This graduate course offered by Alan Liu in the UCSB English Department meets Winter 2017, Tuesdays, 12:30 to 3:00 pm, in the department's Transcriptions Center, South Hall 2509.

Class 1 (Jan. 10) — Digital Humanities, the Humanities, and the "Human"

          [Students are asked to do the readings for this class in advance of the course's first meeting]

• Focal Readings ("focal readings" are chosen to prompt discussion in class)
• Plato, from Phaedrus (the myth of Theuth and the invention of writing) [PDF]
• Hippolyte Taine, "Introduction" to History of English Literature (1863) [online in sequential sections: I | II | III | IV | V | VI | VII | VIII]
• Marshall McLuhan, excerpts from Understanding Media (1964) (read excerpts from "Introduction" and "The Medium is the Message")
• N. Katherine Hayles, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (2012), read pp. 27-31 on "Scale Matters" [PDF] (Google Books version)
• Alan Liu, "N + 1: A Plea for Cross-Domain Data in the Digital Humanities" (2016)

• Other Readings ("other readings" support or expand on themes of a particular class; students are free to browse, skip, or read at will)
• Drew S. Burk, "Living Network Ecologies: A Triptych on the Universe of Fernand Deligny -- Part 1" (2013)
• See also on Deligny's "wander lines": Cartes et lignes d'erre 

Class 2 (Jan. 17) — State of the Field

• Focal Readings Readings representing some of the key issues that have defined/are defining the digital humanities:
• Alan Liu, "Is Digital Humanities a Field? ‒ An Answer from the Point of View of Language" (2016) [PDF]
• Matthew Jockers, "Welcome to the Big Tent," DH 2011 conference, Stanford U., 19-22 June 2011.
• Stephen Ramsay, "On Building" (2011)
• Natalia Cecire, "Theory and the Virtues of Digital Humanities" (Introduction to section on "Conversations"), Journal of Digital Humanities 1.1 [PDF] (Winter 2011): 44-53.
• Alan Liu, "Where is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?" (2012)
• Moya Bailey, Anne Cong-Huyen, Alexis Lothian, and Amanda Phillips, "Reflections on a Movement: #transformDH, Growing Up" (2016)
• Miriam Posner, "What’s Next: The Radical, Unrealized Potential of Digital Humanities" (2016)
• Kim Gallon, "Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities" (2016)
• Elizabeth Losh, Jacqueline Wernimont, Laura Wexler, and Hong-an Wu, "Putting the Human Back into the Digital Humanities: Feminism, Generosity, and Mess" (2016)
• Domenico Fiormonte, "Toward a Cultural Critique of Digital Humanities" (2016)
• GO::DH (Global Outlook::Digital Humanities) [browse site]

• Other Readings
• Early History of Field:
• From "Humanities Computing" to Digital Humanities":
• Susan Hockey, "The History of Humanities Computing" (2004)
• John Unsworth, "What’s 'Digital Humanities' and How Did It Get Here?" (2012)
• Meredith Hindley, "The Rise of the Machines--NEH and the Digital Humanities: The Early Years" (2013)
• Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, "What is Digital Humanities and What's It Doing in English Departments?" [PDF] (2010)
• The early hypertext moment and hypertext literature:
• Robert Coover, "Literary Hypertext: The Passing of the Golden Age" (1999) 
• Scope of the Field (browse entries, titles, tables of contents in some of the following to gain a general sense of DH issues, methods, and tools):
• Methods and tools collections:
• DiRT (Digital Research Tools) Directory and DARIAH-DE (Digital Research Infrastructure for Arts and Humanities), "TaDiRaH: Taxonomy of DH Research Activities and Objects" (2014)| see also explanation of TaDiRaH
• DH Toychest (curated by Alan Liu)
• Essay collections or conferences:
• A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth (Blackwell, 2004)
• A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, ed. Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman (Blackwell, 2007)
• Debates in the Digital Humanities
• 2012 volume, ed. Matthew K. Gold (University of Minnesota Press, 2012); open access edition, 2013.
• 2016 volume, ed. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein (University of Minnesota Press, 2016); open access edition, 2016.
• Literary Studies in the Digital Age: An Evolving Anthology, ed. Kenneth M. Price and Ray Siemens (MLA Commons, 2013)
• Digital Humanities 2016 conference (DH2016), Kraków, Poland, 11-16 July 2016.
• The Dark Side of the Digital conference, U. Milwaukee, 2-4 May 2013. See also the later chapter titled "The Dark Side of the Humanities" in Debates in the Digital Humanities (2016), which includes papers based on/revised from the conference by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Richard Grusin, Patrick Jagoda, and Rita Raley.
• Digital Humanities Panels at MLA 2017 (list created by Carrie Johnston, ‏@CarrieEJohnston)

