I taught a DH class with twelve graduate students this spring. It was my first time teaching DH since fall 2020, and a lot has changed in the field since then. My own approach has become much more hands-on, with a lot less by way of "what is DH?" theorizing. I also added new units on mapping and Storymaps/ArcGIS, a crash course introducing Python, and a couple of sessions to discuss the implications of generative AI.
It may be a bit tedious to navigate, but I opted to include the 'long-form' syllabus below the jump, with lots of links to individual projects and articles alongside descriptions of some of the hands-on exercises we did in this course.
Syllabus
English 498: Introduction to Digital Humanities
Spring 2025
Professor: Amardeep Singh (“Deep”)
Email: amsp@lehigh.edu
Brief Description:
This course introduces students to the emerging field of digital humanities scholarship with an emphasis on social justice-oriented projects and practices. The course will begin with a pair of foundational units that aim to define digital humanities as a field, and also to frame what’s at stake. How might the advent of digital humanities methods impact how we read and interpret literary texts? How is technology reshaping the role of the Humanities in our cultural conversations more broadly? We’ll also explore a series of thematic clusters, including “Race and the Digital Humanities,” “Postcolonial/Decolonial DH,” “Archives, Editions, and Collections,” and “Texts as Data.” Along the way, we’ll explore specific Digital Humanities projects that exemplify those areas, and play and learn with digital tools and do some basic coding using Python. The final weeks of the course will be devoted to collaborative, student-driven projects. No prior programming or web development experience is necessary, but a willingness to experiment and ‘break things’ is essential to the learning process envisioned in this course.
The final project may be a conventional analytical paper or a digital project – either a custom-built corpus (with brief explanatory essay), a custom-built mapping project (perhaps using ArcGIS), or a Scalar collection, or something else that you would like to produce. If you do a digital project, I would strongly recommend consulting with me early and scoping out the resources you might need to make it a reality. The work should be “equivalent” to the amount of time you might spend on a 15 page paper.
Jan 21 | Intro.: Matthew Kirschenbaum, “What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?” Roopika Risam, “Introduction: the Postcolonial Digital Record” (from New Digital Worlds) Keywords/definitions: Digital Humanities, Postcolonial Digital Humanities (Risam), “Digital Canonical Humanities” (Risam); “Digital Cultural Record” (Risam); Digital Humanities vs. Humanities Computing (Kirschenbaum); Timeline of DH emergence (Kirschenbaum); Role of institutions like NEH (Kirschenbaum); Emphasis on Praxis (“More hack, less yak”) Getting our feet wet (20-30 minutes): Google Ngram viewer. Set for “English Fiction.” Recommend “Smoothing” set to 0. https://books.google.com/ngrams Try: “Mars,moon,rocket,stars” (testing emergence of science fiction. Make sure Corpus is set to FICTION.) Try: “colored girl,black girl,black woman,colored woman” Try: “queer, homosexual, lesbian” Try: "working father, working mother" (for this one, turn the corpus to "English" -- includes non-fiction writing. try limiting 1900-2019) Try: "lady doctor, female doctor, woman doctor" (again, using the corpus "English" -- try from 1850-2019) Try: "public humanities, digital humanities, medical humanities, environmental humanities" (settings: 2000-2019; English corpus; smoothing set to 0) Devise your own queries. Think carefully about setting parameters to help the data make a compelling point about how language use is changing/has changed. Get screen captures & share with the class on CourseSite Forum. |
Jan 23 | Digital/Human
Risam, “Chapter One: The Stakes of Postcolonial Digital Humanities” Ted Underwood, “Preface: the Curve of the Literary Horizon” from Distant Horizons Brandon Walsh: “Distant Reading” Keywords: Quantitative vs. Digital; Distant Reading vs. Close Reading; “Slaughterhouse of Literature”/”Great Unread”; Metadata Demo in Corpus of African American literature created by Deep: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ucvCcPLUF_ka4ciPsgjN75VXFk2fJj9A?usp=sharing 1. Download all of these files: Download the corpus onto your computer. 2. Here is an explanation I put together a few years ago describing what this corpus is and how it was constructed (now a little dated – the collection is now significantly larger than it was in 2020): https://www.electrostani.com/2020/07/announcing-open-access-african-american.html 3. Open the Metadata spreadsheet file in Excel or Google Sheets. You can find it at the Google Drive link above. Use "Keywords" to find some texts that look like they might be on topics of interest to you. 4. Do some searches through the corpus. Try searching for: Liberia; Lynching (or Lynch, Lynched); Jamaica; India; Mulatto; Detective; Explorer; Passing; Obi (or Obeah -- an Afro-Caribbean syncretic religious practice); Hayti or Haiti Sometimes the hits that come up might lead us to want to actually read certain books to find out more about how those themes are explored. There are more advanced things we can do with search (especially looking for “collocate” words -- pairs of words that show up together); we’ll play with these shortly as well using Voyant Tools. 5. What jumps out as you look at these materials for the first time? Any surprises? Any patterns you notice so far? Perhaps: Skim a few pages of a text at random -- does anything jump out at you? How does the author identify (or not) the race of their characters? Find any interesting passages? More broadly, at this early phase, what do you think we could do with a corpus of texts by African American authors? What questions might we want to *ask*? |
