 Sep 4; 169(5): 333–334.
Readings and Podcast to be completed by Thursday:
1)The Genealogy Gems Podcast, How to Find Free Genealogy Records and Resources, E.248
2) Masters of Media, "Reflections on Geneology Data in the Age of Dataveillance"
PART 3 Curating and Archiving History and Culture: Digital Historical Archives and Libraries
Week 6
from digitized to computer-readable: digital libraries and archives
Tue, March 1
What is discoverable, accessible, and searchable?
Interface
Hands-on:
-Project Gutenberg(“a library of over 60,000 free books”) https://www.gutenberg.org/
-Google Books https://books.google.com/
-Al Maktaba al Shamila (Arabic “Comprehensive Library”) https://shamela.ws/
-Qatar Digital Library (“This growing archive covers modern history and culture of the Gulf and wider region, available online for the first time”) https://www.qdl.qa/en
Thurs, March 3 Discussion/ in-class presentation 5
Machine Learning and Libraries
Machine readability
HTR and OCR for digital text creation
Readings to be completed by Tuesday:
1) “Generous Interfaces” https://lab.sciencemuseum.org.uk/exploring-museum-collections-online-some-background-reading-da5a332fa2f8
2) Adam Crymble, "The Archival Revisionism of Mass Digitization", in Technology and the Historian: Transformations in the Digital Age, pp.44-48; pp.58-64 (The Rise of Participatory Web section)
Readings to be completed by Thursday:
-Ryan Cordell, “Data for ML”, in Machine Learning + Libraries: A Report on the State of the Field, pp.11-17, 20-30, 33-38.
Recommended Reading:
John Bohannon, "Google Books, Wikipedia, and the Future of Culturomics", in Science, 14 Jan 2011 ,Vol 331, Issue 6014 , p. 135
Week 7
Tue, March 8
Archivist Talks 2: NYUAD Special Collections
Thurs, March 10
Analog work in NYUAD special archives
Response writing 3, due Sunday, March 13, 5 pm
Week 8 Spring Break (12-22 March)
Week 9
Crowdsourcing
Tue, March 22 Spring Break- no class
Final project proposal due Wed, March 23, 5 pm
Thurs, March 24 Discussion/ in-class presentation 6
Crowdsourcing cultural heritage, its promises and ethics
Citizen scholars
Hands-on:
Zooniverse ( Choose a project in Zooniverse and complete at least one classification in it)
FromThePage (Choose a project and transcribe at least five lines)
Readings to be completed by Thurs:
-Trevor Owens, “Making Crowdsourcing Compatible with the Missions and Values of Cultural Heritage Organizations” in Crowdsourcing our Cultural Heritage, pp. 269-280.
- Victoria Van Hyning, “Harnessing crowdsourcing for scholarly and GLAM purposes”, pp.1-11
Follow-up: final project proposals
Response writing 4, due Sunday, March 27, 5 pm
Week 10
"wisdom of the crowds" in the service of digital data creation
Tu, March 29
Crowdsourcing of reusable data/information creation
Crowdsourcing of metadata creation
open-source, copyrights, re-usable data
Hands-on:
Flicker/Commons (“Help Us Catalog the World’s Public Photo Archives”)
Wikimedia Commons (“ a collection of freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute”)
Thur, March 31 Discussion/ in-class presentation 7
Hands-on:
-Curate a collection of open-source images (on your final project topic or on another topic of your choice).
-Create tags for your images
Readings to be completed by Tue:
1)Bethany Redcliff, "Can the Crowd Create Metadata?"
2) Gartner, R. (2016), Metadata: Shaping Knowledge from Antiquity to the Semantic Web, "Dublin Core" ; "Folksonomy: Democratic Classification", "Enrich Then Filter" pp. 33-35 and pp. 101-105
3) About Creative Commons License
Readings to be completed by Thurs:
1) "Owning the Past: Sharing the Property of Others: Copyright and the Public Domain" in Digital History" in Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web
2) "Owning the Past: Fair Use" in Digital History" in Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web
Do you want to learn and think more about the questions we discuss this week? Here are some recommended reading(s), video(s), podcasts:
1) Ephrat Livni, Welcome to 'Web3'. What's that? , The New York Times, Dec 5, 2021.
PART 5 Project-based learning (building towards the final project)
Week 11
computer-readable text creation
Tu, April 5
OCR/HTR for computer-readable corpus creation
HTR case studies: Transkribus Read&Search
Thur, April 7
Hands-on:
Create a sample corpus of computer-readable text from one of the archives/libraries we have discussed in class (on your final project topic or on another topic of your choice)
Readings and Tutorials:
-“How can AI help researchers transcribe their manuscripts?”
- “How to use Transkribus in 10 steps”
- TBA
Recommended event:
Culture Mapping 2022: Archive and Afterlives (Virtual via Zoom & NYU Bobst Library)
Response writing 5, due Sunday, April 10, 5 pm
Week 12
basic text analysis and visualization
Tu, April 11
Text analysis&visualization with Voyant Tools, Part 1
Thur, April 14 Discussion/ in-class presentation 8 (presentation material TBA)
Text analysis&visualization with Voyant Tools, Part 2
Tutorials:
Introduction to Voyant Tools: Basic Distant Reading of Literature
Week 13
Tue, April 19
create, analyze and visualize a digital corpus with HTR/OCR and Voyant Tools
Expand the sample corpus you created on week 11 and perform basic text analysis/ visualization on it, Part 1
Thurs, April 21
digital exhibit creation with Omeka
How to use Omeka platform, 1
Week 14
Tue, April 26
How to use Omeka platform, 2
start building an outline/template for your exhibit
Thurs, April 28
-continue working with the outline/template for your exhibit / creation project
-expand and refine the image/text collection for your final project
Tutorial:
Week 15
Tue, May 3- no class (Eid break)
Thurs, May 5 - Legislative day (no class meeting)
Friday, May 6 - Legislative day class (meeting will start at 7:55 am)
Final Project Presentations, 1
Week 16
Tue, May 10 Final Project Presentations, 2
Thr, May 12 (Last day of class) Final Project Presentations, 3
Submission of the final project: Friday, May 20, 11:59 pm