• Practicum: Getting Started in DH Course "practicums" are hands-on, small-scale exercises that ask students to experiment at a beginner's level with the tools of the digital humanities. The goal is not technical mastery but learning enough about the technologies to think about, and through, their concepts and also to discover which tools might be used in a student's future research.  In many cases, experience gained in the practicums will feed directly into discussion of conceptual issues in class. (See Assignments: Practicums).

• Class 2 Practicum Assignment - Getting Started in DH

Class 3 (Jan. 24) — Text Encoding

• Focal Readings
• Yin Liu, "Ways of Reading, Models for Text, and the Usefulness of Dead People" [PDF or HTML] (2013)
• Alan Liu, "Transcendental Data: Toward a Cultural History and Aesthetics of the New Encoded Discourse" (2004) (read only pp. 49-63)
• Wikipedia article on "Markup Language"
• C. M. [Michael] Sperberg-McQueen and Lou Burnard, "A Gentle Introduction to XML" (2004)
• Julia Flanders, "Basic Manuscript and Physical Document Encoding"
• Michael Witmore, "Text: A Massively Addressable Object" (2013)
• William Warner, Kimberly Knight, and UCSB Transliteracies History of Reading Group, "In the Beginning was the Word: A Visualization of the Page as Interface" (Flash animation)

• Other Readings
• Steven J. DeRose, David G. Durand, Elli Mylonas, and Allen H. Renear, "What is Text, Really?" [PDF] (1990)
• Susan Hockey, Allen Renear, and Jerome J. McGann, "Panel: What Is Text? A Debate On the Philosophical and Epistemological Nature of Text in the Light of Humanities Computing Research" (ALLC-ACH 1999 conference)
• cf., Allen Renear, Elli Mylonas, and David Durand, "Refining our Notion of What Text Really Is: The Problem of Overlapping Hierarchies" (1993) 
• Kari Kraus, "Conjectural Criticism: Computing Past and Future Texts" (2009) [read through paragraph 21]
• Alan Liu, "Escaping History: New Historicism, Databases, and Contingency" [PDF] (originally published 2004; chap. 9 of Liu, Local Transcendence (2008); manuscript version provided here for open access) (read only pp. 317-23 on origins and theory of the relational database)

• Practicum: Encoding
  
• Class 3 Practicum Assignment - Encoding
• (Folder of Exercises on Student Work page)

Class 4 (Jan. 31) — Text Analysis (1) - From Close Reading to Distant Reading

• Focal Readings
• Formalist "Close Reading"
• Cleanth Brooks,
• "The Heresy of Paraphrase" [PDF] from his Well Wrought Urn (1947) 
• "Keats's Sylvan Historian" from the same book
• Boris Tomashevsky, "Thematics" [PDF] (1925) [course password required]
• Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale (1928/1968), pp. 92-93
• "Distant-Reading"
  
• Franco Moretti
• Graphs, Maps, Trees (Verso, 2005), pp. 1-33, 91-92 [purchase this book in paperback from the UCSB bookstore or elsewhere]
• "'Operationalizing': or, the Function of Measurement in Modern Literary Theory" (2013) [PDF]
• Ted Underwood
• "Seven Ways Humanists Are Using Computers to Understand Text" (2015)
• "Genre, Gender, and Point of View" (2013)
• Ryan Heuser and and Long Le-Khac, "A Quantitative Literary History of 2,958 Nineteenth-Century British Novels: The Semantic Cohort Method" [PDF] (2012)
• Algee-Hewitt, Mark, Ryan Heuser, and Franco Moretti, "On Paragraphs: Scale,Themes, and Narrative Form" (2015) [PDF]
• Matthew Wilkens, "Genre, Computation, and the Varieties of Twentieth-Century U.S. Fiction" (2016)
• Andrew Piper, "Reading's Refrain: From Bibliography to Topology" [PDF] (2013)

