Skip to Content
Instructor's note: This schedule will be a work in progress during November and December 2010. Prospective students are encouraged to contact me if there are specific topics or materials they would like to see covered.

 

Week 1: Architecture and Plumbing

January 12, 2007

Introductions

  1. What do we call you?
  2. Where are you from?
  3. What brings you here?
  4. Degree program, area of specialty
  5. Where do you want it to take you?
  6. Research interests?
  7. Digital tools you use: Word processing, databases, electronic communication, email, instant messaging, website, blog . . .
  8. Areas of the course that most interest you?
  9. Project ideas?

Compare syllabi

 

Week 2: Varieties of Digital History

January 19, 2007

Reading

Cohen, Daniel J., and Roy Rosenzweig. Digital history : a guide to gathering, preserving, and presenting the past on the Web. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006: "Introduction," Chapter 1: "Exploring the History Web"
Vernon Takeshita, Tangled Web: The Limits of Historical Analysis on the Internet
Phil Agre, "Designing Genres for New Media: Social, Economic, and Political Contexts"

Creative

If you haven't already, set up a blog. You can use any system you want. The folks at CHNM recommend: Wordpress, Typepad, Blogger. Once you've set up your blog, e-mail me the URL, and I'll add you to the course blogroll.

Groupwork

Website Surveys
Look over the following sites, and pick four on which to spend a significant amount of time. Make selections that help you think about "genre" in digital history.

Write and post to your blog an evaluation (500-1000 words) of one these sites, using the Journal of American History evaluation guidelines and, where relevant, drawing on some of the week's reading. Note especially the questions in the key areas of content, form, audience/use, and new media. The review assignments from our Jan. 12 meeting are in parentheses.

Optional

Reverse-engineer one of these websites. Cohen and Rosenzweig, Digital History Chapters 2 & 4 can get you started. Some things to think about:
  • Are the pages static or dynamic? If dynamic, what kind of scripting language(s) are being used?
  • How (if at all) does the site use CSS?
  • What kinds of multimedia elements are used?
  • How well does the navigation function?
  • Is there a database backend somewhere? How do you know?

 

Week 3: The Future of Historical Narrative

January 26, 2007

Reading

David Staley, Computers, Visualization, and History (2003), introduction and chapter 4, ER.
Keith Jenkins, "Introduction: on being open about our closures," in Jenkins, ed., The Postmodern History Reader (1997), ER.
George Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Amplified, updated version of Chapter One (1996). (Just read "Hypertextual Derrida, Poststructuralist Nelson?"; "The Definition of Hypertext and Its History as a Concept:" and "Predictions.")
William Cronon, "A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narratives," Journal of American History, 78:4 (March, 1992), 1347-1376
 

Creative

Look up a historical topic of your choice in Wikipedia, Encyclopedia Britannica, and in one of the following internet search engines: Google, Yahoo, Excite, About.com, Alta-Vista, or Ask.com. Compare three digital treatments of your topic with a more conventional scholarly source, such as a journal article, monograph, or textbook. Use your blog to reflect on how the strengths and weaknesses of these resources illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of our core readings.

The undergraduate exercise I mentioned in class can be found at http://www.indiana.edu/~wfh/exercises/1definitions.html. I followed this up with an in class small group exercise using this worksheet.

Optional

Frameworks: "Forum on Hypertext Scholarship: AQ as Web-Zine: Responses to AQ's Experimental Online Issue," American Quarterly (June 1999), commentaries by Roy Rosenzweig, James Castonguay, Thomas Thurston, M. David Westbrook, Louise Krasniewicz and Michael Blitz, Susan Smulyan, Christopher P Wilson, and Randall Bass, all available online through Project Muse.

 

Week 4: Databases, Small

February 2 , 2007

Assignment Overview

Do the following tasks in the order you think most likely to help you figure out how to use a database in your own work. Your blog this week should comment on the resources you found most helpful for this undertaking, or which you think most likely to be of use to others. Please include links to any internet resources you explored. The diagram assigned under "creative work" can be done with paper & pencil.

Read

  1. An article or monograph from your field, looking specifically for clues as to how the historian collected and organized information. Questions to ask as you read include:

    • Do you think a database was used? Why/Why not?
    • What kind of impact do (or could) digital tools have on this history?
    • Could (or did) they improve the piece?
    • Would (or did) the use of digital resources alter the kind of questions being asked?
    • If a database or other new media are already employed, could the work have been done without them?