Jan 28 | Politics & Terminology in Literary Studies M.H. Abrams, “Canon of Literature” from A Glossary of Literary Terms (CourseSite) Other Keywords Entries (read a selection according to interest): “Black Arts Movement,” “Feminist Criticism,” “Harlem Renaissance,” “New Criticism,” “New Historicism,” “Periods of American Lierature,” “Periods of English Literature,” “Postcolonial Studies,” “Queer Theory” Keywords from this session: Canon, Canonicity, Canon-formation; Harold Bloom’s 26 essential authors of the Western Canon; “Anxiety of Authorship”; Gynocriticism; DH Projects to explore on your own: Walt Whitman Archive (open access) Charles W. Chesnutt Digital Archive Emily Dickinson Electronic Archive Orlando: Women's Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present (Gated resource – access via library database or EZProxy login) Women Writers Online (Gated resource) What features does each archives have? How large is the collection? (Do they say?) Who are the archives intended for? What might you use this archive to do? How would you rate their navigability? Does the archive have features to invite exploration and learning for non-experts? Kick the tires a little – if you know anything about this author or topic, try and find something that might be relevant. (For instance, Walt Whitman was a gay man. How is that represented on the Walt Whitman Archive?) What features might be missing? Who made the archive – are editors named? Who funded the archive – are funders named? When was the archive created / compiled / last updated? |
1/30 | Digital Humanities and Literary History: Quantitative Approaches Ted Underwood, Chapter 1, “Do We Understand the Outlines of Literary History?” (From Distant Horizons) Franco Moretti, “Graphs,” from Graphs, Maps, Trees (2007. On CourseSite) Hands-on: Play with Voyant-Tools. Write a one-paragraph reflection on what you did, with observations. Also include any questions that came up from the experience. Please post these by noon on Thursday 1/30 Find a single text file or group of files in a folder. Could be from the corpus we looked at earlier. Upload it to Voyant and start exploring it. Word frequency Vocabulary density Collocates (what are these and why might they be important/ interesting?) See if you can figure out how to use the “Dreamscape” tool. [See more detail on CourseSite] We could also look at other Text Corpora: Colonial South Asian Literature (created by Deep) Other options: Corpora of texts by women (can you find some? Or make one of your own?) Detective Fiction Try this corpus of detective stories Gothic Fiction. There is a downloadable corpus of Gothic fiction here: https://github.com/CarolineWinter/gothicC19 (Ted Underwood’s chapter 2, which we’ll read for next week, will make it clear why we might want to look at these two particular genres in particular) Hands-on (demonstrated in class): Gendered Language Visualizer (using HathiTrust corpus of millions of books). Demonstrated in class on 1/30 https://tools.htrc.illinois.edu/genderviz/dataviz |
2/4 | Digital Humanities--Canonicity Amy Earhart, “Can Information Be Unfettered? Race and the New Digital Humanities Canon” (2012) Ted Underwood, David Bamman, and Sabrina Lee. “The Transformation of Gender in English-Language Fiction.” Journal of Cultural Analytics 3:2, 2018. https://culturalanalytics.org/article/11035-the-transformation-of-gender-in-english-language-fiction Hands-on: Open Syllabus Project: Who is being Taught? Assignment: Do test queries on http://opensyllabus.org You might have to set the search parameters to “English literature” to see specifically literature /English department results. Some of the names that might look unfamiliar (Diana Hacker, Andrea Lunsford) are authors of Composition textbooks that are widely assigned. African-American authors? Latinx authors? LGBTQ+ authors? Postcolonial authors? How would we quantify the results? How might we visualize them? (One strategy is to look for groupings of authors by genre or demographic groups and make comparisons.) See more on CourseSite Forum for 2/4 |
