Week 15 and Finals Week: What have we contributed to the digital humanities community?

We’re almost there — just one more week to go! First, let me thank you for your enthusiasm, your collegiality, and your willingness to experiment with new things. You have helped make this semester one of my best, and I hope you feel similarly satisfied with what we’ve accomplished as a class. Second, let me encourage you to finish the semester on a high note. We’re so close to the end, but we’re not there yet. Don’t forget about the last few tasks and deadlines:

• You should wrap up your work on The Gray Jacket project no later than Wednesday, May 7. The tasks we need to complete are listed in the “Special Collections Feedback” file in our class’s shared Google Drive folder. When you are done with your issue, the last step of this assignment is to write a one-page memo about your work on the project, as described on the assignment sheet. Next week, we will officially launch the site and start sharing it publicly.
• Your individual project should be nearing completion. If you would like to meet one last time before you submit your work, please stop by during my office hours (T 1–4; W 9–12) or email me to set up an appointment at a different time. The deadline for this project is Monday, May 12, at 7:45 a.m. (our university-assigned time slot for the final exam). Your project should be live on the web, and your shared Google Drive folder should contain your final memo, as described on the assignment sheet.
• If you have not completed the Student Perceptions of Teaching (SPOT) questionnaire for this course, please take a few minutes this weekend to do so. I’d like to know what you think went well this semester, but I’m especially interested in receiving your feedback about how I could improve this course next time I teach it.

Our class sessions during Week 15 will be dedicated to your oral presentations for the individual project. Each of you will have 10 (and only 10!) minutes to share your project with us. Although the format of these presentations is flexible, they are presentations, so don’t just wing it. Whatever approach you take, please make sure you prepare something. Here’s the lineup for each day:

• On Monday, we will proceed in this order: Ashley, Nathan, Kelly, Andrew K., Alexis, Michelle.
• On Wednesday, we will proceed in this order: Katie, Andrew W., Jennifer, Arian, Lindsey, Britt.

Because you’ll be submitting your final projects online, we will not hold a formal final exam. However, you’re all invited to kick off Finals Week with a breakfast at my house on May 12 at 9:00 a.m. I’ll send out my address and details via email, but for now I’ll just say this: my buttermilk pancakes will change your life.

And that’s it. Congratulations, you’re all certified digital humanists. Now go and build something amazing!

Week 14: What will the digital humanities look like in the future?

Thanks for your enthusiastic participation in yesterday’s “Green Team / Red Team” review. I hope you left class with a few specific ideas about how to improve your individual project, and I hope you’ll come see me during office hours if you’d like another set of eyes to see your project in progress.

Next week, we will have our final reading discussion of the semester and one more Gray Jacket workshop. Here’s a quick preview:

• On Monday, we’ll consider the future of the digital humanities, with Arian and Michelle serving as our discussion superheroes. Please read and be ready to discuss pages 99–120 in Digital_Humanities, as well as the following articles from Part VI of Debates in the Digital Humanities: “Digital Humanities As/Is a Tactical Term,” by Matthew Kirschenbaum; “The Digital Humanities or a Digital Humanism,” by David Parry; and “Humanities 2.0: Promise, Perils, Predictions,” by Cathy N. Davidson.
• On Wednesday, our colleagues from Newman Library will join us to review the current draft of The Gray Jacket and offer us their suggestions for improving and completing the project. Before you come to class, you should ensure that all of the articles from your assigned issue have been double- and triple-checked to eliminate OCR errors and ensure conformity with our style guide.

We’re coming down to the wire on both the collaborative class project and the individual project, so if you need help with anything, now is the time to let me know.

Week 13: Why (and how) should digital humanists critique the digital humanities?

Thanks for another set of excellent workshop days during Week 12. The Gray Jacket site is really starting to take shape, and I hope you’ll continue to revise the items you’ve added to the site and improve the metadata associated with each item. I’ll be working on the layout and theme during the next week (please let me know if you want to help with this!), and we’ll show it to our partners in the library during Week 14.

First, though, we’ll return to our “traditional” schedule during Week 13, with one reading day and one workshop day. Here’s an overview of our plans:

• On Monday, we’ll explore various critiques of the digital humanities, with Arian and Michelle serving as our discussion superheroes. Before you come to class, please read all of the articles in Part III of Debates in the Digital Humanities (“Critiquing the Digital Humanities,” pp. 139–246).
• On Wednesday, we will spend most of class in a peer critique workshop for the individual project. Because all of your projects are unique, conducting this workshop will be a little tricky, but generally speaking, you should be ready to project your laptop onto one of the screens in our classroom and talk through your project with your classmates. If you have a written component that you would like us to review, please feel free to bring that, too.

