L597: Digital Humanities: Information Technology and the Study of the Humanities: Syllabus

Description

This course is an introduction to the use of information technology in literary and humanistic study. We will survey the field of digital humanities, or humanities computing as it is sometimes called, from electronic scholarly editing, to the computational analysis of style, theme, and structure, to considerations of the cultural impact of information technology on scholarly research, publishing, and the academy. We will also study several specific technologies in detail—eXtensible Markup Language (XML), UNIX operating system fundamentals, and text and image processing—establishing a tool set for building compelling Web-based scholarship. Students will be expected to generate critical work on subjects related to digital humanities and to develop a Web-based scholarly project.

Prerequisites

L571 or equivalent, or permission of instructor.

Texts

Required

Church, Kenneth Ward. Unix for Poets. n.d. 1 Dec. 2003. <http://www.research.att.com/~kwc/tutorials/unix_for_poets.ps>.

Harold, Elliotte Rusty and W. Scott Means. XML in a Nutshell. 2nd ed. Sebastopol: O'Reilly, 2002. (One copy currently on reserve in B-SLIS; usually located in B-SWAIN.)

McGann, Jerome J. Radiant Textuality: Literature After the World Wide Web. New York: Palgrave, 2001. (One copy available in B-MAIN.)

Format

The course format will alternate between formal instruction and seminar-style discussion.

Assignments

Technical Exercises

There will be a series of five technical exercises throughout the course. Each exercise will be worth 20 points, resulting in 100 total points, which will account for 10% of the final grade.

Presentations/Papers

Each student will develop two presentations (about 15 minutes each). The first will be on an additional reading the student finds particularly relevant to his or her own research interests and will be due on October 7th. The second will provide an overview and critique the design and utility of an existing digital humanities Web project and will be due on November 11th. Presentations should be accompanied by a five to seven page paper.

Web Project

Each student will develop a Web-based digital humanities project. An example project might be a digital edition of a smaller literary work, such as a volume of poetry, a children's book, or a short story. A project Web site for this digital edition would support the search and display of the text (and, if applicable, illustrations) along with supplementary editorial information such as metadata, annotations, supplementary texts, etc. There are countless possible variations on this basic example. For instance, the edition may include supplementary audio or visual media types; it may include a topic map and navigation based on this topic map; or the text or critical methodology may require custom TEI extensions (i.e., new elements and attributes not available in the base TEI vocabulary).

You are encouraged to follow the "release early and often" philosophy of development. A detailed project proposal will be submitted in the fourth week of class on September 23rd. A "beta" version of the project must be released during the eighth week of class on October 21st, and subsequent versions, showing substantial development from the previous version, will be released throughout the rest of the semester, with the final version due on December 16th.

A project will typically include underlying data (e.g, a TEI XML text), a Web site, and software or scripting that provides functionality for the Web site. The beta version should show some progress in all three of these areas. For instance, in the case of a digital critical edition, the beta version may include a partially completed TEI version of the text, preliminary designs for the Web site, and some basic software or scripting that allows basic searching of the TEI text.

By the end of the semester, the project should have a professional appearance and implement the functional specifications included in the project proposal. The project will receive a letter grade based on the project proposal, the development process, and the "final" version of the project at the end of the semester (though you are encouraged to continue to develop your project after the semester concludes).

Grading Policies

Letter Grade Definitions

All grades will be assigned according to the Indiana University School of Library and Information Science Definitions of Letter Grades.

Weighting

Assignments will be weighted as follows:

Assignment

% of Grade

Due Date

Technical Exercises

10%

Presentation/Paper 1

25%

30 September

Presentation/Paper 2

25%

11 November

Web Project

40%

Proposal:	23 September
Beta Version:	21 October
Final Version:	16 December

Late Submissions

All late assignments will be penalized by lowering the earned grade one grade level (e.g., from A- to B-; from B to C) for each day that the assignment is late.