2/6 | Jessica Johnson [Johns Hopkins] visit to Lehigh (Humanities Center) Read: Jessica Marie Johnson, “Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads” (2018) Jessica Johnson talk – 4:30 pm (not required but strongly recommended [Update: this talk was rescheduled for April 24] “The Humanities Center and the English Department will co-host Jessica Johnson from Johns Hopkins. Dr. Johnson is an internationally recognized digital humanist and the Director of LifexCode: Digital Humanities Against Enclosure. She is PI of Black Beyond Data, a Black studies computational and social sciences lab. Dr. Johnson also co-directs the Diaspora Solidarities Lab, a Mellon-funded multi-university initiative applying Black feminist methodologies to collaborative scholarship.” Keywords for today: Data vs. Capta; “There is no bloodless data in Slavery’s archive” Mentioned in the Johnson piece: Database itself: https://www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/database History of the project (going back to the CD-ROM era) https://www.slavevoyages.org/about/about#history/1/en/ Understanding the Database https://www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/about#methodology/introduction/0/en/ A Brief Overview of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Introductory Maps https://www.slavevoyages.org/blog/tag/intro-maps Black Digital Humanities Projects – an Open List https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rZwucjyAAR7QiEZl238_hhRPXo5-UKXt2_KCrwPZkiQ/edit?tab=t.0 Take a few minutes and explore one or two that look interesting to you. (General question: is this a good way to catalogue and share information about these projects? What might be a better way?) |
2/11 | No new readings. In-class workshop for first assignment. A working session – come in prepared to share your work in progress in small groups (2-3), with Deep circulating and offering help. In Class: Deep walks through his project, African American Poetry: A Digital Anthology (a project several Lehigh grad students have worked on and contributed to) https://scalar.lehigh.edu/african-american-poetry-a-digital-anthology/index Also: Walk through “Responsible Datasets in Context,” a related project. https://www.responsible-datasets-in-context.com/ (See esp. Mission Statement) Also: Walk through Colored Conventions Project (Will be relevant to the Topic Modeling session at the Radical Love Conference on 2/14 at Lehigh) |
2/13 | Race and Technology/ Colored Conventions Digital Project and Social Network Analysis Readings: Ruha Benjamin, “The New Jim Code” from Race After Technology (Ruha Benjamin is giving a talk as part of the Marcon Institute’s Annual Radical Love Conference. Talk will be on Friday 2/14 at 6pm. You’ll need to pre-register) Also read: P. Gabrielle Foreman, “Black Organizing, Print Advocacy, and Collective Authorship: The Long History of the Colored Conventions Movement” from The Colored Conventions Movement Anthology Jim Casey, “Social Networks of the Colored Conventions, 1830-1864” from The Colored Conventions Movement Anthology Keywords: Colored Conventions; Frances E.W. Harper; Transcribe-athon; Named Entity Recognition, Natural Language Processing, Network Analysis First assignment due: Friday 2/14. Working with an idea or question from one of the DH scholars we have looked at, use a quantitative tool to try and answer that question. Equivalent to 5 pages (double-spaced) of writing (not including screenshots). |
2/18 | Using Quantitative Methods to Study the Publishing Industry, Prestige, and Canonicity Alexander Manshel, Laura McGrath, J.D. Porter, “Who Cares About Literary Prizes?” (2019) https://www.publicbooks.org/who-cares-about-literary-prizes/ Nika Mavrody, Laura B. McGrath, Nichole Nomura, Alexander Sherman, Stanford University Literary Lab, “Voice” (2021) https://post45.org/2021/04/voice/ Laura B. McGrath, “Books About Race: Commercial Publishing and Racial Formation in the 21st Century” New Literary History 53.4, Autumn 2022. Melanie Walsh, “Where is all the book data?” https://www.publicbooks.org/where-is-all-the-book-data/ Keywords for this session: “Vernacular criticism” Brief demo in class – network diagram of African American poetry (relevant to discussion from 2/13) https://scalar.lehigh.edu/aapada-periodical-poetry/index/ Compare to highly detailed & comprehensive network diagrams like “Six Degrees of Francis Bacon”: http://www.sixdegreesoffrancisbacon.com/?ids=10000473&min_confidence=60&type=network |
2/20 | Race and the Digital Humanities / Intro to Scalar Platform Kim Gallon, “Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities” (2016) Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: Introduction and Chapter 1 (on CourseSite) If you can just read the first 30 pages of the PDF, that should be sufficient. Keywords: “Technology of Recovery” Hands-on work in class: introduction to the Scalar content management system. Before class, please create an account on Lehigh’s instance of the Scalar platform. (Make sure you log in to register / create an account) Deep’s slides introducing the Scalar platform: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1T47WV7OejP6pbzUYKl1dJWYxtf1qV99q/edit#slide=id.p14 Working document with instructions for the hands-on project: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Oed4tUzXV5PY7_IvDPjsljxDsi7YnBHavZQFA-vtn3k/edit?usp=sharing I’ll be asking you to add pages to this brand-new project: https://scalar.lehigh.edu/virginia-woolfs-essays-and-short-fiction-a-collection-/index?path=index& |