Finally, I hope some of you will be able to join us for our final “Digital Discussion” of the semester: a digital scholarship show-and-tell session, held on Friday, April 25, at 1:00 p.m. in the library’s new Multipurpose Room (1st Floor).

Questions? Concerns about your individual project? Feedback about our class project? Come see me during office hours (slightly adjusted this week: Tuesday and Wednesday from 9–12) or email me.

Week 12: How can we publish and share our digital humanities work on the web?

I think our class workshops on Omeka during Week 11 were incredibly productive. There’s something to be said for putting everyone in a physical space together and just working. We now have a common style sheet to use as we add content from The Gray Jacket to our new website, and we will continue to work out the details regarding metadata and text formatting, so please keep a running list of issues that we need to address as a team.

Here’s a quick overview of our plans for Week 12:

• On Monday, we will explore the various options for publishing your individual project and try to help you determine whether you need your own web hosting account. I will lead this workshop, so your only homework for the weekend is to finish scanning, OCRing, and “itemizing” the articles in your issue of The Gray Jacket. By the time you come to class on Monday, the text of your articles should be added to our Omeka site so we can start organizing the issues and designing the visual layout. (You don’t need to upload all of your JPEGs to the site yet — we still need to determine our guidelines for that process.)
• On Wednesday, we will hold another Gray Jacket work session. This time we’ll focus on applying and modifying Omeka themes, so you should familiarize yourself with all of the available options as well as the documentation about themes. This will be our last work session for a couple of weeks, so please be ready to ask questions or discuss problems you and your partner have encountered. Wednesday is also the deadline for determining your web hosting/publishing plans for the individual project, so you should consider your options and, if needed, update your project proposal to reflect your adjusted plans.

I know we’ve been focusing heavily on our class project for a couple of weeks, but please don’t neglect your individual project. Remember: an early draft of your project is due during Week 13! If you have questions about your work or need help with anything, come see me during office hours (T 1–4; W 9–12) or email me.

Week 11: What tools and methods will best help us complete our class project?

This post will be short and sweet, but I want to make sure that everyone knows what they’re doing before I leave for my trip. I’ll be gone Wednesday through Sunday, but I’ll be checking email every day if you need to reach me. Here’s what should happen while I’m away:

• On Wednesday (April 2), you should use our class session to share your newly approved individual project plans with each other. Each of you should take five minutes to briefly describe your project and get advice from your classmates about tools and strategies that might help you with your work. You might not use the entire class period, but I hope your conversation will help you identify other people in class who are pursuing similar topics or using similar methods.
• You should begin making progress on your individual project. This might mean downloading software, setting up a website, collecting your artifacts, or continuing your search for good models of what you want to do. Based on the conversations I had with each of you during our individual conferences, I’m confident that everyone has something to do this week.
• Before the end of the week, you and your partner on the class project should scan and OCR your assigned issue of The Gray Jacket. (See the Week 10 post for more details.)

Next week, both of our class sessions will focus on learning Omeka and adding our content for the class project to our new site. Before you come to class on Monday, please read through the Omeka documentation (especially the pages in the “Getting Started with Project Planning” section) and spend some time playing in the Omeka Sandbox.

By the end of Week 11, I hope we’ll have our site up and running. Chances are pretty good we’ll also have a long list of questions that need to be answered and problems that need to be solved. I can’t wait to get started!

Week 10: What can we contribute to the digital humanities community?

With the “documented exploration” project behind us (watch for my feedback soon!), we can turn our attention squarely to the two remaining assignments that will keep us busy for the rest of the semester: the individual final project and the collaborative class project. If you haven’t taken the time to read through the details of each assignment, please do so, and let me know if you have any questions about what’s expected of you or how I’ll evaluate your work.

During Week 9, we got off to a great start on the class project, and at this point all of you should be coordinating with your assigned partner to scan and OCR your issue of The Gray Jacket. Try to complete those tasks sometime during Week 10, and when you’re done, add your files to our shared Google Drive folder. I’ve created a new folder called “Gray Jacket,” with subfolders for each issue. You should add three types of files to your folder:

1. The scanned .jpeg images (Special Collections will keep the high-resolution .tiff files; ask Marc Brodsky about that if you have questions.)
2. The OCR’d .pdf files (Ryan Speer can help you with this process.)
3. A raw text file associated with each .pdf file (Copy and paste the text from your .pdf files, but don’t worry about “cleaning up” the text yet. We’ll work on this during Week 11.)