  2. Additional models of historical writing that used digital tools to organize and analyze sources. Read as much as needed to develop ideas for your own project. The following are examples from my field:

  3. A resource that will introduce you to the technical concepts and language of database development. In class we mentioned:

Creative Work

  1. Identify a source from your own research that you think would benefit from organization in a database.

  2. Investigate at least three efforts to digitize similar sources. I've listed below some of the resources we discussed in class. You are encouraged to add other examples from your own web searches.

    • For diaries:
    • For newspapers:
      • Go to the IUB Libraries home page and search their site for "newspapers." The Early American Newspapers & African American Newspapers (Accessible Archives) will be among the top results, but there are many others.
      • Compare these with Lexis Nexis.
      • Find another example on the web.

  3. Make a diagram depicting the different kinds of information found in your source, and the different ways in which they might connect to each other. Bring this to class.

Week 5:   Databases, Large    Social Science as Resource and Model

February  9, 2007

Guest Moderator:   Professor George Alter

Read (see instructor email for articles)

Alter, George. "Theories of Fertility Decline:   A Nonspecialist's Guide to the Current Debate." In The European experience of declining fertility, 1850-1970 : the quiet revolution, edited by John R. Gillis, Louise Tilly and David Levine, xii, 385 p. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992. 

and at least one of the following:

Alter, George, Muriel Neven, and Michel Oris. "Economic Development and Differential Fertility in Rural and Urban Eastern Belgium, 1812-1899." In Chaire Quetelet 2005.
Alter, George, and Michel Oris. "Childhood Conditions, Migration, and Mortality:  Migrants and Natives in Nineteenth-century Cities."  2005.

What questions guide this research? Can you reverse engineer the steps from question to argument?

Creative Work

Explore the Historical Statistics of the United States and the Social Explorer websites.

How do you ask a question where the answer is a map? How might you use resources like this in your own research or teaching?

Visit the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) and the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). Does either databank contain material relevant to your research or teaching?

Blog about any of this and/or about your emerging plans for a final project.

Week 6: Databases, Large    Digitization and the Culture of “Abundance”

February 16, 2007

Guest Moderator: Celestina Wroth, IUB Research Librarian

Overview from Celestina:

"My inclination for next week is to focus on how we use (or make useable) these immense collections of digitized materials. The kinds of metadata-centered approaches that librarians and archivists are advocating, are, I think, what historians would ideally like to see, but it also seems that these approaches don't easily scale up to the sheer quantity of material out there, and people like Gregory Crane think they're hopelessly outdated relics of the print world."

Read

Cohen, Daniel J., and Roy Rosenzweig. Digital History, Chapter 3 Becoming Digital
Crane, Gregory. “What Do You Do with a Million Books?.” D-Lib Magazine 12, no. 3 (March, 2006).

Turkel, Bill. Teaching Young Historians to Search, Spider and Scrape. December 26, 2005.
Garrett, Jeffrey. "Subject Headings in Full-Text Environments: The ECCO Experiment," College & Research Libraries; Jan 2007, Vol. 68 Issue 1, p69-80.
Sandler, Mark. "Academic and Commercial Roles in Building 'the Digital Library'." Collection Management; 2003, Vol. 28 Issue 1/2, p107-119.
Tennant, Roy. "The Importance of Being Granular." Library Journal, 5/15/2002, Vol. 127 Issue 9, p32
Gill, Tony, et al, ed.s, Introduction to Metadata: Pathways to Digital Information. Online edition, version 2.1 Skim the chapters "Setting the Stage" and "Metadata and the world wide web." The glossary might also help make some of the other readings more intelligible.

Creative Work

Choose an online archive and review it carefully. Post on blog ("archives/research" and your name) an idea for a historical research and writing project based on that archive that could not be carried out--or at least not carried out easily--with a print-based archive. Comment briefly on the structure, interface, search, and presentation of sources. Is this a well-structured and user friendly archive? Comment also on any digital tools (for search and discovery or analysis and organization or presentation and display) that would make it easier for you to complete that research and writing project. The project doesn't need to be based exclusively on the online resources but they should be a central feature. The goal of the exercise and the reading for this week is to think about whether (and, if so, how) research and writing will be different in the digital era.

