Eileen Gardiner and Ronald G. Musto, The Digital Humanities: A Primer for Students and Scholars, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). pp. 1–14.
Ann Burdick et al., “A Short Guide to Digital_Humanities,” in Digital_Humanities (Cambridge, 2012).
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.
Visit the Cuneiform Digital Library and view a cuneiform tablet from any one of the digitized tablets accessible on the site. 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.
Stephanie Ann Frampton, Empire of Letters: Writing in Roman Literature and Thought from Lucretius to Ovid (Oxford, 2018), pp. 1–12, 33–55. [posted on canvas]
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.
Introduction to International Image Interoperability Framework, or IIIF, as well as its necessity for the Polonsky Project
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 and view the digital facsimile of the manuscript page.
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.
Explore the Agas Map, and compare the spatial representation of that city to the Nahuatl Maps of the Mapas Project, paying close attention to the Oztoticpac Lands Map
Visit EMLO, and try to find your favorite Humanist or Enlightenment thinker’s letters with the traditional database search function.
Then Browse the catalogue by People and find a woman letter writer or recipient. View the graphs and visualizations of their correspondence by clicking on the author’s name.
Benedict Anderson, “Creole Pioneers,” in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, 3rd edition (New York: Zone Books, 2006), 47–65. [posted on canvas]
Search the newspapers digitized in the Chronicling America archive at the Library of Congress for the names of any of the historical figures cited in our readings. Choose one article from a newspaper mentioned or related to our secondary readings this week and read it. We will work with the text of this article in class on Wednesday.
Visit the Google Books Ngram Viewer website. This tool allows users to chart word usage over time. Choose three or four seemingly random words or names drawn from the newspaper article you selected from Chronicling America and enter them into the search box, separated by commas. Take a screenshot of the graph generated, and head to our Canvas discussion page.
Voyant Tools and lexical analysisPost to our Canvas discussion
Listen to Paul Robeson sing “Ballad for Americans,” broadcast on the radio show Pursuit of Happiness in 1940D. M. Ryfe, “Franklin Roosevelt and the Fireside Chats.” Journal of Communication 49, no. 4 (1999): 80–103. [posted on canvas]
Zachary Gershberg and Sean Illing, The Paradox of Democracy: Free Speech, Open Media, and Perilous Persuasion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022), TBD.
Visit TweetSets from George Washington University. Select an election-related dataset (from 2016 or 2018) and run a few searches through the set. Depending on what you search for (i.e. “electionfraud” or Russia, for example) you’ll be able to see the top accounts that used your search terms and the top websites linked to that language. Pay particular attention to the websites, and notice how many of them are social media posts.