Schedule of Readings and Assignments for English 238 (Winter 2017)
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)
- Other Readings ("other readings" support or expand on themes of a particular class; students are free to browse, skip, or read at will)
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":
- The early hypertext moment and hypertext literature:
- 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:
- 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 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)
- 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)
Class 4 (Jan. 31) — Text Analysis (1) - From Close Reading to Distant Reading
- Focal Readings
- Formalist "Close Reading"
- Cleanth Brooks,
- Boris Tomashevsky, "Thematics" [PDF] (1925) [course password required]
- Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale (1928/1968), pp. 92-93
- "Distant-Reading"
- Franco Moretti
- Ted Underwood
- 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)
Class 5 (Feb. 7) — Text Analysis (2) - Topic Modeling
- Focal Readings
- David M. Blei,
- Edwin Chen, "Introduction to Latent Dirichlet Allocation" (2011)
- Ted Underwood,
- 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)
- 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.)
- Practicum: Trying Topic Modeling
- 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)
- Practicum: Trying Social Network Analysis
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:
- 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]
- Practicum: Mapping an Idea
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)
- Archives
- 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)
- Practicum: Something Old, Something New
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
- 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
- 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
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.
John Unsworth, "What’s 'Digital Humanities' and How Did It Get Here?"
