Syllabus

Logistics

Instructor: Matt Price
Email: matt.price@utoronto.ca
Meeting Times T 2-4, Th 2-3 ET via Zoom (see announcement for password)
Web: http://digitalhistory.github.io/
Slack: https://digitalhistoryuoft.slack.com/ (invite link)
Youtube: Digital History Lecture Channel
Office Hrs: Th 3-4 ET via Zoom (see announcement for password)

In general, online communication should take place via Slack. In the case of questions having to do with official University business (requests for extensions, discussion of accommodations, any message involving sensitive personal data) please use my University email, being sure to put “HIS393” in the subject line.

Introduction

We all know – it is so commonplace that we barely even notice it! – that we are living through a revolutionary period in the history of communication. In the year of your birth, the World Wide Web was a scrawny, hand-powered frontier of hand-coded sites and Internet startups. Amazon and Google were infants. The University of Toronto Library website looked something like this, and many students and faculty still used the card catalog to find books in Robarts.

Today, the processes of research, writing and reading are all dramatically transformed by information technology. Instead of painstakingly discovering rare books and manuscript artifacts, we can do full-text searches on a vast corpus. Our writing is mediated by immensely powerful computing machines, and our creations need not be limited exclusively to the linear texts around which all the humanities initially took shape. Readers encounter our writing, not as a few precious drops of information in a desert of ignorance, but as part of an endless stream of information that assaults them all day long.

How should history respond to these new conditions of our existence? In this class we explore foundational topics in the “digital humanities” and ask what we can learn from them about how we should be doing history – in particular, how we should be collecting, analyzing, synthesizing and presenting knowledge.

  • How do the digital media developed in the last two decades change the way we understand history? Can the fundamental goal of interpreting the past survive?
  • What, if any, new technical skills do we need to acquire?
  • Can we use the new media to ask (and answer!) new kinds of questions? Can they help us improve our answers to the old questions?
  • Perhaps most powerfully: how do the new digital conditions of existence relate to the question of “engaged” scholarship? What new opportunities, constraints, and dangers does digital production call forth when we mix scholarship and citizenship?

Objectives

At the end of this course, you should:

  • be able to describe to others what the phrase “digital humanities” means to you.
  • be able to frame a coherent and nuanced argument of your own about the value of DH methods to the field of history
  • be able to clearly state and defend a position regarding “engaged scholarship”, and articulate the relationship of your argument to the contemporary media landscape
  • have a basic understanding of markup languages and their use in DH
  • be able to make compelling use of media materials such as audio, video, and animation in historical arguments
  • understand how to create simple historical maps, and have an opinion about the value of GIS in historical argument

Method

There are many approaches to the digital humanities, all of them involving tools that are under rapid and iterative development. A given project is likely to require a substantial training period in the particular tools chosen by the principal investigators. It is therefore not possible for this course to provide an effective survey of “the” digital humanities toolkit. But learning tools is an essential skill for the digital humanist. So what should we do?

Almost every digital humanist will, at some point, need to do the following:

  • read and edit HTML, CSS and Javascript
  • debug running web pages using the browser’s built-in tools
  • use a text editor to write code in any of several languages
  • collaborate with peers using version control software, almost always git

Our emphasis is therefore on simple coding taught using standard tools that are available almost everywhere. Almost all of the software we use is Free or Open Source. You will learn very basic web development skills and slowly come to apply them to increasingly sophisticated (but still pretty simple!) historical questions. These baby steps will give you some sense of what skills a “real” digital history project requires, and give you the tools you’ll need to teach yourself when you encounter new tools in the course of a project.

Course Format (CoViD edition)

This class is being taught online and largely asynchronously for the first time during lockdown in May/June 2020. Despite being organized around Digital History,the class has, ironically, traditionally relied heavily on face to face interactions. This term, lectures will all be delivered asynchronously, and scheduled classtime – 4 hours per week – will be devoted to practical coding and writing problems. Essentially, this is a flipped classroom approach, but one in which we never meet IRL. If you’re not able to come to the live sessions, help will also be available through Slack and other async channels.

Each week, I will post a series of short lectures online. You will be expected to watch them in advance of our class meetings, and we will use the meeting time to practice skills you’ll need for the assignments.

Please use this BB Collab to join our class meetings. This first week is a trial run – we will see if BB Collaborate works for us, and reassess if necessary.

Policies

Accessibility

The University provides academic accommodations for students with disabilities in accordance with the terms of the Ontario Human Rights Code. For information on services and resources, see http://www.studentlife.utoronto.ca/as

Respecting Diversity

Diverse backgrounds, embodiments, and experiences are essential to the critical thinking endeavor at the heart of higher education. We expect you to be respectful of the many social and cultural differences among us, which may include, but are not limited to: age, cultural background, disability, ethnicity, technical ability, gender identity and presentation, citizenship and immigration status, national origin, race, religious and political beliefs, sex, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic status. Please talk with me right away if you experience disrespect in this class—from any source, including myself—and I will active work to address it.