• Other Readings
• Chad Wellmon, "Big Humanities" (2014) (on 19th-century philology as "big data")
• Kate Singer, "Digital Close Reading: TEI for Teaching Poetic Vocabularies" (2013)
• Tanya Clement, "Text Analysis, Data Mining, and Visualizations in Literary Scholarship" (2013)
• Stanford Literary Lab (Sarah Allison et al.), "Style at the Scale of the Sentence" [PDF] (2013)

• Practicum: Trying Some Text Analysis Tools
• Class 4 Practicum Assignment - Trying Some Text Analysis Tools
• (Folder of Exercises on Student Work page)
   
• Other Assignment Due Students should by this date submit to the instructor a list of "possible blog posts" for the blog post assignment in the course.

Class 5 (Feb. 7) — Text Analysis (2) - Topic Modeling

• Focal Readings
• David M. Blei,
•  "Probabalistic Topic Models" (2012) [Note: no need to follow the parts of the article that have math]
• "Topic Modeling and Digital Humanities" (2012)
• Edwin Chen, "Introduction to Latent Dirichlet Allocation" (2011)
• Ted Underwood,
• "Topic Modeling Made Just Simple Enough" (2012)
• "What Kinds of "Topics" Does Topic Modeling Actually Produce?" (2012)
• Matthew L. Jockers, "The LDA Buffet is Now Open; or, Latent Dirichlet Allocation for English Majors" (2011)
• Andrew Goldstone and Ted Underwood, "The Quiet Transformations of Literary Studies: What Thirteen Thousand Scholars Could Tell Us" [PDF] (2014) (preprint version)
• See Andrew Goldstone's site for exploring and visualizing the topic models on which "The Quiet Transformations of Literary Studies" is based. (See also Andrew Goldstone's new site for exploring and visualizing topic models 40 years of the Signs journal)
• John Mohr and Petko Bogdanov, "Topic Models: What They Are and Why They Matter [PDF]," (2013) [paywalled; UCSB students have free access through UCSB Library Proxy server] | [open-access manuscript version]
• Lisa M. Rhody, "Topic Modeling and Figurative Language" (2012)
• Benjamin M. Schmidt, "Words Alone: Dismantling Topic Models in the Humanities" (2012) -- Read the introductory section (up until the section on "topic modeling at sea")

• Other Readings:  Word Embedding/Vectors (Read for conceptual comprehension in the following sources. You do not need to follow the math or programming details.)
•  Bhaskar Mitra, "A Simple Introduction to Word Embeddings" (2016) (slideshow)
• "Vector Representations of Words" (TensorFlow tutorial)
• Benjamin Schmidt, "Word Embeddings for the Digital Humanities" (2015) [Note: there are scripts that run on this page that may cause your browser to freeze temporarily and ask if you wish to continue running the script. Choose to continue until the page fully loads.]

• Practicum: Trying Topic Modeling
• Class 5 Practicum Assignment - Trying Topic Modeling
• (Folder of Exercises on Student Work page)
  
  
• Other Assignment Due In class on this date, students will either form up into teams for their mock project prospectus assignment or decide to work individually on that assignment.
  

Class 6 (Feb. 14) — Social Network Analysis

• Focal Readings
• Wikipedia article on "Social Networks"
• David Easley and Jon Kleinberg.  Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World, Chap. 1 (Overview) [PDF] (2010) -- read only Chap. 1
• Stephen P. Borgatti,, et al. (2009), "Network Analysis in the Social Sciences" [PDF] [paywalled; UCSB students have free access through UCSB Library Proxy server]
• Scott B. Weingart, "Demystifying Networks, Parts I & II" (2011)
• Franco Moretti, "Network Theory, Plot Analysis," Stanford Literary Lab Pamphlet #2 (2011)
• Elson, David K., Nicholas Dames, and Kathleen R. McKeon, "Extracting Social Networks from Literary Fiction" [PDF] (2010)
• Elijah Meeks and Scott B. Weingart, "Introduction to Network Analysis and Representation" (play with the interactive tutorial on network visualization models and parameters)