2/25 | DH and the Ethos of Generosity. Also: Hands-on mapping work. Gabrielle Foreman, “Writing About ‘Slavery’? This Might Help” Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Generous Thinking: A Radical Plan to Save the University (2019). Preface and Introduction Emily McGinn, Digital Humanities’ Ethos of Sharing (2024) https://blogs.library.jhu.edu/2024/10/digital-humanities-ethos-of-sharing/ Brandon Walsh and Amanda Visconti, “Building Community and Generosity in the Context of Graduate Education” (2021) Keywords: DH’s Ethos of Generosity; “Generous Thinking” Hands-on work on creating custom maps. I’ll create this as a CourseSite Forum for Tuesday. --Using Named Entity Recognition to get Names and generate Maps from a corpus (or text) of your choosing. Can be as small as a short story. A good example to play with might be Nella Larsen’s short novel, Passing (plain text can be downloaded here) [Update from March: We found a better way to do this – using Recogito] Can use an online tool like this one: https://textanalysisonline.com/spacy-named-entity-recognition-ner (this site will only let you do a few pages at a time) Or download a simple piece of software here: https://nlp.stanford.edu/software/CRF-NER.html#Download Goal: Create a list or possibly a CSV (Excel/ Google Sheets) file with just Location names. If you used the first site above, you’ll have a list with a lot of different categories of entities. The ones that say “/GPE” are the geographical locations. (One reason to do it as a multi-column table is if you want to do something more complex than simply enumerate locations. For instance, column 1 could be locations, and column 2 could the context in the story where the location was mentioned – along the lines of “James Baldwin in Paris”) This file can be uploaded to Google Maps (MyMaps) or Storymaps. See if you can create a custom map of locations you extracted from your chosen text using mymaps.google.com See Deep’s sample map here to get an idea of what you might be aiming for: Alternative approach to this assignment: Voyant-Tools has the Dreamscape tool, which has embedded NER and mapping. However, it often needs disambiguation (Athens, Greece, or Athens, Georgia? York, PA or York, England?). If you replace all of the ambiguous location names in a given text and then upload that ‘cleaned’ version to Voyant, does it produce a more accurate result? Again, you might find a short story is more manageable for this assignment than a full novel. |
2/27 | Mapping, part 2. Vincent Brown, “A Slave Revolt in Jamaica” (2013) http://revolt.axismaps.com/project.html http://revolt.axismaps.com/map/ (The map itself was not working when I clicked on it on 2/25. I wrote Vincent a note to ask him if he could fix it on 2/26. That said, even if the maps aren’t able to fixed in time, we can still get a sense of what they should look like from the Vimeo video link. You can also look at pp. 27-29 of the PDF for an illustration of how the maps help tell the story of the rebellion.) Readings from Vincent Brown, Tacky’s Revolt (2020): “Prologue,” “Chapter 4: Tacky’s Revolt” (CourseSite) Another case study. What kind of research did Vincent Brown need to do to put this project together? What technical skills might it have taken? What were his sources? What is the historical gap in knowledge he was aiming to address? (Hint: you can do most of what he did now with Storymaps, including the animated map built on a historical source. Storymaps did not exist when he made this project.) Kate Hennessey (former Lehigh MA student!), “ "I Felt the Fight in Me" Mapping the Life, Labor, and Rediscovery of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911)” https://storymaps.com/stories/e83a0104b66f41fda5859bdd03a504f9 This is a great Storymaps project Kate put together mostly in summer 2024, using funds from in-house department funding. Read as much as you can – but be sure to scroll down to look at the map (hint: zoom out to see other locations outside of Philadelphia). Introduction to Mapping Software / methods: Storymaps / ArcGIS Jeremy Mack’s how to use Storymaps at Lehigh https://wordpress.lehigh.edu/jsm4/gis-at-lehigh/story-maps/ https://lu.maps.arcgis.com/home/index.html More general intro to Storymaps: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/5e7edc31d9de49a8a5241ad6ec3934c6 A storymaps demo designed to introduce key elements / features of Storymaps https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/e5dba7e5043b419099737b062111f512 Another cool Storymaps example – Jonathan Harker’s voyage in Dracula: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/ec9db57231e344f19c3f5199e2efa9a3 (A much simpler version than Kate Hennessey’s, but well-designed and structured to tell a story) Hands-on option will be next week as a CourseSite forum post. Storymaps has been a popular new DH platform, with a lot of visual / multimedia flexibility. You can take some type of mapping project and embed it into a narrative and explanatory framework that shows why it matters & guides readers to the main points you want them to get out of it. (Optional / Relevant to topics discussed on 2/25 re: mapping Woolf. This will be mainly of interest to folks who were in the Woolf class in the fall. The second link below is a great example of an effective use of MyMap. The first uses a historical map very effectively) Melba Cuddy-Keane, “Mapping Mrs. Dalloway: London as a Networked City” (this has not apparently published online as a digital project, but note the way she uses the historical map here) https://utoronto.scholaris.ca/items/eae7ef0b-4e89-4588-9dec-abdc92b10872 Londonist, “Mapping Virginia Woolf’s novels” (uses Google MyMap effectively for 10 Woolf novels – no short stories or essays) https://londonist.com/london/books-and-poetry/mapped-all-virginia-woolf-s-novels |