Schedule

02 September	What is Humanities Computing? Readings McCarty, Willard. “Humanities Computing.” <http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/wlm/essays/encyc/>. McGann, Jerome J. “Introduction. Beginning Again: Humanities and Digital Culture, 1993-2000.”Radiant Textuality: Literature After the World Wide Web. New York: Palgrave, 2001.1-19. Rockwell, Geoffrey. “Is humanities computing an academic discipline?” <http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/hcs/rockwell.html>.
09 September	No class. John Walsh will be presenting/attending at the Digital Resources for the Humanities conference.
16 September	Hypertext theory Readings Aarseth, Espen J. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997. 41-51. Landow, George. Hypertext 2.0. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997. 1-89. McGann, Jerome J. “The Rationale of Hypertext.” Radiant Textuality: Literature After the World Wide Web. New York: Palgrave, 2001.53-74.
23 September	XML Overview Readings Harold, Elliotte Rusty and W. Scott Means. XML in a Nutshell. 2nd ed. Sebastopol: O'Reilly, 2002. 3-135. Sperberg-McQueen, C. M. and Lou Burnard, eds. Guidelines for Text Encoding and Interchange. 2 vols. Oxford: TEI Consortium, 2002. 05 April 2004 <http://www.tei-c.org/P4X/>. Chapter 2: A Gentle Introduction to XML. Assignment Due Project Proposal
30 September	Xpath/XSLT Overview Readings Harold, Elliotte Rusty and W. Scott Means. XML in a Nutshell. 2nd ed. Sebastopol: O'Reilly, 2002. 136-174, 202-233, 416-457.
07 October	Text Digitization and Encoding Readings Burnard, Lou. “On the Hermeneutic Implications of Text Encoding”. November 1998. 5 April 2004. <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~lou/wip/herman.htm>. McGann, Jerome J. “Editing as a Theoretical Pursuit.” Radiant Textuality: Literature After the World Wide Web. New York: Palgrave, 2001.75-87. McGann, Jerome J. “Rethinking Textuality.” Radiant Textuality: Literature After the World Wide Web. New York: Palgrave, 2001.137-160. Assignment Due Paper 1: Response to reading.
14 October	Textual Analysis Readings Ramsay, Stephen. “Toward an Algorithmic Criticism.” Literary and Linguistic Computing. 18 (2003): 167-74. Stéfan Sinclair. “Computer-Assisted Reading: Reconceiving Text Analysis.” Literary and Linguistic Computing. 18 (2003): 174-184. Bradley, John. “Finding a Middle Ground between 'Determinism' and 'Aesthetic Indeterminacy': a Model for Text Analysis Tools.” Literary and Linguistic Computing. 18 (2003): 185-207. Rockwell, Geoffrey. “What is Text Analysis, Really?” Literary and Linguistic Computing. 18 (2003): 209-219. Corns, Thomas N. Afterword. Literary and Linguistic Computing. 18 (2003): 221-223. Assignment Due "Beta" version of project.
21 October	Image Digitization and Visual Resource Metadata Readings Drucker, Johanna. “The Ontology of the Digital Image.” Reimagining Textuality: Textual Studies in the Late Age of Print. Ed. Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux and Neil Fraistat. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2002. Keeler, Mary. “The Place of Images in a World of Text.” Computers and the Humanities. 36 (2002): 75-93. Viscomi, Joseph. “Digital Facsimilies: Reading the William Blake Archive.” Computers and the Humanities. 36 (2002): 27-48.
28 October	Text Encoding Initiative: Introduction, Basic Document Structure, the TEI Header Readings Siemens, Raymond G. “A New Computer-assisted Literary Criticism?” Computers and the Humanities. 36 (2002): 259-267. Sperberg-McQueen, C. M. and Lou Burnard, eds. Guidelines for Text Encoding and Interchange. 2 vols. Oxford: TEI Consortium, 2002. 05 April 2004 <http://www.tei-c.org/P4X/>. Chapters 3 - 7.
