Syllabus
Lecture/Discussion of Readings: Tuesdays, 11:00 am - 12:20 pm
Digital Lab Work: Thursdays, 11:00 am - 12:20 pm
Week 1: Introduction to Digital Humanities & Markdown
Readings
- Read Ann Burdick, A Short Guide to Digital Humanities (MIT Press, 2012) [Available on D2L]
- Watch this video from BBC4 Radio explaining the Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan’s theory: “The medium is the message.”
- Next, watch this video from the MIT Media Lab explaining how a research team used big data scraped from Wikipedia to test McLuhan’s theory.
Digital Assignments
- Before class, read and complete the Getting Started with Markdown lesson on The Programming Historian
- In class we’ll discuss text editors, go over Markdown syntax, and draft your author.md files for the course blog, https://technologies-of-history.github.io/spring-2026
Week 2: Special Collections and GitHub
Readings
- Special Collections visit to Burnett Library
Digital Assignments
- Before class, register for a GitHub account if you don’t already have one.
- In class, we’ll get you all added to the course organization and we’ll complete the Introduction to GitHub lesson to learn basic functionality of GitHub.
- Introduction to Digital Tools Assignment 1
Week 3: The ABCs of Philosophy & Computer Languages
Readings
- Jack Goody and Ian Watt, “The Consequences of Literacy,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 5 (April 1963), pp. 311–332. [Available from the TCU Library as an eBook.] Note: You should STOP reading at page 332.
- Marc Van De Mieroop, Chapter 1: “At the Time of Creation” from Philosophy before the Greeks: The Pursuit of Truth in Ancient Babylonia (Princeton, 2015), pp. 3–31. [Available from the TCU Library as an eBook.]
Digital Assignments
- Before class, visit the Cuneiform Digital Library and search for a translated cuneiform tablet. A good way to find a tablet that’s been translated is to run a “Full Search” and type a single word into the “Translation” search box. Use your imagination to think about what sorts of words or terms might be preserved on a cuneiform tablet, and come to class prepared to discuss your tablet.
- Before class, visit the Machine Translation and Automated Analyses of Cuneiform Languages and read their About page. Think about what it means to make a computer read ‘human’ languages, and what it means for humans to try to ‘read’ computer languages.
- Digital Tools Assignment 1 due on GitHub on Friday, January 30, by 11:59 pm
Week 4: Roman Epigraphy & Geolocation
Readings
- Ramsay MacMullen, “The Epigraphic Habit in the Roman Empire,” American Journal of Philology Vol. 103, no. 3 (1982): 233–246. [Available from the TCU Library.]
- Alison E. Cooley and Edward Bispham, Chapter 34: “Inscriptions,” from the Edinburgh Companion to Ancient Greece and Rome (Edinburgh, 2010), 262–274 [Available from the TCU Library as an eBook].
Digital Assignments
- Before class, read Section 3.1 “A technical guide to Latin epigraphy,” from Alison E. Cooley, The Cambridge Manual of Latin Epigraphy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 327–335 [Available from the TCU Library as an eBook.]
- Before class, visit the Epigraphic Database Heidelberg and select two epigraphic inscriptions to work with in class.
- In class, we’ll practice creating a Google MyMaps from a CSV file of inscription locations
- Introduction to Digital Tools Assignment 2
Week 5: Sacred Books & Illustrated Websites with IIIF
Readings
- Christopher de Hamel, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts: Twelve Journeys into the Medieval World (New York, 2016), pp. 52–94. [Available on D2L.]
- View the short series of videos demonstrating the preparation of a medieval manuscript from the British Library
Digital Assignments
- Visit the British Library and Bibliothèque nationale de France’s Polonsky Project and select one illuminated liturgical or biblical manuscript to work with in class
- Before class, read an Introduction to International Image Interoperability Framework, or IIIF, as well as this post about IIIF’s utility for the Polonsky Project
- In class, we’ll learn about different IIIF Viewers and play around with loading a IIIF manifest into the Mirador viewer
- In class work on Digital Tools Assignment 2, due Friday, February 20
Week 6: Documents and Paleography
Readings
- M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 1066–1307 (New York, 2012), pp. 44–73. [Available on D2L.]
- Marina Rustow, The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue (Princeton, 2020), 1–13, 55–82. [Available from the TCU Library as an eBook.] Note: Stop reading the introduction at p.13 and continue on to Chapter 2.
Digital Assignments
- Visit the Princeton Geniza Project and explore the project by searching the Project’s Digital Document Library and JTS Image Collection.
- Introduction to Digital Tools Assignment #3
- In class, browse the EditionCrafter site Old Books, New Science to which you’ll be contributing transcriptions for an XML-encoded digital edition. Choose which page from the manuscript you want to transcribe (folio 6r or later), and be sure you’re not working on the same page as a classmate. Begin to work through your transcription with a partner.
- Digital Tools 2 Assignment due on GitHub on Friday, February 20, by 11:59 pm
Week 7: Writing and Making with TEI
Readings
- Pamela H. Smith, “In the Workshop of History: Making, Writing, and Meaning.” West 86th 19, no. 1 (2012): 4–31. [Available from the TCU Library.]