3/4 | Introduction to Sentiment Analysis / Hands-on Component Sentiment analysis is a technique for analyzing the emotional ‘levels’ of texts. It’s most commonly used in the business world to analyze public sentiment about brands and products (“do consumers like the new Post Malone Oreos?”). With literary texts, scholars have been interested in using it to take the mood of individual works and break them down sentence by sentence to chart the emotional rise and fall of works of fiction. The idea is that the algorithm is crude and sometimes wrong looking at an individual sentence, but at scale it might tell us something interesting. There are online tools for doing sentiment analysis, but these are pretty limited. A few years ago I made a step by step guide for non-coders for doing this in the R programming language. As an optional hands-on exercise for Thursday 3/6, you could try follow my instructions and see if you could get it to work. (Or you could use an online tool & accept the length limitation.) See CourseSite for the prompt (for 3/6). In class on Tuesday, we might do a ‘hand code’ exercise with a short passage from a 20th century novel – and compare our coding of sentiment against what the Syuzhet software says about the same passage. I will bring instructions about this & we’ll try it live in class – you don’t need to prepare anything for it. Simone Rebora, “Sentiment Analysis in Literary Studies. A Critical Survey” (2023) https://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/17/2/000691/000691.html Do your best with this overview of the field of Sentiment Analysis. Some parts are pretty technical; in our conversations, we’ll probably focus on the concepts and big picture questions. Hoyeol Kim, “Sentiment Analysis: Limits and Progress of the Syuzhet Package and Its Lexicons” (2022) https://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/16/2/000612/000612.html Example: sentiment analysis in Colored Conventions Project [Jeremy Mack’s slides from Douglass Day. Will share these on CourseSite. See slides 58-69 especially, focusing on using the NRC lexicon with Colored Conventions Project documents as a dataset.] Amardeep Singh, “Syuzhet for Dummies” (a blog post) (this is really more relevant to the CourseSite assignment for Thursday’s class 3/6) https://www.electrostani.com/2015/10/syuzhet-sentiment-analysis-of-novels.html My blog post is partly a how-to – but also an illustration of where depending too much on math we don’t fully understand can be a problem. One option for Thursday 3/6 will be to try the how-to. |
3/6 | Latina/o/e/x Communities and the Digital Cultural Record Hands on exercise – CourseSite Forum post – due today. Try to start a Storymaps or follow my step-by-step explainer on Sentiment Analysis. Maira E. Álvarez and Sylvia Fernández Quintanilla, “Borderlands Archives Cartography Bridging Personal, Political, and Geographical Borderlands” Bringing together mapping, archiving, and postcolonial digital humanities concepts for a project with a complex, binational and bilingual framing and design. Their project was bult in Carto – a GIS tool that might be thought as an alternate to Storymaps / ArcGIS. Gabriela Baeza Ventura logo , Lorena Gauthereau and Carolina Villarroel, “Recovering the US Hispanic literary heritage: A case study on US Latina/o archives and digital humanities” (2019) (PDF here) This essay introduces a large-scale, longstanding print archive project that has been digitized and is designed to be accessed via a subscriber database via university library subscriptions (EBSCOhost). Lehigh does not subscribe to the database they’ve created, I don’t think. They also allude to various digital humanities projects. There are small-scale (individual author) projects that are published, but the larger-scale / general interest project they allude to does not appear to have ever been published. (I would argue that it’s still needed.) DH Project examples: Borderlands Archives Cartography (mentioned in one of the articles) Gabriela Baeza Ventura and Carolina Villarroel Puerto Rican Literature Project Sylvia Fernandez Quintanilla, “Gender Violence at the Border (1993-1998) |
