Digital Humanities Questions & Answers » Tag: syllabus

Digital Humanities Questions & Answers » Tag: syllabus - Recent Posts http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/tags/syllabus Digital Humanities Questions & Answers » Tag: syllabus - Recent Posts en-US Sun, 19 May 2013 11:18:42 +0000 http://bbpress.org/?v=1.0.2 <![CDATA[Search]]> q http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/search.php pcfyfe@gmail.com on "What texts would you use in a "Literature of Information Overload" course?" http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/what-texts-would-you-use-in-a-literature-of-information-overload-course#post-1953 Wed, 27 Mar 2013 01:00:08 +0000 pcfyfe@gmail.com 1953@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ Sounds great and I'd be interested to see how the syllabus develops, if you're willing to share it as you go. A few suggestions to fill in some of the C19th: Have a look at Andy Stauffer’s article “Ruins of Paper: Dickens and the Necropolitan Library” (RaVoN 2007) <a href="http://id.erudit.org/iderudit/016700ar">http://id.erudit.org/iderudit/016700ar</a> and the sources within, including Dickens’s wonderful Household Words piece “Bill-Sticking” <a href="http://www.djo.org.uk/household-words/volume-ii/page-601.html">http://www.djo.org.uk/household-words/volume-ii/page-601.html</a>. Speaking of Dickens, you could both theorize and experience information overload by assigning Bleak House, a novel deeply interested in the circulation of documents as well as the shortcomings of institutions designed to manage them. Reading an enormous novel would also give you occasion to reflect on modes of reading, memory habits, etc. then and now. On the shorter side, try George Eliot’s fascinating novella The Lifted Veil, in which info overload is figured as uncanny omniscience. Richard Menke has a chapter in Telegraphic Realism which brilliantly links those thematics to the emergence of photography. Also, you might check out some of the references to the information overload within the C19th periodical press in <a href="http://diginole.lib.fsu.edu/eng_faculty_publications/1/">this article</a>. Lastly, add to your critical contexts list David Weinberger’s recent Too Big to Know. Good luck! -- Paul Dorothea Salo on "What texts would you use in a "Literature of Information Overload" course?" http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/what-texts-would-you-use-in-a-literature-of-information-overload-course#post-1948 Mon, 25 Mar 2013 02:33:33 +0000 Dorothea Salo 1948@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ What? No Memex? <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/">There must be Memex</a>. Memex is obligatory. Re the above suggestion, I have <a href="http://pinboard.in/u:dsalo/t:trithemius">an entire linklist</a> that is more or less Trithemian that may be of use. Also a <a href="http://misc.yarinareth.net/trithemius.html">half-assed but Creative Commonsed translation</a> of some of the Good Bits. Apologize to your students for my abysmal Latin skills. jean_bauer on "What texts would you use in a "Literature of Information Overload" course?" http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/what-texts-would-you-use-in-a-literature-of-information-overload-course#post-1947 Sat, 23 Mar 2013 15:30:30 +0000 jean_bauer 1947@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ I think you have a great list already. One work I like to have students read, is De Laude Scriptorum (In Praise of Scribes) by Johannes Trithemius. It was written in 1492 and is a call for monks to continue the scribal tradition despite the invention of moveable type. I've found it be be an excellent conversation starter on how texts are created, the modern emphasis on "original" work, and a nice starting point for a discussion of information overload. Josh Honn on "What texts would you use in a "Literature of Information Overload" course?" http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/what-texts-would-you-use-in-a-literature-of-information-overload-course#post-1946 Sat, 23 Mar 2013 00:59:59 +0000 Josh Honn 1946@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ Replying to @<a href='http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/profile/rachaelsullivan'>rachaelsullivan</a>'s <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/what-texts-would-you-use-in-a-literature-of-information-overload-course#post-1945">post</a>: Two short novels that may be interesting for this class are Bartleby & Co. by Enrique Vila-Matas, and The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira by César Aira. The former is about writers (most real, a few imaginary) who at some point made the decision not to write; the latter is a bit harder to encapsulate but I've reviewed it <a href="http://asymptotejournal.com/article.php?cat=Criticism&id=42&curr_index=2">here</a>. As for non-fiction, maybe Rita Raley's work through courses like <a href="https://engl252.wordpress.com/">"Distracted Reading"</a> and her recent talk on <a href="http://www.livestream.com/mithdigitaldialogues/video?clipId=pla_d75c5f1b-4500-4b7c-acf0-6892d0e49412&utm_source=lslibrary&utm_medium=ui-thumb">disintegrated reading</a>, and N. Katherine Hayles on <a href="http://engl449_spring2010_01.commons.yale.edu/files/2009/11/hayles.pdf">hyper attention</a>. Many of the "debates" (usually just <a href="http://www.dispositio.net/archives/1340">sensible responses</a> to <a href="http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?id=1040&fulltext=1">shitty opinion pieces</a>) in DH on literature as data would be good here, too. Oh, and drones and Google Glass. And things like <a href="http://onemilliontweetmap.com/">this</a>. rachaelsullivan on "What texts would you use in a "Literature of Information Overload" course?" http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/what-texts-would-you-use-in-a-literature-of-information-overload-course#post-1945 Fri, 22 Mar 2013 20:55:43 +0000 rachaelsullivan 1945@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ This fall, I'm teaching a course called "Literature of Information Overload." It's a 200-level undergraduate course in English. Students will mostly be sophomore English