Possible On-line Archives:

RLG's Cultural Materials "a good example of how hard it is to really do this right!"

NewspaperArchive: http://access.newspaperarchive.com (Mike)

British and Irish Women’s Letters and Diaries (Colleen)

Emergence of Advertising in America (Shannon)

The Library Resource Page for my Marriage & the Nation class links to the archives I know best.

 

Week 7: Archives and the Futures of Research and Scholarship

February 23, 2007

Guest Moderators:

Julie Bobay, Director of Scholarly Communication, IUB Libraries

William Turkel, Assistant Prof. of History, University of Western Ontario

Readings:

Cohen, Daniel J., and Roy Rosenzweig. Digital History, Owning the Past and Preserving Digital History
Roy Rosenzweig, "Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era," American Historical Review, June 2003, http://chnm.gmu.edu/assets/historyessays/scarcity.html
Cohen, Dan. “From Babel to Knowledge: Data Mining Large Digital Collections.” D-Lib Magazine 12, no. 3 (March, 2006): 6–19.
Turkel, Bill. “Methodology for the Infinite Archive.” (April 5, 2006).
Lyman, Peter and Hal R. Varian. How Much Information? Executive Summary. University of California, Berkeley:School of Information Management and Systems, 2003.
Toobin, Jeffrey, "Google's Moon Shot," The New Yorker, February 2, 2007 http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/070205fa_fact_toobin
Bearman, David, "Jean-Noël Jeanneney's Critique of Google: Private Sector Book Digitization and Digital Library Policy," D-Lib Magazine, December 2006

Copyright tables used by IUB librarians:

Kenny Crew's site at IUPUI: http://www.copyright.iupui.edu/quickguide.htm

Lolly Gassaway's standard chart: http://www.unc.edu/%7Eunclng/public-d.htm

Web Exploration

Visit and explore the websites for the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH), IU's Digital Library Program, and IU Scholar Works. The IATH is the best known program supporting scholars engaged in digitization projects; IU's digital libraries program is modeled after IATH, but on a smaller scale. Julie Bobay requests that you include a question about ScholarWorks in your blog in preparation for Friday's discussion.

Week 8: The Challenge of Digital Scholarship

March 2, 2007

Guest Moderator:   Professor Mike Grossberg

Read the following two examples of digital scholarship, and one of your own choosing.

The following are possible choices for your third reading.  You are also welcome to select one from your own field; let me know if you choose this option so that I can add the link.

  • Charles Hardy III & Allesandro Portelli, "I Can Almost See the Lights of Home ~ A Field Trip to Harlan County, Kentucky," Journal of Multimedia History 2(1999) http://www.albany.edu/jmmh/
  • Philip J. Ethington, "Los Angeles and the Problem of Urban Historical Knowledge" American Historical Review (December 2000) http://cwis.usc.edu/dept/LAS/history/historylab/LAPUHK/index.html
  • At http://chnm.gmu.edu/aq/:
    • "Dreaming Arnold Schwarzenegger" by Louise Krasniewicz and Michael Blitz
    • "Hearsay of the Sun: Photography, Identity, and the Law of Evidence in Nineteenth-Century American Courts" by Thomas Thurston
    • "From Hogan's Alley to Coconino County: Three Narratives of the Early Comic Strip" by David Westbrook

Write and post a blog entry on whether the examples of digital scholarship you examined fulfilled the "promise of digital scholarship." Do they do anything genuinely new with new media? Do they do it well?

Week 9: Copyright / Conversation about Final Projects

March 9, 2007

Reading:

Cohen, Daniel J., and Roy Rosenzweig. Digital History, Owning the Past
Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture, chapter ten ("property"), which is available for free download at http://free-culture.org/freecontent
Unsworth, John. “The Next Wave: Liberation Technology.” The Chronicle of Higher Education 50, no. 21 (January 30, 2004).
Copyright Office Report on Orphan Works, particularly “Executive Summary” and “Description of Orphaned Works”
Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use
http://www.dancohen.org/blog/posts/raw_archives_and_hurricane_katrina

Creative Work:

In your blog, please comment on the readings, but it should also outline your plans for your final project.

