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 due Tuesday, January 13
- 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 due Thursday, January 15
- 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.
Week 2: Special Collections and GitHub
No readings due Tuesday, January 20
- Special Collections visit to Burnett Library
Digital Assignments due Thursday, January 22
- 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
- Introduction to Digital Tools Assignment 1
Week 3: The ABCs of Philosophy & Computer Languages
Readings due Tuesday, January 27
Because the university has cancelled classes due to inclement weather on Tuesday, January 27, we’ll combine the Tuesday and Thursday assignments for this week
- 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.]
- In class, we’ll view about 20 minutes of this NOVA special on The First Alphabet
Digital Assignments due Thursday, January 29
- 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 an “Advanced Search” and in the “Translation” search box under “Inscriptional Data,” type a single word. 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. We’ll browse their GitHub repos with code for machine translation in class.
Week 4: Roman Epigraphy & Geolocation
Readings due Tuesday, February 3
- 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 due Thursday, February 5
- 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 one epigraphic inscription and one Roman region to focus on for your digital tools assignment
- In class, we’ll generate a csv file of inscription locations in a Roman province and work to add geolocation data from Pleiades
- Introduction to Digital Tools Assignment 2
- Digital Tools Assignment 1 due on GitHub on Friday, February 6, by 11:59 pm
Week 5: Sacred Books & Illustrated Websites with IIIF
Readings due Tuesday, February 10
- Christopher de Hamel, The Book: A History of the Bible (London, 2001), pp. 1–39. [Available on D2L.]
- In class, we’ll view the short series of videos demonstrating the preparation of a medieval manuscript from the British Library
Digital Assignments due Thursday, February 12
- 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 due Tuesday, February 17
- 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.
- Introduction to Digital Tools Assignment #3
Digital Assignments due Thursday, February 19
- Visit the Princeton Geniza Project and explore the project by searching the Project’s Digital Document Library and JTS Image Collection.
- In class, browse the EditionCrafter site Old Books, New Science to which you’ll be contributing transcriptions for an XML-encoded digital edition. Begin working on the page of the manuscript you’re been assigned to transcribe (folio 6r or later), following the directions outlined in your Digital Tools Assignment #3. Partner with a classmate so the two of you can check each other’s transcriptions. Two sets of eyes is better than one!
- Digital Tools 2 Assignment due on GitHub on Friday, February 20, by 11:59 pm
Week 7: Writing and Making with TEI
Readings due Tuesday, February 24
- 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 due Thursday, February 26
- 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
- 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”
- Introduction to basic TEI thanks to the Women Writers Project
- In class, we’ll go over your transcriptions of TCC MS O.8.35 and begin to add XML tags according to TEI standards
Week 8: Print and XML
Readings due Tuesday, March 3
- 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]
- Elizabeth Eisenstein, “In the Wake of the Printing Press” The Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress Vol. 35, no. 3 (July 1978): 183–197. [Available from the TCU Library]
- Anthony Grafton, “The Importance of Being Printed,” Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies (Autumn 1980): 265–286. [Available from the TCU library.]
Digital Assignments due Thursday, March 5
- 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
- In class, we’ll work through the process of merging your transcriptions into the XML file for Old Books, New Attitudes
- Digital Tools 3 Assignment Part I due on GitHub by Friday, March 6 by 11:59 pm
Week 9: Maps as Timelines
Readings due Tuesday, March 10
- Barbara E. Mundy, “Mapping the Aztec Capital: The 1524 Nuremburg Map of Tenochtitlan, its Sources and Meanings,” Imago Mundi 50, no. 1 (1998): 11-33. [Available from the TCU Library.]
Digital Assignments due Thursday, March 12
- Explore the various Mesoamerican maps collected and annotated as part of the Mapas Project, paying close attention to the Oztoticpac Lands Map
- In class, we’ll get everyone set up with their ArcGIS Online account and discuss Geographic Information Systems and their utility for encoding all sorts of information onto maps
- Introduction to Digital Tools Assignment #4
- Digital Tools 3 Assignment Part II due on GitHub by Friday, March 13 by 11:59 pm
Spring Break March 14–22
Week 10: Making Maps & Geocoding
Readings due Tuesday, March 24
- 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 due Thursday, March 26
- Play around with the global map of sea voyages on the Age of Exploration site; select a voyage of exploration from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries to focus on for your next digital tools assignment.
- Next, visit Old Maps Online and click Maps and then Explore Maps. You use both the timeline slider and the map function to find a map that roughly coincides with the era and region of the voyage data you’re working with. Make sure the map you choose is from the David Rumsey Map Collection. [NB: You can tell it’s from that collection because the David Rumsey logo is a little black box that will show up to the left of the map in the listing.]
- In class, we’ll work with that map to create a georeferenced layer in ArcGIS that you’ll then use for your Digital Tools 4 Assignment.
Week 11: Enlightenment Letters and Relational Databases
Readings due Tuesday, March 31
- Carol Pal, Republic of Women: Rethinking the Republic of Letters in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1–21. [Available from the TCU Library as an eBook.]
- Dena Goodman, Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 1–15, 100–132. [Available on D2L]
Digital Assignments due Thursday, April 2
- Before class, visit Mapping the Republic of Letters to view a visualization of Voltaire’s correspondence network produced on Palladio.
- Next, browse the results you see at Early Modern Letters Online, which are filtered here to show only letters sent by, received by, or mentioning women
- In class, we’ll discuss how data from the EMLO project is structured using an SQL relational database and generate datasets for our Digital Tools 5 assignment
- Introduction to Digital Tools Assignnment #5
- Digital Tools Assignment #4 due on GitHub on Friday, April 3 by 11:59 pm
Week 12: Newspapers and Network Analysis
Readings due Tuesday, April 7
- 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.]
- 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 due Thursday, April 9
- Before class, 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 work with this newspaper dataset to generate a network using Palladio
- Before class, please download OpenRefine and Cytoscape
- In class, we’ll practice refining our data scraped from EMLO and structuring our data for import into Cytoscape
Week 13: Mass Media and Politics
Readings due Tuesday, April 14
- 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 due Thursday, April 16
- Read the Programming Historian’s Editing Audio with Audacity
- In-class work with your women’s correspondence datasets and Cytoscape
- Digital Tools 5 Assignment due on GitHub on Friday, April 17 at 11:59 pm
Week 14: Democracy in the Digital Age
Readings due Tuesday, April 21
- Matthew Hindman, The Internet Trap: How the Digital Economy Builds Monopolies and Undermines Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 1–14. [Available from the TCU Library.]
- Nathaniel Persily, “Can Democracy Survive the Internet?” Journal of Democracy Vol. 28, no. 2 (April 2017): 63–76. [Available from the TCU Library.]
Digital Assignments due Thursday, April 23
- 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. Please read the README file.
Week 15: AI, the Final Revolution?
Peer Review of Final Podcasts due Tuesday, April 28
- Read AI Slopaggedon and the OSS Maintainers, RedMonk, Feb. 3, 2026
- Read AI is Coming for the Past, too, New York Times Opinion, Jan. 28, 2024
- Come prepared with an outline of your final podcast script for peer review.
For More Information
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