Our other big task for Week 10 is getting started on the individual final project. Here’s how we’ll proceed:

• Instead of meeting as a whole class on Monday, I will meet with each of you for 20 minutes to discuss your proposal for the individual final project. Please use the template I created as a starting point for your proposal, but don’t feel constrained by it. When you come to your conference, be ready to walk me through your proposal and iron out any wrinkles in your plans.
• On Wednesday, I will be traveling, but I trust that you will be able to have a productive day without me. Each of you should take five minutes to briefly describe your individual project to your classmates and seek their feedback about tools and strategies that might help you with your work. My hope for this exercise is that you’ll discover other people in class who are pursuing similar topics or using similar methods, and you’ll help one another brainstorm ideas about how to proceed.

As always, I’ll be checking email while I’m away, so please don’t hesitate to contact me if you need anything.

Week 9: Where are the digital humanities going next?

I will be traveling for the rest of Week 8, so this is an early update about Week 9. If you have any questions about these plans, I’ll be checking my email at least once a day while I’m gone.

While I’m gone, you should be doing two things:

1. Completing your documented exploration of a digital humanities tool. This means getting all of your text and screenshots into Medium and having a classmate (or two!) peer review your tutorial. I’ll leave it up to you to make arrangements with one another, but if you need a place to meet, our regular room will be available during class time on Wednesday.
2. Generating lots of ideas for your individual final project and our collaborative class project. We will discuss both of these assignments in more detail next week, but right now, you should be considering multiple options for each project.

Here’s a quick overview of how we’ll spend our time next week:

• On Monday, we will explore several “varieties” of digital humanities, with Jennifer and Britt serving as our discussion superheroes. Before you come to class, please read pages 27–60 in Digital_Humanities. Most importantly, don’t forget that your “documented exploration” project is due before you come to class. To submit your project, all you need to do is publish it on Medium and submit it to our collection on Medium.
• On Wednesday, we will meet in the Library’s Special Collections (near the coffee shop on the first floor) to get some training on digitizing historical artifacts. Please do not come to our regular classroom; go directly to Special Collections at 4:00 p.m.

Good luck finishing up your tutorials, and enjoy your mini-break from Quinn! I’ll see you when I get back from Indianapolis.

Week 8: How can the humanities help us study computer code?

I’m glad we took some time during Week 7 to take stock of where we are as class and where we want to go for the rest of the semester. Please drop me a line if you have any additional thoughts about topics you want to address or changes I can make to the syllabus to help you get the most of out of this class.

You should take full advantage of spring break and get plenty of R&R. I have pushed back the due date for your second assignment by a week, which I hope will make your break a little less stressful. When we get back, we’ll have an abbreviated week, but I hope it will be a productive one. Here’s how we’ll proceed:

• On Monday, we will explore the field of software studies as it relates to the digital humanities, with Katie and Andrew W. serving as our discussion superheroes. Please read Frabetti (pp. 161–71) and Manovich (pp. 249–78) in Understanding Digital Humanities, and another short article by Manovich, “The Algorithms of Our Lives.” As time permits, you might also want to check out Computational Culture, a new “journal of software studies.” Last but not least, you should have a draft of your tool exploration essay completed by Monday. (Don’t click “publish” on your essay yet, but be ready to share what you’ve written with your classmates.)
• I will be traveling to CCCC in Indianapolis from Tuesday through Saturday, so we won’t meet on Wednesday. My trip will also prevent me from holding regular office hours during Week 8, but I will be checking email regularly, so please let me know if you run into any unforeseen problems as you complete and post your essay on Medium.

I’ll be on campus most of spring break (insert sad-face icon here), so if you happen to be in Blacksburg and want to meet, feel free to email me. Otherwise, enjoy your time off!

Week 7: How does the way we do research change the nature and results of that research?

I think we’ve worked out all of the kinks in our assignments for the second assignment, so at this point you should be learning as much as you can about your chosen tool and documenting the process as you go. Insofar as it’s possible, try to situate your exploration of the tool within the context of a project that you could actually carry out. In other words, work with real data or real artifacts, and develop some sample research questions that will allow you to find out what the tool is (or is not) capable of doing.

Here’s a quick review of our plans for next week:

• On Monday, we will focus on the methodological challenges of doing digital humanities work, with Lindsey and Andrew K. serving as our discussion superheroes. Please read Rieder and Röhle’s chapter in Understanding Digital Humanities (pp. 67–84), Matthew Wilkens’s chapter in Part IV of Debates in the Digital Humanities (pp. 249–58), and “Topic Modeling Made Just Simple Enough,” by Ted Underwood. In addition, please be ready to talk about any challenges you have encountered during your early explorations of your chosen tool.
• On Wednesday, we will conduct a workshop on content management systems, focusing on WordPress and Medium. Before you come to class, please create an account on the Blogs@VT system. (You can name your site whatever you’d like; you’ll be able to delete it at the end of the workshop.)