 

Part II: Pedagogy and the Public

 

Week 10: The New Media Classroom

March 23, 2007

Moderator: Colleen

Reading

Cohen, Dan and Roy Rosenzweig. “No Computer Left Behind.” Chronicle of Higher Education (Feb. 24, 2006).
Kelly, T. Mills. “For Better or Worse? The Marriage of Web and the History Classroom.” Journal of the American Association for History and Computing 3, no. 2 (August 2000).
Pace, David. “The Amateur in the Operating Room: History and the Scholarship of Teaching.” American Historical Review 109, no. 4 (October 2004).

Explore

 

Week 11: Oral History & Video

March 30, 2007

Moderators: Mike & Mark

Reading

Finish Cohen and Rosenzweig, Digital History, Chapters 2-6.

Explore:

Historical Voices

Washington State's African-American Oral History Collections

http://www.wsulibs.wsu.edu/Holland/masc/xblackoralhistory.html

http://www.wsulibs.wsu.edu/holland/masc/xcivilrights.html

Review by Trevor James Bond

YouTube

National Archives http://video.google.com/nara.html

 

Week 12: Games, Pedagogy and the Public

April 6, 2007

Guest moderator:    Professor Lee Sheldon

            Londontown, Anti-linearlogic.com

Reading: 

Located in the Resources folder of the H650 OnCourse site:

Selections from Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play, see especially Chapter 26 "Games as Narrative Play" and Chapter 27, "Games as the Play of Simulation."   
Michael Matteas and Andrew Stern, "Interaction and Narrative," in The Game Design Reader, eds. Salen and Zimmerman.
Henry Jenkins, "Game Design as Narrative Architecture"  

Creative Work:

Find and play games that operate on historical terrain, or otherwise contain elements that might make them interesting as media for communicating historical scholarship or skills. Please share compelling examples with the instructor & class.

 

Facade is Matteas & Stern's experimental project.

 

Week 13: Popular and Public History Online

Moderator: Ben

Visit and closely examine the following sites:

Post an answer to one of the following questions:

  1. Which of these sites most effectively conveys the past to a "general" audience? (And why?)
  2. Which of these sites makes the most effective use of new media? (And how?)
  3. Which of these sites has a design and interface that most effectively communicates its message and serves its audience?
  4. Which of these sites has an interpretation of the past that either:
    a.) best reflects current scholarship or b.) challenges its audiences?

 

Week 14: The Future of Historical Communities

 

Guest: Professor James Capshew

Additional materials related to Prof. Capshew's Traditions and Cultures of Indiana University course have been made available via email. Links include:

http://www.indiana.edu/~memento/histindiana.html

http://www.copyright.iupui.edu/

http://www.copyright.iupui.edu/dl_agreement.htm

Read:

Barry Wellman and Milena Guila, "Virtual Communities as Communities: Net Surfers Don't Ride Alone," in Marc Smith and Peter Kollock, eds., Communities in Cyberspace (1999). (e-book accessible through IUCAT, if this link fails.)

Pew Internet Project, "Online Communities: Networks that nurture long-distance relationships and local ties" (October 2001), at http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/toc.asp?Report=47

Creative Work

Write and submit to the Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org) an original entry for a topic that interests you but that is not yet dealt with in the Wikipedia; or make a substantial intervention in one or more exisiting entries. Then write and post in your blog a discussion of why you chose the entry or entries you chose, how writing for the Wikipedia was difficult or easy, which other topics you created links to, and what responses you received.

In addition, observe and comment on another online historical community of your choosing.

 

Week 15: Proposal Presentations

 

You will each have 15 - 20 minutes in which to give an overview of your final project, and solicit advice on your work from the class. We will begin our class meeting at 11am to allow sufficient time. You are all invited to lunch afterwards. I'd like to continue our unfinished conversation about Wikipedia, and solicit your thoughts regarding the place of this course – and the "New Media" more generally – in IU's graduate curriculum. The readings below relate to these concerns.

 

Optional Reading

Noam Cohen, "The Latest on Virginia Tech, From Wikipedia," NYT, April 23, 2007
Peruse the list of digital history syllabi supplied by Bill Turkel in his Feb. 10, 2007 blog: Turkel, Digital History Hacks: Methodology for the Infinite Archive, Feb. 2007 Archive