Next spring, I’ll be teaching our grad program’s DH course for the second time. While not a complete loss, the first time I taught the course was affected in no small measure by the fact that I had major surgery just prior to the start of the semester. It turned out that debilitating pain and medication-hazed convalescence were not especially conducive to course planning. 🙂
So in many ways, then, it feels like I’m really teaching the course for the first time. I’m going to paste below my preliminary outline for course readings, for which I would especially welcome your feedback. It’s not really close to done yet, but I feel like I’ve got enough now that I can finally move on and plan my fall courses (!!). I still have several layers of research to do (bookmarks, instapaper, fave tweets, TOCs, etc.) before this will feel finalized. So if you have any suggestions for readings, please share them here, or drop me a note–this will be an ongoing process throughout much of the fall semester.
A couple of additional notes: In addition to weekly readings, I expect that I’ll ask the students to look at 1-2 online projects a week–I have a huge list of possibilities, but I haven’t sorted through them yet to match them up with readings and topics. We’ll also be spending time each week in the lab working with various tools–again, big list that needs sorting and matching. Finally, I’ll be hosting a more dynamic version of the syllabus at http://rcdh14.wikispaces.com/. The static version of the syllabus will be available both there and here once I’m closer to finalizing.
Oh, and there are only 13 weeks because we’ll lose one to CCCC, I think, and because I always leave a week open for flexibility’s sake.
—
CCR 733: Rhetoric, Composition, and Digital Humanities
Schedule of Activities
Winter Break
This is not required, but I highly recommend you read either or both of the following over winter break–if you are new to DH, both books provide a nice introduction to some of the issues we’ll be discussing:
Robin Sloan, Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore (Amazon)
Charles Soule, Strange Attractors (Amazon)
Week 1 Introduction to Course
There are no required readings for our first meeting, but I do recommend setting up some sort of blogspace (WordPress, e.g.) in advance, as well as a Twitter account if you don’t already have one. We will spend some time discussing this site, the role that blogs and Twitter will play in the course. If you have questions about this prior to the actual course, feel free to contact me.
Week 2 Definition
Matthew Berry, “Introduction” Understanding Digital Humanities
Anne Burdick, et al., “A Short Guide to the Digital Humanities,” from Digital_Humanities (PDF)
Alan Liu, “The Meaning of Digital Humanities,” PMLA 128.2 (March 2013): 409–423.
Willard McCarty, “The Future of Digital Humanities is a Matter of Words.” from A Companion to New Media Dynamics (PDF)
Part I of Debates in the Digital Humanities, “Defining the Digital Humanities” (available online)
Recommended
Andrew Abbott, “The Chaos of Disciplines,” from Chaos of Disciplines (PDF)
Part III of Debates in the Digital Humanities, “Critiquing the Digital Humanities” (You should at least skim this)
Week 3 Database
Charles Cooney, et al. “The Notion of the Textbase: Design and Use of Textbases in the Humanities.” LSDA
Sharon Daniel, “The Database: An Aesthetics of Dignity.” from Database Aesthetics (PDF)
Ed Folsom, Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives. PMLA 122.5 (Oct 2007), 1571-1612 (includes responses).
Christiane Paul, The Database as System and Cultural Form: Anatomies of Cultural Narratives.” Database Aesthetics (PDF)
Geoffrey Sirc, “Serial Composition.” Rhetorics and Technologies (PDF)
Recommended
Collin G Brooke, “Databases, Data Mining” and “Personal Patterns: Mapping and Mining” from Lingua Fracta (PDF)
Week 4 Archive
Casey Boyle. Low-Fidelity in High-Definition: Speculations on Rhetorical Editions. RDH
Tarez Samra Graban, Alexis Ramsey-Tobienne and Whitney Myers. In, Through, and About the Archive: What Digitization (Dis)Allows. RDH
Michael Neal, et al. Making Meaning at the Intersections. Kairos
Liza Potts. Archive Experiences: A Vision for User-Centered Design in the Digital Humanities. RDH
Jenny Rice and Jeff Rice. Pop Up Archives. RDH
Week 5 Metadata
Tarez Samra Graban, “From Location(s) to Locatability: Mapping Feminist Recovery and Archival Activity Through Metadata.” College English
Kieran Healy, “Using Metadata to Find Paul Revere.”
Richard McNabb, “Making the Gesture: Graduate Student Submissions and Expectations of Journal Referees.” Composition Studies, 29.1 (2001): 9-26.
Geoffrey Nunberg, “Google’s Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars.” CHE, August 31, 2009.
Jessica Reyman, “User Data on the Social Web: Authorship, Agency, and Appropriation.” College English 75.5 (May 2013): 513-522.
Jentery Sayers, et al., Standards in the Making
Week 6 Algorithm
Kevin Brock, One Hundred Thousand Billion Processes: Oulipian Computation and the Composition of Digital Cybertexts
James Brown, “Making Machines”
Paul Eggert, “Text as Algorithm and as Process.” from Text and Genre in Reconstruction (PDF)
Stephen Ramsay, Reading Machines: Toward an Algorithmic Criticism
Mark Sample, Hacking the Accident
Week 7 Microscopy
Don Foster, from Author Unknown
Matthew Jockers & Julia Flanders, “A Matter of Scale”
Seth Long, “Text Network and Corpus Analysis of the Unabomber Manifesto.” Feb 12, 2013
Geoffrey Rockwell, “What is Text Analysis, Really?” LLC 18.2 (2003): 209-219.
Greg Urban, “The Once and Future Thing.” from Metaculture (PDF)
Patrick Juola, “Rowling and “Galbraith”: an authorial analysis” Language Log, July 16, 2013.