majors, I'd imagine. I need help with selecting texts for this course! Below is a draft of the course description and a list of texts I've started (obviously I won't include all this on the syllabus, but I just wanted to give a sense of what I'm thinking). I'm looking for fiction, non-fiction, films -- you name it. Even if I don't use something in the syllabus, I'd like to compile a longer list of "recommended reading and resources" to post on the course website. I'm open to all ideas/suggestions. - - - - Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense. They listen so much that they forget to be natural. This is a nice story. <a href="http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/stein-atom-bomb.html">Gertrude Stein, 1946</a> Information overload is a contemporary cultural concern with a rich past. This course will cover a broad sampling of texts from different time periods to consider how our current confrontation/struggle with digital technologies both is and is not new. We will pay attention to the various forms that information overload takes: a pathological condition, a burden on attention and social bonds, a renaissance of knowledge access and production, and even a non-issue. Most importantly for our purposes, the texts we read and view will help us to ask how our understanding of knowledge, literature, and even ourselves evolves alongside technological innovations. Through studying texts that comment on, represent, and/or actually produce the feeling of overload in readers, we will encounter questions like: <ul> <li>How do people experience and describe information overload (or a sense of "too much") across cultures and chapters of technological development? In what ways is the contemporary predicament of information management similar to and different from struggles of the past?</li> <li>How does information overload contribute to distraction and changing modes of attention, and why is this relevant to today's readers of literature? </li> <li>What are the differences between information and literature? What is at stake in efforts to make a distinction?</li> <li>If we accept the story of how humans are becoming increasingly dependent on their reference tools and technological devices, what new types of machine-human hybrids emerge? What reasons might we find for accepting or resisting this cyborg vision?</li> </ul> Through engaging with these questions and the texts (some alphabetic and others visual) on the syllabus, we will learn how information overload functions as a subject matter, a form or structuring device, and an affect generated by the work itself. This final affective quality of information overload (the feeling of having too much to know and organize) is a familiar frenemy of college students, so I hope that you will draw on your personal experiences to enlighten our discussions and inform your writing. - - - - ideas for literary texts Jonathan Swift, "The Battle of the Books" (1704) Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself" (1855) Gertrude Stein, selections from Tender Buttons and/or "Composition as Explanation" Jorge Luis Borges, "The Library of Babel" (1941) Thomas Pynchon, "Entropy" (1960) Franz Kafka, "The Burrow" (1971) Michael Joyce, Was: annales nomadique: a novel of internet (2007) Something YHCHI Nick Montfort & Stephanie Strickland, Sea and Spar Between (2010) ideas for critical/theoretical texts Alex Wright, selections from Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages (2007) Specifically the introduction and chapters on "The Ice Age Information Explosion" and "The Age of Alphabets" Tom Standage, selections from The Victorian Internet (2007) Vannevar Bush, <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/">"As We May Think"</a> (1945) Neil Postman, <a href="http://w2.eff.org/Net_culture/Criticisms/informing_ourselves_to_death.paper">"Informing Ourselves to Death"</a> (1990) Philip Elmer-Dewitt, Time magazine article: <a href="http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,978216,00.html">"Take A Trip into the Future on the Electronic Superhighway"</a> (1993) Clay Shirky, <a href="http://boingboing.net/2010/01/31/clay-shirky-on-infor.html">"It's Not Information Overload. It's Filter Failure"</a> (2008) Ann Blair, <a href="http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/11/28/information_overload_the_early_years/">"Information overload, the early years"</a> (2010) or a selection from Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (2010) Nick Carr, <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/">"Is Google Making Us Stupid?"</a> (2008) Cathy Davidson, introduction and chapter 6 ("The Changing Workplace") from Now You See It (2011) Elizabeth Gruber Garvey, selections from Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance (2012) Paige Morgan on "How do we introduce undergraduates to the digital humanities?" http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/how-do-we-introduce-undergraduates-to-the-digital-humanities/page/2#post-1594 Tue, 10 Apr 2012 02:57:13 +0000 Paige Morgan 1594@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ Replying to @Ethan Gruber's <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/how-do-we-introduce-undergraduates-to-the-digital-humanities/page/2#post-1593">post</a>: I hear you on this; and I don't think it has to be. It's as much teaching undergraduates* how to use the already effective tools that are out there -- how 18th century English Lit studies are changed by the accessibility of ECCO, EEBO, and the Burney Collection,** for example. *And even graduate students, staff, faculty, in some cases. **Not that I'm blithely assuming that all colleges and unis have access to these tools. Ethan Gruber on "How do we introduce undergraduates to the digital humanities?" http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/how-do-we-introduce-undergraduates-to-the-digital-humanities/page/2#post-1593 Tue, 10 Apr 2012 01:06:19 +0000 Ethan Gruber 1593@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ I agree with you that interpretations of textual, visual, geographical, archaeological, etc. data within the humanities are digital humanities. Almost everything I have done professionally