04 November	Text Encoding Initiative: Prose, Poetry, Drama Readings Schreibman, Susan. “Computer-mediated Texts and Textuality: Theory and Practice”. Computers and the Humanities. 36 (2002): 283-293. Sperberg-McQueen, C. M. and Lou Burnard, eds. Guidelines for Text Encoding and Interchange. 2 vols. Oxford: TEI Consortium, 2002. 05 April 2004 <http://www.tei-c.org/P4X/>. Chapters 8 - 10.
11 November	Text Encoding Initiative: Additional Tag Sets and TEI Modifications Readings Sperberg-McQueen, C. M. and Lou Burnard, eds. Guidelines for Text Encoding and Interchange. 2 vols. Oxford: TEI Consortium, 2002. 05 April 2004 <http://www.tei-c.org/P4X/>. Chapters 14, 15, 17, 18, 20, 22, and 29. Assignment Due Paper 2: Evaluation of digital humanities project.
18 November	Publishing TEI Documents Readings Mazzocchi, Stefano. Introducing Cocoon. 13 Feb 2004. Apache Software Foundation. 09 Apr 2004. <http://cocoon.apache.org/2.1/introduction.html Kumar, Pankaj and Davanum Srinivas. Understanding Apache Cocoon. 27 Oct 2003. Apache Software Foundation. 04 April 2004. <http://cocoon.apache.org/2.1/userdocs/concepts/index.html>. Ratz, Sebastian. XSL Stylesheets for TEI XML. 27 Jan 2003. TEI Consortium. 09 Apr 2004. <http://www.tei-c.org/Stylesheets/teixsl.html>.
25 November	Metadata, KM, and Ontology Formats: Introduction Readings Noy, Natlaya F. and Deborah L. McGuinness. “Ontology Development 101: A Guide to Creating Your First Ontology.” n.d. Stanford University. 12 April 2004. <http://protege.stanford.edu/publications/ontology_development/ontology101-noy-mcguinness.html>. Obrst, Leo, and Howard Liu. “Knowledge Representation, Ontological Engineering, and Topic Maps.” XML Topic Maps: Creating and Using Topic Maps for the Web. Ed. Jack Park and Sam Hunting. Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2003.
02 December	Metadata, KM, and Ontology Formats Readings Bray, Tim. “What is RDF?” 24 Jan 2001. O'Reilly. 12 April 2004. <http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/01/24/rdf.html>. Garshol, Lars Marius. “Metadata? Thesauri? Taxonomies? Topic Maps!: Making Sense of It All”. n.d. Ontopia. 06 April 2004. <http://www.ontopia.net/topicmaps/materials/tm-vs-thesauri.html>. Pepper, Steve. “The TAO of Topic Maps”. n.d. Ontopia. 12 April 2004. <http://www.ontopia.net/topicmaps/materials/tao.html>.
09 December	Project Presentations
16 December	Project Presentations Assignment Due Final version of project.

Resources

Journals

The three major journals devoted to digital humanities are:

Computers and the Humanities, the journal of the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH), http://www.ach.org/. (Available in B-MAIN.)

Literary and Linguistic Computing, the journal of the Association of Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC), http://www.allc.org/. (Available in B-MAIN.)

TEXT Technology: The Journal of Computer Text Processing, http://texttechnology.mcmaster.ca/. (Available in B-MAIN.)

Email Discussion List

The primary email discussion list for digital humanities is Humanist. You may subscribe and search the archives at http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/.

Conferences

Major conferences devoted to digital humanities include:

Date: (unknown) (revised 08/06/2004) . Author: John A. Walsh (revised jawalsh).

L597: Digital Humanities: Information Technology and the Study of the Humanities: Syllabus

Description

Prerequisites

Texts

Required

Recommended

Format

Assignments

Technical Exercises

Presentations/Papers

Web Project

Grading Policies

Letter Grade Definitions

Weighting

Late Submissions

Schedule

Resources

Journals

Email Discussion List

Conferences