If you have any questions about these plans, or if you’d like to talk about the project you’re working on right now, don’t hesitate to ask.

Week 6: What new questions can we ask and answer with digital tools?

We didn’t have nearly as much time for our workshop yesterday as I would have liked, but I think it helped us get a feel for some tools commonly used to conduct text analysis and what they’re capable of doing. I hope you’ll continue to experiment with the programs listed on our resources page and perhaps even pursue one of them for our next assignment.

Here’s a brief summary of where we’re headed next week:

• Before you come to class on Monday, you should review several options for our second assignment and add your preferences to the spreadsheet I created in our shared Google Drive folder. During class, we will finalize everyone’s chosen tool, then conclude our discussion of Macroanalysis, with Lindsey and Andrew K. serving as our discussion superheroes. Please read Chapters 8-10 (pp. 118-75), as well as two short pieces online: “Using Metadata to Find Paul Revere,” by Kieran Healy, and “Should We Teach Literature Students How To Analyze Texts Algorithmically?”, by Luke Dormehl.
• We’ll devote our entire class session on Wednesday to an HTML and CSS workshop. Please bring your laptop to class and install one of the following text editors before you arrive: TextWrangler (Mac), Komodo Edit (Mac, Windows, or Linux), or Notepad++ (Windows). You don’t need to do anything else to prepare for the workshop, so your homework for Wednesday is to begin immersing yourself in your chosen tool for our second big assignment. [Update: When you get to class, please download the HTML workshop files.]

If you have questions about these plans, please let me know. Otherwise, I’ll see you in class on Monday!

Week 5: Can we (should we?) quantify texts?

I hope you’re all safe and warm today, enjoying one of Virginia Tech’s rare snow days! The storm definitely threw off our schedule, but I think we’ll be able to get back on track during Week 5. Here’s what we’ll do to catch up:

• On Monday, we’ll listen to your presentations about the first assignment. If you’re planning to use PowerPoint, please remember to upload your file to your shared Google Drive folder before class. (On a side note, I saw that all of your essay files were in your shared folders, but a few of you still need to convert them to Google Docs format. Please take care of that ASAP.) If time allows, I’ll introduce our next assignment at the end of class.
• We’ll postpone Monday’s reading assignment, so please be ready to discuss Chapters 6 and 7 of Macroanalysis (pp. 63–117) in class on Wednesday. Ashley and Alexis will once again be our discussion superheroes. We’ll shorten our discussion in order to experiment with some text analysis tools. To prepare for the workshop, you should download a “plain text” version (not some other format, like HTML or ePub) of a novel you know well from Project Gutenberg before you come to class.

If you have questions about your presentation or anything else related to class, feel free to email me over the weekend.

Week 4: How does text analysis change as we move away from the text?

I hope yesterday’s workshop on setting up a digital workflow gave you some ideas about things you can do to be a little more organized, secure, and productive in your digital work. If you want to talk more about these practical topics, let me know — we might be able to hold another workshop like this before the end of the semester.

Your first assignment is due next week, so you should be fully immersed in your chosen site and steadily working on your essay. If you are feeling unsure about your work on this project, please come see during office hours on Tuesday (1–4 p.m.) or email me to set up an appointment on Friday or Monday.

Here’s a quick overview of our plans for Week 4:

• On Monday, we’ll turn away from definitional issues about the digital humanities and toward methodological ones, with Ashley and Alexis serving as our discussion superheroes. Please read Dan Dixon’s chapter in Understanding Digital Humanities (pp. 190–209) and the first five chapters of Macroanalysis (pp. 1–62) and be ready to discuss them in class.
• On Wednesday, your analysis of a mature digital humanities project is due. Please make sure your essay is uploaded to your shared Google Drive folder and converted to Google Docs format before you come to class. During class, each of you will have 3–5 minutes to tell us about the project you analyzed and help us understand why we might (or might not) be interested in learning more. The format for your presentation is up to you, but if you plan to use a PowerPoint file, please upload it to your Google Drive folder, too.

I can’t wait to read your essays and see your presentations next week! If there’s anything I can do to help you finish up, don’t hesitate to ask.

Week 3: Why do definitions of DH matter so much?