3/18 | Decolonial / Indigenous Communities and the Digital Humanities David Gaertner, “Closed, Open, Stopped: Indigenous Sovereignty and the Possibility of Decolonial Digital Humanities” (CourseSite) Jennifer Guiliano and Carolyn Heitman, “Indigenizing the Digital Humanities: Challenges, Questions, and Research Opportunities” (Talk given at the Digital Humanities conference. Published abstract. 2017) (CourseSite) Kenneth M. Price, “Edition, Project, Database, Archive, Thematic Research Collection: What's in a Name?” One of the editors of the Walt Whitman Archive, considering terminology. Just a good general piece helping to think through what we’re making and what to call it. Sites and Projects to explore / discuss. 1. Mentioned in Gaertner article, “The People and the Text.” https://thepeopleandthetext.ca/ Check out the bio of E. Pauline Johnson. https://thepeopleandthetext.ca/featured-authors/EPaulineJohnson 2. Mukurtu platform for managing / gating culturally sensitive materials. (There are images and texts that are important in indigenous spiritual traditions that outsiders aren’t supposed to see. How to balance the power of digitizing and sharing those materials – but only for enrolled members of the tribe? When is open access desirable, and when might it not be?) 3. Joy Harjo, “Living Nations, Living Words” https://www.loc.gov/ghe/cascade/index.html?appid=be31c5cfc7614d6680e6fa47be888dc3 (A beautiful Storymaps project produced by the Library of Congress with the curation of Joy Harjo, a member of the Muscogee nation in Oklahoma. Take some time and read some of the poetry by the 47 featured poets on this project) 4. IDA Treaties Explorer (Indigenous Digital Archive mentioned in one of the articles appears to be defunct) At the link above, if you click on “Cessions,” there are some really interesting maps you can get to (they used OpenStreetMap for the maps on this site) https://digitreaties.org/treaties/cessions/ Example of a student Scalar project: 5. Hannah Provost (former Lehigh MA student), “Mapping Indigenous Poetry of North America: https://scalar.usc.edu/works/native-american-poetry-of-the-long-19th-century/index This project was put together for a class project in fall 2020 (in the middle of the pandemic. I thought it was very well done. On 3/17/25 – I tried to load Hannah’s site, but it was hanging (perhaps the central Scalar.usc.edu site might be a bit slow / broken today?) |
3/20 | Archival Paradigms. (Also introducing Postcolonial/ South Asian Archives) Terry Cook, “Evidence, Memory, Identity, and Community: Four Shifting Archival Paradigms” (2013) (CourseSite) Influential article tracking the shift from institutional (government) archives to community archives. Not directly about DH, but seems relevant for DH projects. Amy E. Earhart, “The Era of the Archive” (Traces of the Old, Uses of the New, Chapter 2). Puthiya Purayil Sneha, “Alternative Histories of Digital Humanities Tracing the Archival Turn” (2022) Highlight links from the Sneha piece: Indian Memory Project https://www.indianmemoryproject.com/ People’s Archive of Rural India: https://ruralindiaonline.org/en I’m particularly interested in their Adivasi (tribal) page. https://ruralindiaonline.org/articles?categoryIds=431 Here’s a particular story about elephant trackers https://ruralindiaonline.org/article/walking-with-elephants-in-udanti-sitanadi-tiger-reserve 1947 Partition Archive https://in.1947partitionarchive.org/ Hands-on/Forum assignment for this week. Text Processing with Regular Expressions. This is a method for cleaning up messy texts that come from scanned PDFs – a common situation when building various digital resources, including digital archives like the kinds of texts we’ve been looking at. I created another step-by-step guide with quite a number of examples, and a kind of overview of a set of commands you can use to automate certain text processing tasks, called Regular Expressions. If you get good at doing this, you will be thinking like a coder – and we could think of this as learning a bit of coding through the back door. https://www.electrostani.com/2020/08/text-processing-101-digital-humanities.html I will post a prompt on CourseSite, connected to a small folder of texts you could work on. |
3/25 | Global / Postcolonial DH (Archives focus) Roopika Risam, “Colonial Violence and the Postcolonial Digital Archive” (Chapter 2 of her book New Digital Worlds, 2019. CourseSite) Violence of the colonial archive; omissions of the colonial world in projects like NINES; evolution of DH as a praxis-oriented field (“hack vs. yack”); Early Caribbean Digital Archive; Bichitra: Tagore Online Variorum Domenico Fiormonte, Paola Ricaurte, and Sukanta Chaudhuri, “Introduction: Global Debates in the Digital Humanities” (2022) Writing/thinking about DH during a global pandemic; Global data divide; The Knowledge GAP; Importance of Open Access to the Global South; infrastructure of DH organizations like ADHO; “Global Outlook: DH” Dibyadyuti Roy and Nirmala Menon, “No “Making,” Not Now Decolonizing Digital Humanities in South Asia” from Global Debates in the Digital Humanities (2022) Digital Humanities Alliance of India (DHAI) → DHARTI; Is “Digital Humanities” relevant in India?; Significance of Indian IT industry for Indian DH work; Overwhelming STEM emphasis of Indian academia; Caste/gender dynamics associated with “making”; Do It For Me vs Do It Yourself Michelle Caswell, Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work, “Introduction: Community Archives, Assimilation, Integration, or Resistance?” (2021) (CourseSite) South Asian American Digital Archive “The Problem” (five-part series on civil rights on SAADA) Optional (if you’re interested in quantitative / textual analysis in the South Asian context w/ South Asian languages): Sayan Bhattacharyya, “Epistemically Produced Invisibility” Sayan Bhattacharyya, “Words in a world of scaling-up: Epistemic normativity and text as data,” Sanglap 4.1(Sep, 2017) (CourseSite) (He mentions this article as a precursor in “Epistemically Produced Invisibility”) |
