Course Requirements
Our course will meet twice per week: Tuesdays will begin with a short lecture, followed by discussion of secondary scholarship; Thursdays are our “digital lab” days, in which we will learn about a particular digital tool and explore its applicability for presenting historical knowledge to a wider public.
In-Class Reading Responses
Students will be expected to complete 30–50 pages of reading of historical scholarship every week. At the instructor’s discretion, students will be asked to respond to these readings in brief in-class writings assignments, which will assess the student’s completion and comprehension of the readings and challenge the student to think critically about their historical arguments. Responses will be graded as Fail/Pass/Excel according to the following criteria:
- Fail (50%): The assignment was completed with no evidence of student engagement with the readings.
- Pass (80%): The assignment was completed, with some evidence of student engagement with the reading.
- Excel (100%): The assignment was completed, with evidence of considerable student engagement with the reading.
In-class writing assignments may not be made up. If an assignment is missed due to an excused absence, you will receive an “NG” (No Grade). If an assignment is missed due to an unexcused absence, you will receive a zero. Your lowest grade on these assignments will be dropped at the end of the semester.
Digital Tools Assignments
Digital Tools Assignment #1: Communicating Simply
In this assignment, students will produce a blog post reflecting on how the nature of a communication technology informs the structures of knowledge that it can communicate. Students will write about the emergence of writing systems in the ancient world in relation to the development of “simple” or “static” communications technologies for digital scholarship. Students will produce this assignment using those simple digital tools: in Markdown syntax, for publication on our course blog, hosted with Jekyll through GitHub pages, thus demonstrating mastery of foundational digital skills. In their post, students will reflect on how the structure and form of a writing system–whether it be cuneiform syllabaries, alphabetic ancient Greek, or computer languages like HTML or Markdown–condition what sort of ideas or outcomes can be produced from that language.
Read detailed instructions with tutorials here.
Digital Tools Assignment #2: Showing History
In this assignment, students will produce a blog post that reflects on the presence of public writing across the Roman empire. Using geolocation data and images from the Epigraphic Database Heidelberg, students will create a post discussing at least four surviving artifacts of Roman epigraphy and what these surviving artifacts suggest about Roman attitudes toward writing. This post will include an embedded Google MyMaps depicting the original location of these artifacts, as well as an embedded Mirador IIIF viewer so that users can compare epigraphic images side-by-side.
Read detailed instructions with tutorials here.
Digital Tools Assignment #3: Making Text into Data
In this assignment, students will produce a TEI-encoded transcription of a medical recipe from a fifteenth-century manuscript as a means of understanding the relationship between writing and doing in the early modern world. Students will contribute their transcription to an XML file in our course GitHub repository, which the class will then publish using the digital publication tool, EditionCrafter. Each student will also be responsible for producing a brief blog post describing their TEI heirarchy within their transcription, as well as the materials and methods represented in their medical recipe, and the relationship between technical writing and making, whether it be a website or a medical ointment.
Read detailed instructions with tutorials here.
Digital Tools Assignment #4: Mapping History
In this assignment, students will produce a blog post reflecting on how maps are interpretive pieces of communication that tell a particular story, whether that be a history of Mesoamerican conquest or European ‘discovery.’ The blog post will feature an interactive StoryMap made with a geocoded and “warped” 1569 map of the world by Gerard Mercator. This StoryMap should present geospatial data on one of the major sixteenth-, seventeenth-, or eighteenth-century voyages of European exploration drawn from the dataset made available by the Age of Exploration project. Students will produce a narrative post explaining how their selected voyage brought different cultures into contact, and how that contact left its imprint on the geopolitical boundaries we see on the contemporary globe today.
Detailed instructions and tutorials coming soon.
Digital Tools Assignment #5: Networks and Knowledge
In this assignment, students will produce a blog post analyzing the centrality of women within the early modern Republic of Letters, using datasets generated from Early Modern Letters Online. This post will include a visualization of one decade’s worth of correspondence involving women authors or recipients using Cytoscape, an open-access software for performing network analysis. The blog post should also contain a description and historical contextualization of at least one of the correspondents central to your network. Finally, students should articulate how their network expands our understanding of the materials, methods, actors, and ideas that gave rise to the period known as the Enlightenment.
Detailed instructions and tutorials coming soon.
Final Evaluative Exercise
This course has emphasized how digital tools and technologies facilitate different means of engaging with historical evidence and presenting historical narratives. For your final assignment, you’ll use a simple digital tool–an audio recorder and audio player, embedded in our site–to produce and share a 10-minute podcast about the impact of one of the communications technologies we’ve covered in this class, excluding our final week’s engagement with social media. Your podcast should convice your listeners why the technology you’ve chosen is the most significant communications revolution in history by comparing it with at least three other technologies discussed in the course. Finally, your podcast will reflect on how your chosen revolution is or is not similar to the ongoing revolution in digital communications technologies through which we’re all living. Your podcast will be shared in a post that includes show notes with links to any scholarship referenced in your episode, as well as links to any digital projects or archives you discuss.
Detailed instructions with tutorials coming soon.
Submission Information
Remember: All ssignments will be submitted via a pull request in our course GitHub repository. Your final response paper and in-class reading responses will be submitted to our course D2L.
Course Assignments and Final Grade
Weighted Percentages
| Assignments | Percentage |
|---|---|
| Participation | 10% |
| In-Class Reading Responses | 15% |
| Digital Tools Assignments: | 60% total |
| Assignment #1 | 5% |
| Assignment #2 | 10% |
| Assignment #3 | 15% |
| Assignment #4 | 15% |
| Assignment #5 | 15% |
| Final Podcast | 15% |
Grading Scales
| Grade | Points |
|---|---|
| A | 93–100 |
| A- | 90-92.99 |
| B+ | 87–89.99 |
| B | 83–86.99 |
| B- | 80–82.99 |
| C+ | 77–79.99 |
| C | 73–76.99 |
| C- | 70–72.99 |
| D+ | 67–69.99 |
| D | 63–66.99 |
| D- | 60–62.99 |
| F | 0–59.99 |