Earlier today, I contacted each of you to confirm and/or gently redirect your selected topic for our first assignment, so now it’s time to immerse yourself in your site. I’ve added a few guidelines to the assignment description that should help you consider what types of questions you might want to ask about your site, but if you need help narrowing your focus, feel free to drop by during my office hours next week. We won’t spend much time in class working on this project, but Week 3 is when the bulk of your analysis should take place, so don’t procrastinate!

Here are a few quick reminders about our plans for Week 3:

• On Monday, we’ll continue our conversation about definitions of “digital humanities,” with Jennifer and Katie serving as our first discussion superheroes. Before you come to class, please read all of the articles in Part I (“Defining the Digital Humanities,” pages 1–71) in Debates in the Digital Humanities and William Pannapacker’s “Stop Calling It ‘Digital Humanities’.” In addition, familiarize yourself with John Unsworth’s helpful timeline of DH milestones.
• On Wednesday we’ll hold a workshop that will help you establish a workflow for doing digital scholarship. Before you come to class, spend some time reviewing Miriam Posner’s excellent guide to managing research assets and William J. Turkel’s collection of posts on digital research tools. (You don’t need to install every piece of software recommended by Posner and Turkel, but I hope you’ll test out a few of them that look interesting to you.)

Last but not least, remember that everyone is invited to our first “Digital Discussions” event on Friday at 1:30 p.m. It’s a roundtable conversation on graduate education in the digital humanities, and we would love to have REAL LIVE GRADUATE STUDENTS in attendance. You can even download a PDF flyer and pass it along to anyone who might be interested. I hope to see you there!

Week 2: What is (are?) the digital humanities?

Thanks for making our first day of class so productive and engaging. Just from listening to our initial discussion, I can tell that we’re going to have a lot of fun this semester. I hope you feel the same way, and I hope you’ll take me seriously when I reiterate this point I made during class: I want this course to help you achieve your individual goals, so if at any point during the semester you’re struggling to see the connection between what we’re reading/doing and what you want to accomplish, I hope you’ll talk to me about it.

Our first class ended with a whirlwind tour of the course policies, assignments, and calendar, but next week we’ll slow things down a bit. Here’s a brief overview of our plans:

• On Monday, we’ll try (and probably fail!) to define the term “digital humanities.” We’ll also assign “discussion superheroes” for many of our future reading days and talk about what that entails. Before you come to class, please read pages 1–66 in Understanding Digital Humanities and pages 1–26 in Digital_Humanities. In addition, please thoroughly review the course policies and the details for our first assignment, taking some time to familiarize yourself with a variety of projects linked on that page.
• On Wednesday, we’ll hold our first workshop, designed to help you establish a personal system for following the many ongoing conversations surrounding the digital humanities. For this workshop, it will be helpful if you’re using your own computer, so bring your laptop unless you absolutely can’t. Wednesday is also the deadline for selecting a project to analyze for our first assignment, so please come to class with a list of your top three choices, in ranked order. (I’d like to make sure that everyone is analyzing a different project, so the rankings might matter.)

Last but not least, remember that our classroom is changing, so starting on Monday please go directly to 1120 Torgersen Hall instead of the lab in Shanks.

If you have any questions about these plans, just let me know. Otherwise, I’ll see you on Monday. Happy reading!

Welcome to Introduction to Digital Humanities!

Welcome to ENGL 5074: Introduction to Digital Humanities. This website will function as the online headquarters for our class this semester. Each week, I will post an update to the website with details about coming week, deadline reminders, links to helpful resources, etc… I will use Virginia Tech’s Scholar site to record your grades, but otherwise, everything related to this course will be posted here. You should bookmark this site on your laptop, your tablet, your phone, etc. — whatever you use to get online.

A bit about me: This is my second year at Virginia Tech, and I love it here. My research focuses on how people use rhetoric in online environments, and all of the classes I teach have something to do with technology. I think academics have a tendency to downplay the importance of the tools they use, so I work hard to correct (overcorrect?) that problem in my work. I spend a lot of time thinking about the technologies that shape my research and teaching, and I love comparing workflows with other academics — especially my students. When I’m not staring at a computer screen, I like to cook, read, and spend time with my wife, a brilliant freelance writer, and our two daughters.

Each week (typically no later than Thursday evening), I will add a post to this website that explains what we will be doing in class the following week and what you need to do to prepare for those class sessions. The Week 2 post will be up soon, but for now, here are a few things you can do to get a jump start on the semester:

• Create a Twitter account, if you don’t have one already. (We’ll talk about using Twitter in the coming weeks, but for now, you just need to create an account, add a photo, and customize your profile.)
• Get familiar with your Google Drive account, which is connected to your vt.edu email address.
• Purchase copies (print or electronic) of the textbooks listed on the Course Policies page.