- Browse Secrets of Craft and Nature, the annotated critical edition of a sixteenth-century French craft manual. Read the essay on Counterfeit Coral; watch the Video of lab researchers describing their efforts to reconstruct the recipe; and finally, read the translation of the recipe
Digital Assignments
- In class, we’ll return to the recipe for Counterfeit Coral in Secrets of Craft and Nature to see how that recipe is encoded with XML
- Introduction to basic TEI thanks to the Women Writers Project
- In class, we’ll work through your transcriptions to add XML tags according to the standards of TEI
Week 8: Print and XML
Readings
- Kai-wing Chow, “Reinventing Gutenberg: Woodblock and Movable-Type Printing in Europe,” in Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), pp. 169–192. [Available on D2L]
- Anthony Grafton, “The Importance of Being Printed,” Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies (Autumn 1980): 265–286. [Available on D2L]
Digital Assignments
- Read David Birnbaum, “What is XML and why should humanists care? An even gentler introduction to XML.” STOP READING at “Entities and numerical character references”
- View the copy of Thomas Tusser’s Points of Good husbandrie held at Princeton University Library and annotated by Gabriel Harvey at The Archaeology of Reading
- In class, we’ll view the XML data for each of the pages of the book annotated by Harvey, downloaded from the AOR, as well as the XML file generated for the Dyngley edition, in the dyngley-data repository in our course GitHub organization
Week 9: Maps as Timelines
Readings
- Barbara E. Mundy, “Mesoamerican Cartography,”from The History of Cartography, Vol. II (Chicago, 1998), 183–240. [Available on D2L.]
Digital Assignments
- Explore the various Mesoamerican maps collected and annotated as part of the Mapas Project, paying close attention to the Oztoticpac Lands Map
- Play around with StoryMap, a digital map and storytelling tool created by the Knightlab at Northwestern University
- Digital Tools 3 Assignment due on GitHub on Friday, March 13 by 11:59 pm
Week 10: Making Maps & Geocoding
Readings
- Sara Caputo, “Trailblazers” and “Writing on Water,” from Tracks on the Ocean (Chicago, 2024), pp. 42–103. [Available from the TCU Library as an eBook.]
Digital Assignments
- Play around with the global map Age of Exploration
- Read the Programming Historian’s Introduction to Map Warper and Displaying a Georeferenced Map in Story Map JS
- Introduction to Digital Tools Assignment #4
Week 11: Enlightenment Letters and Relational Databases
Readings
- Carol Pal, Republic of Women: Rethinking the Republic of Letters in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1–21. [Available as an eBook in the TCU Library.]
- Dena Goodman, Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 1–15, 100–132. [Available on D2L]
Digital Assignments
- Visit Mapping the Republic of Letters to view a visualization of Voltaire’s correspondence network produced on Palladio.
- Next, search EMLO for women writers and choose one writer to briefly research for discussion in class.
- In class, we’ll discuss how data from the EMLO project is structured using an SQL relational database and use OpenRefine to clean a dataset generated from EMLO’s women writer’s correspondence catalogue
- Digital Tools Assignment #4 due on GitHub on Friday, April 3 by 11:59 pm
Week 12: Newspapers and Network Analysis
Readings
- Benedict Anderson, “Creole Pioneers,” in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, 3rd edition (New York: Zone Books, 2006), 47–65. [Available from the TCU Library as an [eBook](https://tcu.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01TCU_INST/5m6o0r/alma9974992317108721.]
- Jordan E. Taylor, “The Reign of Error: North American Information Politics and the French Revolution, 1789–1795” The Journal of the Early Republic vol. 39, no. 3 (2019): 437–466. [Available from the TCU Library.]
Digital Assignments
- Search the newspapers digitized in the Chronicling America archive at the Library of Congress for the period 1789-1795. Find one news story relating to the French Revolution.
- In class, we’ll practice loading a newspaper dataset into Cytoscape to view network relationships
- Introduction to Digital Tools Assignnment #5
Week 13: Mass Media and Politics
Readings
- Listen to the podcast, The First Family of Radio, from American RadioWorks
- Listen to Paul Robeson sing “Ballad for Americans,” broadcast on the radio show Pursuit of Happiness in 1940D.
- Listen to FDR’s fireside chat on “The WPA and Social Security,” from April 28, 1935 on the The First Family of Radio site
Digital Assignments
- Read the Programming Historian’s Editing Audio with Audacity
- In-class work with your women’s correspondence datasets and Cytoscape
Week 14: Democracy in the Digital Age
Readings
- Zachary Gershberg and Sean Illing, The Paradox of Democracy: Free Speech, Open Media, and Perilous Persuasion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022), TBD.
Digital Assignments
- Before class, read Axel Bruns, “The Library of Congress Twitter Archive: A Failure of Historic Proportions,” Medium, January 1, 2018.
- Before class, read “Arab Spring Twitter data now available (sort of)”
- In class, we’ll visit the GitHub repository for Hydrator, an application for working with Twitter data scraped from Twitter’s API. Read the README file.
- Digital Tools 5 Assignment due on GitHub on Friday, April 24 at 11:59 pm
Week 15: Wrap-Up Discussion & Podcast Prep
No readings this week, but come prepared to discuss your ideas for your final podcast.
For More Information
Click the menu at the top left to view general course information or to read details on assignments, or to navigate to our course blog, where students publish their work.