3/27 | May start with continued conversation about readings from 3/25 if we don’t get to everything on Tuesday. In-Class Project Workshop. Consultations with peers and Deep Project Due 4/7. More details TBA |
4/1 | Data Feminism Lauren Klein and Catherine D’Ignazio, Data Feminism: Introduction: Why Data Science Needs Feminism” (2020) Klein and D’Ignazio, Data Feminism: Chapter 1: “The Power Chapter” Joy Buolamwini, “How I’m Fighting Bias in Algorithms” (YouTube video 2017) (mentioned in the Klein/D’Ignazio introduction) (9 minutes) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UG_X_7g63rY UC Berkeley Library, “Women of Hidden Figures” (mentioned in the Klein/D’Ignazio introduction) https://exhibits.lib.berkeley.edu/spotlight/women-who-figure/feature/women-of-hidden-figures |
4/3 | Data Feminism, Day 2 Klein and D’Ignazio, Data Feminism: Chapter 3: “On Rational, Scientific, Objective Viewpoints from Mythical, Imaginary, Impossible Standpoints” Klein and D’Ignazio, Data Feminism: Chapter 4: “What Gets Counted Counts” Responsible Datasets in Context Mission Statement: https://www.responsible-datasets-in-context.com/mission.html I would be curious to hear your thoughts and questions about this mission statement & how it relates to Data Feminism. Finally, I might suggest we use the dataset below as an example to query using the concepts from Data Feminism: This was a dataset I created (with Kate Hennessey's help) last year in connection with the "Responsible Datasets" project. One of the challenges we faced was how to classify gender with often very limited information about authorial identity. The data has a lot of uncertainty, and is messier than it might look... I could explain my rationale for us doing it as we did, but I am also open to criticism and critique. |
4/8 | A work of contemporary theory: Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy, or the Style of Too Late Capitalism (PDF of selected chapters on CourseSite). The opening sections might seem a little bit abstract; the “Circulation” chapter draws quite a bit on Marxist theory. However, stick with it for the “Imaginary” and “Writing” chapters, both of which I think make excellent and important points about the effect of digital media on our minds as well as on our social institutions. |
4/10 | Can We Learn A Little Coding? Deep’s guide for these sessions Crash Course in Basic Python Using Google Colab with Melanie Walsh’s textbook on Cultural Analytics and Python (2021). https://melaniewalsh.github.io/Intro-Cultural-Analytics/welcome.html She references a thoughtful blog post by Miriam Posner regarding the often male-dominated “culture of coding” that is sometimes not ideal in some DH circles. My takeaway is that learning a little bit of coding has a lot of potential benefits, but we should approach it with humility, patience, and acceptance if some learners decide it’s not their thing. https://miriamposner.com/blog/some-things-to-think-about-before-you-exhort-everyone-to-code/ See Deep’s intro / guide to using Melanie Walsh’s textbook with Colab (easier to get started with this than with the Jupyter Notebooks approach. Does not require installing any software on your own machines): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ugh3aZeoitRTwGM3nNT5c8qqfEW_73SP2ipYslhZnxs/edit?usp=sharing In the Walsh textbook, focus on: “How to Interact With This Book” (read in advance) “Course Schedule” (read in advance, explore some of their recommended readings if possible) In class together. Hands-on: “The Command Line” (skip some sections – see my Google Doc guide) “Python Basics” (focus on just the first three sections, up to “Anatomy of a Python Script.” If you have time and interest in reading more, go for it. ) |
4/15 | Coding, Continued. Deep’s guide for these sessions Continuing with some basic Python. Focus for today: the Network Analysis Sentiment Analysis chapters. Walsh’s textbook has several sections that overlap with topics we’ve covered before, including sentiment analysis (under Text Analysis) and mapping. The Sentiment Analysis example here uses the VADER method, not Matthew Jockers’ Syuzhet, so the results it would give would likely be a bit different from Syuzhet. https://melaniewalsh.github.io/Intro-Cultural-Analytics/05-Text-Analysis/04-Sentiment-Analysis.html VADER is designed for social media scraping more than for literary texts, though at the bottom of this page she puts it to use on a short story. Since we haven’t done much hands-on work with social network analysis / making network diagrams this spring, I thought it might be good for us to try that chapter together. (We did talk about network analysis a bit with an essay by Jim Casey on the Colored Conventions Project earlier in the term.) https://melaniewalsh.github.io/Intro-Cultural-Analytics/06-Network-Analysis/00-Network-Analysis.html The textbook will be working through an example from the Game of Thrones social network (where someone worked through the Game of Thrones novels and analyzed how connected various characters are based on their