• Other Readings
• John Scott, "Social Network Analysis" (1988) [paywalled; UCSB students have free access through UCSB Library Proxy server]
• Stacy Margolis, "Network Theory circa 1800: Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn" (2012) [paywalled; UCSB students have free access through UCSB Library Proxy server]
• Alan Liu, "From Reading to Social Computing" (2013)
• A few humanities social network projects: -- Browse the following projects:
• Six Degrees of Francis Bacon: Reassembling the Early Modern Social Network (2013) [Click on "?" at top right for documentation]
• Kindred Britain (2013) (see also essays & documentation from the developers)
• SNAC (Social Networks & Archival Contexts) | Prototype (2010-)
• RoSE (Research-oriented Social Environment) (2009-) (created at UCSB): About | White Paper [PDF]
• Yaddo Circles Prototype (demo video)
• Mapping the Republic of Letters (2008-) [See the case studies -- e.g., Locke's letters and related network visualizations]

• Practicum: Trying Social Network Analysis
  
• Class 6 Practicum Assignment - Trying Social Network Analysis
• (Folder of Exercises on Student Work page)

• Other Assignment Due Students (or teams) should by this date submit to the instructor a paragraph sketching the gist of a "possible mock project prospectus" for the mock project prospectus assignment in the course.  The paragraph is only provisional; it does not prevent changes in plan in future.

Class 7 (Feb. 21) — Digital Humanities & the Spatial Imagination (Mapping)

• Focal Readings
• Background: a few pieces to provoke thought about the history and intellectual traditions of mapping:
• Albert Borgmann, Holding On to Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium (1999) - Introduction
• Fernand Braudel and Annales historiography (e.g., Table of Contents [PDF] from The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1976)
• Michel Foucault, "Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias" [PDF]" (1967)
• Jason Farman, "Map Interfaces and the Production of Locative Media Space" [PDF] (2015)
• Terrigal High School, New South Wales, Australia, "Introduction to Aboriginal Art" [slideshow, PPT] [course password required]
• Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees (Verso, 2005), pp. 35-64 [purchase this book from the UCSB bookstore or elsewhere]
• Ian N. Gregory and David Cooper, "Geographical Technologies and the Interdisciplinary Study of Peoples and Cultures of the Past" [PDF] (2013)
• Ian N. Gregory, "Different Places, Different Stories: Infant Mortality Decline in England and Wales, 1851–1911" [PDF] (2008)
• Zephyr Frank, "Layers, Flows And Intersections: Jeronymo José De Mello And Artisan Life In Rio De Janeiro, 1840s-1880s" [PDF] [paywalled; UCSB students have free access through UCSB Library Proxy server]
• Barbara Piatti, et al., "Mapping Literature: Towards a Geography of Fiction" [PDF] (in Cartography and Art, ed. William Cartwright, et al., 2009) [paywalled; UCSB students have free access through UCSB Library Proxy server]
• See also the project associated with this essay: A Literary Atlas of Europe.

• Other Readings
• Sites to Browse:
• The Spatial History Project (including Richard White, "What is Spatial History?" [2010])
• ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World
• HyperCities
• Neatline Projects (see demos on Neatline site)
• Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761
• Google Lit Trips (using the downloadable .kmz files that overlay literary maps over satellite maps requires Google Earth)
• See also Walking Ulysses ("Enter into the world of James Joyce's novel, Ulysses, by following its characters as they walk the streets of Dublin on June 16, 1904")
• David Rumsey, "Reading Historical Maps Historically: How Spatial Technologies Can Enable Close, Distant and Dynamic Interpretations" (opening keynote at DH 2011 conference) (Youtube video; keynote begins at 37 min., 50 sec. in video) (See also David Rumsey Map Collection)
• Maria Popova, "An Atlas of Alternative Maps" (2014)
• John Klima, Project Gallery
• See also Rita Raley, "Statistical Material: Globalization and the Digital Art of John Klima" (2003) [paywalled; UCSB students have free access through UCSB Library Proxy server]

• Practicum: Mapping an Idea
• Class 7 Practicum Assignment - Mapping
• (Folder of Exercises on Student Work page)