Correspondence

As noted above, most communication should take place via Slack. In the case of questions having to do with official University business (requests for extensions, discussion of accommodations, any message involving sensitive personal data) please use my University email, being sure to put “HIS393” in the subject line. I’ll do my best to reply within two working days, though occasionally the delay may be slightly longer. Please allow the full 48 hours to elapse before sending a repeat email.

Also: I have an injury-related difficulty co-ordinating action between my left and right hands, which leads to very frequent & distinctive typographical errors (and is also one of the many reasons you don’t want to hear me play a musical instrument). In my course materials, assignment comments, and announcements, I strive to eliminate those errors, but in instant messaging I am less attentive, as typing corrections approximately triples my composition time. So… please bear with me.

Attendance

Make every effort to attend each class meeting if you can! Class will begin and (usually) end on time. Please do your best to get to class before the start of the session. Students are expected to attend all meetings unless lockdown-related scheduling issues prevent you. Please let me know in advance if you need to skip class either once or in general.

Please silence notirications on your devices during class, so you can focus. Please don’t use class time (lecture or lab) to check your email, update your Facebook, read reddit, watch YouTube, make dank memes, seize the means of production (well, that may be allowed under certain circumstances), etc. Such usage is distracting and interferes with learning both for you and for all the other students around you. If I notice you doing this, I will call you out in public. Spend class time on class materials. If another student’s activity is distracting, please ask them to stop it (or let me know outside of class).

Tools

Course assignments will require you to install software. All of the software we use is free, but it requires a laptop to run. A Chromebook unfortunately will not be sufficient. While it is in principle possible to do all of your assignments on the web or using a very basic text editor, I do not recommend that method, and will not offer technical support. If you don’t own a laptop, you should find a way to borrow one, or buy a cheap model on College St to use for the duration of the semester.

I can offer help with the following

Tool On Mac On Windows On Linux
Real Web Browser Firefox and/or Chrome Firefox and/or Chrome Firefox and/or Chrome
Text Editor VSCode VSCode VSCode
Bash Shell Environment Terminal (Built in) Git for Windows or Windows Subsystem for Linux gnome-terminal, qterm, etc
Git Version Control Git for OSX Git for Windows apt-get install git
Github Membership Sign up here Sign up here Sign up here
Node and NPM Node Website (guide) Node Website (guide) Node Website (distro instructions)

Please see the Setup page for more details about the particular tools we will be using. YOU WILL ABSOLUTEY NEED TO HAVE THESE TOOLS IN ORDER TO TAKE THE COURSE

Course Requirements & Grading

The assignments in this course take a wide variety of forms, and for the most part, differ significantly from what you’re likely to have encountered in other History courses. If you have little technical experience, or have perhaps ended up in this course by accident (!), you may find some of the work daunting at first. I have done my very best to make the assignments feasible for beginners, but you will likely encounter some difficult moments. I therefore strongly urge you to (1) start early! and (2) persevere through the difficult initial stages. The frustration you experience is, in fact, part of pedagogical method here. You are not expected to become a coding ninja, but learning how to learn is a major component of work in the Digital Humanities.

Be warned! Marking in this course is unusual!

Grading in this course is done using a modified point system. The system may seem odd at first, but it has definite advantages for both students and teachers, so don’t be intimidated. Instead of receiving a number or letter grade for each assignment, and then getting a weighted sum of those grades as your final mark, you will choose what final mark to try for and then complete the assignments required for that mark. A certain set of assignments is required for a D; for a C, you must complete all of the “D” assignments plus another set; for a B, all of the C assignments plus some more; and the same goes for an A.

Here are some more details:

All Assignments Are Graded Pass/Fail
Each assignment you get will include a careful explanation of my expectations. If your work meets those expectations, you get full credit; if not you get no credit.
A ‘Passing’ Mark on Assignments is a B+
In order to get credit for an assignment, you will have to demonstrate a high level of mastery – about the level normally required for a B+.
Each Higher Grade Represents a quantum level of additional achievement
As you move up the ladder, assignments test more advanced and difficult concepts from the course.
If you fail, you can try again
You start the semester with 5 ‘retry’ chits, which you can use to resubmit assignments that have not succeeded. If necessary, you can use all of those chits on a single assignment! Resubmission process must be completed withing 1 week of the return date of the original version.
A late assignment costs one ‘retry’ chit
There is no percentage penalty for late work; instead, a late paper will cost you one of your retry opportunities.
Second and third tries get fewer comments
I will give substantial comments on first tries; additional tries will get less and less fulsome commentary.
Pluses and Minuses are determined by participation
The only part of your grade which is not determined on a pass/fail basis is the “+” or “-” part, which is assigned based on your on and offline participation. See the participation grade sheet for more details.

I know there will be questions! Please don’t hesitate to ask them. And here, finally, is the list of assignments. Detailed assignments will be handed out with adequate time to permit completion.