Ben Zimmer, “Decoding Your Email Personality.” NYT, July 23, 2011
Ben Zimmer, “The Science that Uncovered J.K. Rowling’s Literary Hocus-Pocus.” WSJ, July 16, 2013.
Recommended
Journal of Law and Policy Symposium on Authorship Attribution (PDF available at site)
Week 8 Mesoscopy
Carol Berkenkotter & Thomas Huckin, “Conventions, Conversations, and the Writer”
David Hoffman and Don Waisanen. “At the Digital Frontier of Rhetorical Studies: An Overview of Tools and Methods for Computer-Aided Textual Analysis” RDH
Dan Wang, “Is There a Canon in Economic Sociology?” Accounts 11.2 (2012): 1-8.
Issue 2.1 of the Journal of Digital Humanities on Topic Modeling
Week 9 Macroscopy
Matthew Jockers, Macroanalysis
Nelya Koteyko. Corpus-Assisted Analysis of Internet-Based Discourses: From Patterns to Rhetoric. RDH
Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature.” NLR
Gregory Crane, “What Do You Do With a Million Books?” D-Lib Magazine12.3 (2006).
Jean-Baptiste Michel et al., “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books,”Science331.176 (2011): 176-182.
Ted Underwood, “How Not To Do Things with Words,” blog post, The Stone and the Shell, 25 August 2012.
Week 10 Networks
Albert-Lazlo Barabasi. from Linked &o Bursts
Anna Munster, “Prelude to the Movements of Networks.” from An Aesthesia Of Networks
James Porter. “Rhetoric in (as) a Digital Economy.” Rhetorics and Technologies (PDF)
Duncan Watts, from Six Degrees.
Week 11 Visualization
Tanya Clement, “Text Analysis, Data Mining, and Visualizations in Literary Scholarship.” LSDA
Johanna Drucker, “Graphesis: Visual knowledge production and representation” (PDF)
Johanna Drucker, “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display.” DHQ
Martyn Jessop, “Digital Visualisation as a Scholarly Activity” LLC 23.3 (2008): 281-293.
Krista Kennedy and Seth Long, “The Trees Within the Forest: Extracting, Coding, and Visualizing Subjective Data in Authorship Studies.” RDH
Manuel Lima, “The Syntax of a New Language.” from Visual Complexity (PDF) (Companion Site)
Stéfan Sinclair, et al., “Information Visualization for Humanities Scholars.” LSDA
Recommended
Max Black. from Models and Metaphors
Week 12 Graphs
Morgan Currie, “The Feminist Critique: Mapping Controvery in Wikipedia.” UDH
Kieran Healy, “A Co-Citation Network for Philosophy.”
Brad Lucas and Drew Loewe, “Coordinating Citations and the Cartography of Knowledge.” The Changing of Knowledge in Composition
Derek Mueller, “Grasping Rhetoric and Composition by Its Long Tail: What Graphs Can Tell Us about the Field’s Changing Shape.” CCC 64.1 (Sep 2012): 195-223.
Anne Stevens and Jay Williams, “The Footnote, in Theory.” Critical Inquiry
Week 13 Maps
Scot Barnett, “Psychogeographies of Writing: Ma(r)king Space at the Limits of Representation.” Kairos
Franco Moretti, “Maps.”
Franco Moretti, “Network Theory, Plot Analysis.”
+Spatial Humanities
Dawn
August 11, 2013 9:00 amMatthew Kirchenbaum writes almost exclusively about digital humanities (http://mkirschenbaum.wordpress.com/). HIs book, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, is one of the most innovative ways of looking at the materiality of the digital humanities. His article, What Is Digital humanities and What’s It Doing in
English Departments? (http://mkirschenbaum.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/kirschenbaum_ade150.pdf) is a good introduction into the ways we may view DH in traditional departments.
Katherine Hayles also has a new book out that is geared toward the digital humanities: How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis.
And finally, in the map area, Amy Propen has an excellent book, Locating Visual-Material Rhetorics: The Map, the Mill, and the GPS, that while not strictly DH, is a great introduction into how mapping has shifted.
These may add to the depth of your listing here, and may give some different perspectives — especially since all of these authors come out of English departments but are looking at DH from a decidedly technical perspective.
Collin
August 11, 2013 9:13 amThanks, Dawn! Yeah, I have a little Hayles hidden in there, but I just haven’t read HWT yet. I know Matt’s essay, and will recommend it if not require it that week–I’m going to have to shape that week a little bit.
I hadn’t thought of Amy’s book, probably because it’s on my to-read list but I haven’t gotten there yet–I’ll move it up though…
To your broader point, I suspect that materiality is going to be a weak point for this syllabus, and that may be unavoidable–we’ll see. There’s a lot of good stuff out there that doesn’t quite fit the way I’m setting this up–media ecologies, game studies, materiality, software studies, et al. I’m trying not to feel too bad about all the interesting work I’m having to leave out! 🙂
Thanks again!
cgb
Dawn
August 11, 2013 9:23 amI’m probably a little biased toward materiality since that’s where a great part of my research is. 🙂 I threw it out there just in case.
I think it’s a huge issue in DH and one that, as we continue on with this trajectory toward more online accessibility, we will have to confront, reconcile, and understand. We are tactile creatures and understanding that connection to the material, especially in digital realms is, I believe, important.
That being said, I understand that it’s one class and you have to limit it. It sounds like an interesting class!
Jason Luther
August 15, 2013 10:14 pmI really loved 1.0 of this course despite the unfortunate surgery, but so many new (and awesome) readings this time around. Can I take it again ABD?
Collin
August 15, 2013 10:53 pmYou’re very kind! 🙂 You’re definitely welcome to sit in if you’d like, Jason…