Class 8 (Feb. 28) — Digital Humanities and the Temporal Imagination (Timelines, Archives, Media Archaeology)

• Focal Readings
• Timelines
• Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton, Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline (2013)
• Synopsis, quotations, and illustrations from the book from a Williams College 2011 course, "THEA 228: The Cartographic Imagination".
• Archives
• Luciana Duranti, "Archives as a Place" (1996)
• Kate Theimer, "Archives in Context and as Context" (2012)
• Yuk Hui, "Archivist Manifesto" (2013)
• Media Archaeology
• Friedrich A. Kittler, from Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986, trans. 1999), "Preface" and "Introduction" [PDF]
• Wolfgang Ernst, from Digital Memory and the Archive [PDF] (ed. Jussi Parikka, 2013). Read the two following essays:
  
• "Archives in Transition: Dynamic Media Memories"
• "Experimenting with Media Temporality: Pythagoras, Hertz, Turing"
• Jussi Parikka, from What is Media Archaeology (2012), "Archive Dynamics: Software Culture and Digital Heritage" (course password required)
• Lisa Gitelman, from Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (2006), "Introduction: Media as Historical Subjects" (course password required)
• Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, from Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (2008), "'Every Contact Leaves a Trace': Storage, Inscription, and Computer Forensics," pp. 36-50 (course password required)

• Other Readings
• Alan Liu, "Imagining the New Media Encounter" (2008)

• Practicum: Something Old, Something New
• Class 8 Practicum Assignment - Temporality
• (Folder of Exercises on Student Work page)

Class 9 (Mar. 7) — Critical Infrastructure Studies

• Focal Readings
• Contextual Frame for this Class
• Alan Liu, read first 12 pages of Alan's recent talk: “Toward Critical infrastructure Studies: Digital Humanities, New Media Studies, and the Culture of Infrastructure” [Word file | slides] University of Connecticut, Storrs. 23 February 2017. [course password required]
• Large Technical Systems STS approach
• Thomas P. Hughes, "Introduction" to Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930 [PDF] (1983) [read only the introduction]
• Bemward Joerges, "Large Technical Systems: Concepts and Issues" [PDF] (1988)
• Media Studies/Media Archaeological/Digital Humanities approaches
• Shannon Mattern, "Library as Infrastructure" (2014)
• Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski, "Introduction" to Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures (2015) [course password required]
• Research "Cyberinfrastructure
• ACLS, Our Cultural Commonwealth (The Report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences) (read pp. 6-40)"
• Sheila Anderson, "Thinking Infrastructure: What Are Research Infrastructures?" [PDF] (International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing, vol. 7, issues 1-2, March 2013) [paywalled; UCSB students have free access through UCSB Library Proxy server] --Note: accessible only through UCSB Library electronic journals by navigating to the specific issue of International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing)
  
• James Smithies, "Towards a Systems Analysis of the Humanities" (from his forthcoming The Digital Humanities and the Digital Modern) [course password required]
• Susan Brown, Tanya Clement, Laura Mandell, Deb Verhoeven, and Jacqueline Wernimont, “Creating Feminist Infrastructure in the Digital Humanities” (paper abstract for DH 2016 conference).
• Deb Verhoeven, "As Luck Would Have It: Serendipity and Solace in Digital Research Infrastructure" (2016)
• Michael Dieter, "The Virtues of Critical Technical Practice" (2014) [paywalled; UCSB students have free access through UCSB Library Proxy server]
• David Berry, "Tactical Infrastructures" (2016)

• Other Readings
• The "Maintenance," "Repair," and "Care" Movement
• Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel, "Hail the Maintainers!" (2016)
• Steven J. Jackson, "Rethinking Repair" [PDF] (2014)

• Practicum
• Class 9 Practicum Assignment - Critical Infrastructure Studies
• (Folder of Exercises on Student Work page)

Class 10 (Mar. 14) — Student Presentations of Project Prospectuses

• Other Assignment Due Student mock project prospectuses (description of assignment) should be online by this date (please place a post or link for your prospectus in the folder for Project Prospectus on the Student Work page for this course.  For effective presentations, students may want to create other online resources or slideshow presentations.