Assignment Due Date Skills/Aims A B C D
Class Profile/ Git& Github Sep. 17 version control and collaboration ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔
G & GH Extras ✔
Zero to Blog Post Sep. 22 web markup and presentation ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔
Z2B Extras ✔
A Feast of Ministers Oct. 27 Programming Concepts: abstraction, loops, data types ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔
Ministers Extras ✔
DOM and Data Nov. 03 Programming Concepts: Object structure, substitution, text as data ✔ ✔ ✔
DOM and Data Extras ✔
Spatial History Nov. 24 API’s, GIS ✔ ✔
Oral History Dec. 04 API’s, Multimedia Narratives ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔
Project Proposal Dec. 12 Imagine a Digital History Project ✔

Please note that while due dates will never be earlier than listed here, if we do get behind in lecture, individual assignments may be moved later by a few days.

Texts

While all our readings are online, the following texts are heavily used & may be of interest. They are available in the library or via various online booksellers:

  • Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History Verso, 2005. (Online Access)
  • Geddes et al Toward Spatial Humanities Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014.
  • Perks, et al. The Oral History Reader. 2016 (Online Access)

Course Outline

Text, Code, and the Web

(Sept. 10) Introducing Digital History, Github, and Markdown

Class Synopsis: Introduction to the course

Lecture Videos:

Readings: You may want to read some of these as general preparation for this and other history classes:

In-Class Activity: Collaboration on Github, Markdown

(Sep. 15) What the Web Signifies + HTML and CSS

Class Synopsis: we all live with the web, but that doesn’t mean we think much about how it works and what it’s changed. This week’s lecture presents some thoughts on the changing nature of the public sphere and the significance of the web’s digital and machine-readable nature.

Lecture Videos:

Readings:

In-Class Activity: HTML + CSS

Resources: These Mozilla Developer Network guides are inter-related, and the structure is easy to get lost in. Still, this is among the best resources on the web.

  • MDN: HTML Basics. Start here.
  • MDN: Getting Started with the Web (HTML Basics, above, is part of this progression. You can skip this for now, but we’ll come back to several of these topics later.)
  • MDN: Intro to HTML. This is a great, systematic introduction to the most important HTML elements. There are some interactive exercises, and you can also copy code into files to experiment with in VSCode using the Live Server Preview functionality.
  • MDN: Learn HTML Pathway . There’s a ton more here; we will use some of it later on.
  • MDN Reference. Complete reference for all HTML elements, These pages are often very technical, but can be useful when you find yourself stumped

(Sep. 22) Abundance and Openness

One of the key features of the web is its immenseness. We will discuss how this genuinely new circumstance transforms the work of the historian.

Lecture Videos:

  • Abundance and Openness
  • CSS 2: The Box Model
  • CSS 3: Layouts with Flex and Grid

Readings:

In-Class Activity: More HTML + CSS

Data Driven History

(Sep. 29) Distant Reading 1

Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees was a manifesto of sorts for a data-driven literary history. We’ll discuss the first 2/3s of this book before turning to some practical skills

Readings:

In-Class Activity: Javascript variables & functions

(Oct. 06) Distant Reading 2: Are Texts Data?

More Moretti, and some criticisms

Readings:

In-Class Activity: Javascript objects and DOM manipulation

(Oct. 13) Text as Data, History as Algorithm

Note: we may need to push this up We’ll explore some more playful extrapolations about the future of data-driven history.

Readings:

Recommended Readings:

In-Class Activity: Javascript and the DOM

(Oct. 20) Computing Concepts & Assignment Help Catch-up day

Maps, Visualization, and History

(Oct. 27) Spatial History

Contemporary “Historical GIS” and web-based geohistory projects descend from an illustrious lineage of qualitative and quantitative “spatial histories”. In class today we explore what happens when “place” takes centre stage in a historical analysis.

Readings:

In-Class Activity: Mapping with Google

(Nov. 03) Maps Online

Maps and visiaulizations are neat and all, but contemporary web-based geohistory allows historical maps to interact powerfully with other data sources. We’ll explore some possibilities!

Readings:

  • “Railways and Agriculture in France and Great Britain” in Toward Spatial Humanities
  • “The Development, Persistence, and Change of Racial Segregation in U.S. Urban Areas, 1880-2010” in Toward Spatial Humanities
  • google earth tutorial: https://geospatialhistorian.wordpress.com/lessons/lesson-1/
In-Class Activity: GIS

(Nov. 10) NO CLASS DURING READING WEEK

(Nov. 17) Visualization

Of course, maps and graphs are in a certain sense part of a much broader field of rhetorical visualizations: attempts to convey quantitative information through pictures in an effort to convince the reader.

Readings:

In-Class Activity: Reading visualizations

Oral History, Crowdsourcing, and the Promise of the Public Sphere

(Nov. 24) What’s Special about Oral History

Oral History has a long tradition; we explore its roots and peculiarities, and

Readings:

In-Class Activity: Popcorn.js

(Dec. 01) Project Planning & Citizen History

We’ll discuss some project management techniques that should help you with your final proposal

Oral History & Remix Culture

Once oral histories migrate to the web, they, like maps, can interact with other kinds of data.

If we’re ahead of schedule, we’ll watch Harlan County USA in class.

Readings:

(Dec. 08) Wrap-up!

No reading!

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Joel Wrossley of the University of Washington and Thomas J Bradley of Algonquin Collegee for help and inspiration in assignments and grading strategy. Various pieces of the course have been inspired by other teachers over the year, and have benefited from feedback within the Github Education Community.