co-appearance in the text). : https://melaniewalsh.github.io/Intro-Cultural-Analytics/06-Network-Analysis/01-Network-Analysis.html But there are other sample datasets for network analysis / social network graphing here. These, for instance, are derived from metadata from the Modernist Journals Project: https://github.com/melaniewalsh/sample-social-network-datasets I might suggest we look at the Dora Marsden feminist network data here: Making our own CSV files with node and edge information from scratch is not so easy; to automate it would require we do NER on the text to identify character names (and going through the text by hand could be very time-intensive). Then, we look for instances where characters co-appear in the same sentence. With repetition, the strength of the connection might grow stronger. I will share some of my own messy hand-made datasets along these lines – Nella Larsen’s Passing, The Hunger Games, and Dracula. |
4/17 | What About AI? Preparing for AI Workshop on 4/25-4/26 at Lehigh. PMLA Special Issue on AI in Literary Studies, with essays by a group of DH scholars. Lauren Goodlad, “Humanities in the Loop” (editor’s introduction to the new scholarly journal, Critical AI), 2023 What do we mean by AI? How did generative AI based on large language models emerge? What do terms like “machine learning” and “deep learning” have to do with it? Why are tech leaders so enamored with “Artificial General Intelligence?” (Does that even mean anything?) Matthew Kirschenbaum and Rita Raley, “AI and the University as a Service” (12 page PDF) Big picture piece asking what role literary studies and literary critics will have in the era of Generative AI. What will the role of English professors be? How will big umbrella organizations like MLA and CCCC react to Generative AI? Assumes AI is here to stay: how will our job change? They’re thinking of looming job losses to AI in white collar workforce – but in the humanities, we’re used to this (our work has already been thought of as “useless” and “superfluous”). Aarthi Vadde, “Inside and Outside the Language Machines” (6 page PDF) Second half of essay brings up some interesting case studies – thoughts from the creator of a creative writing GenAI called Sudowrite; the strange conjunction of poststructuralist theory idea of citationality with the design of GenAI/LLMs; some interesting textual experiments that speak to the present moment. Optional: Matthew Kirschenbaum, “Again Theory” (mentioned in the Vadde piece – conjunction of Generative AI with poststructuralist theory) Optional: Vauhini Vara, “Ghosts” (also mentioned in the Aarthi Vadde article). https://www.thebeliever.net/ghosts/ |
4/22 | What About AI? 1. (15 minutes in class) A brief follow-up on our Python unit – a look at a work-in-progress by Matthew Kollmer, a Ph.D. student at UIUC, working on data on lynchings in the U.S. (3000+ Black people; 900 White people). There’s also an interesting AI component here: https://matthewkollmer.com/09_interactive_codebook.html https://github.com/MatthewKollmer/us_lynching_victims https://github.com/MatthewKollmer/works-in-progress/tree/main/vrt_work/us-lynching-victims The cool thing about this is, he shows the code he uses to work with his data (3000+ CSV files). He is able to map the incidents of racial violence, measure it over time (showing a peak around 1921), and analyze the coverage in more than 200,000 newspaper clippings covering the incidents, assisted by a Large Language Model (generative AI) – BERT. 2. (15 minutes) Aarthi Vadde, “Inside and Outside the Language Machines” (carried over from last time) 3. (45 minutes) Melanie Walsh, Anna Preus, Maria Antoniak, “Sonnet or Not, Bot? Poetry Evaluation for Large Models and Datasets” (2024) (36 page PDF. Article is 11 pages; rest is appendices) https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.914.pdf Repository linked with article: https://github.com/maria-antoniak/poetry-eval Includes Python scripts, and 1400 public domains poems Cited in the article: What’s in my Big Data? A toolkit for looking under the hood of generative AI – what’s inside of the large language models? Requires some Python commands/installs to use. For now, just look at the way the project is described. https://github.com/allenai/wimbd?tab=readme-ov-file Note: Melanie and Anna will be on campus on Friday 4/25 for the Humanities AI conference event. Come meet them & say hi! Hands-on component: trying different sorts of DH-related queries with Generative AI. What works? What doesn’t? When might it be useful? What about using generative AI to help with analytical and creative writing? Is it always “wrong”? (Is it ever useful?) Alternative AI models to try: Allen AI – non-profit, open source model: Sudowrite [Not assigned – maybe next Time: Melanie Walsh, Anna Preus, “Does ChatGPT Have a Poetic Style?” https://melaniewalsh.org/assets/pdf/ChatGPT-Poetic-Style-CHR2024.pdf |
4/24 | Final projects presentations (5-6 minute presentation; 5 minutes of discussion for each project). First six volunteers |
4/29 | Final projects presentations (5-6 minutes of presentation, 5 minutes of discussion for each project). Second six volunteers |
5/1 | Last day of class: wrap-up and review |
5/8 | Final projects due |