or academically over the last six years has been DH, from GIS to 3D visualization to cultural heritage informatics. I'm not going split hairs as to whether TEI and data mining are web-based or not, but I find myself increasingly frustrated by conversations about "How do we teach/introduce students to DH," and all of the answers relate to some form of web development: designing a database schema, learning HTML/CSS. These are things that are of limited usefulness in many humanities disciplines. I understand that people will suggest skills based on their own experience, but DH is losing out a lot of experienced technologists and scholars from non-textual fields, and as I have observed DH becoming more and more narrowly focused, voices in the textual humanities fields have greater and greater influence (control, even) over what is or is not "Digital Humanities." That is why I suggest that people who call themselves digital humanists ought to reconsider their notion of DH. I think the field is much bigger than they realize, and thus needs to be more inclusive. Patrick Murray-John on "How do we introduce undergraduates to the digital humanities?" http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/how-do-we-introduce-undergraduates-to-the-digital-humanities/page/2#post-1584 Sat, 07 Apr 2012 17:41:08 +0000 Patrick Murray-John 1584@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ Replying to @Ethan Gruber's <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/how-do-we-introduce-undergraduates-to-the-digital-humanities/page/2#post-1583">post</a>: I have to say, I disagree with most, if not all, of this. There is plenty of coding work in DH that is not web-related. Text-mining and distant reading are examples, as is work encoding texts in TEI. I think I remember some very awesome visualizations of ancient architecture, too, that I would call non-web DH coding? :) The thing that I disagree with most is the idea that we (counting myself as a digital humanist) need to rethink our notion of the Digital Humanities. Like the #transformDH hashtag, it is predicated on a set idea of DH that I do not think exists. It seems like less than a year ago that there was still very active discussion about the role of code in DH, what skills could/should be part of it, and how it all fits together. No one, I think, ever came up with a notion of DH that had widespread consensus as being a good definition. Now, it seems, we are chasing after responses to a non-existent notion. That said, I do see the existence of two branches of DH, with different histories. In broad strokes, one is the "Humanities Computing" branch, on is indeed the more web-oriented branch (which shares more in common with ed tech). This has been recounted many times before, sometimes in this very site. I'd ask that we all recognize the youth of DH, and this it is -- whatever it is! -- still developing through informal channels like THATCamps and blogs and twitter conversation, and through the institutional decisions made by administrators and through cluster hires. In short, I think it is far too early to say that DH is far too focused on textual disciplines. It might be at present, but the ultimate constitution of DH is still very much to be determined. Awesome visualization and interpretation of data -- textual, architectual, visual, geographical, temporal, archaeological, and more -- through digital/code-based means can and should be part of DH. I consider it to be implicit that it _is_, but maybe hasn't had as much attention as other aspects. Seems parallel to the Theory and DH questions that way? Ethan Gruber on "How do we introduce undergraduates to the digital humanities?" http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/how-do-we-introduce-undergraduates-to-the-digital-humanities/page/2#post-1583 Thu, 05 Apr 2012 20:15:50 +0000 Ethan Gruber 1583@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ Is learning to code even important in Digital Humanities? I argue that it's not. There are particular technologies that are relevant to various disciplines in the humanities, and web development isn't necessarily one of them (since coding always refers to web development in DH contexts). Digital Humanities, capital D capital H, is far too focused on the textual disciplines and hardly inclusive of the humanities as a whole. Digital Humanists ought to reconsider their notion of the Digital Humanities. If you wonder why computer scientists are reluctant to get involved in Capital D Capital H, it's for this reason. There are actually a great many computer scientists involved elsewhere in the humanities. frostdavis on "How do we introduce undergraduates to the digital humanities?" http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/how-do-we-introduce-undergraduates-to-the-digital-humanities/page/2#post-1563 Thu, 15 Mar 2012 16:10:11 +0000 frostdavis 1563@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ Thanks for all the great answers! To update this forum, two of the respondents (Brian Croxall and Jeff McClurken) along with Ryan Cordell spoke about "Teaching DH 101: Introduction to the Digital Humanities" for NITLE's Digital Scholarship Seminars in December. You can access the recording from the event website: <a href="http://www.nitle.org/live/events/129-teaching-dh-101-introduction-to-the-digital" rel="nofollow">http://www.nitle.org/live/events/129-teaching-dh-101-introduction-to-the-digital</a> This seminar prompted a couple of posts on the NITLE blog because the presenters didn't really address coding for undergrads. Here are a couple of posts that adress that issue: Can Humanities Undergrads Learn to Code? by undergrads who learned to code in a humanities course at Pitt <a href="http://blogs.nitle.org/2012/01/31/can-humanities-undergrads-learn-to-code/" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.nitle.org/2012/01/31/can-humanities-undergrads-learn-to-code/</a> (The answer is yes!!) More Coding for Humanities Undergrads by Kathryn Tomasek, Wheaton College (again yes!!) <a href="http://blogs.nitle.org/2012/02/02/more-coding-for-humanities-undergrads/" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.nitle.org/2012/02/02/more-coding-for-humanities-undergrads/</a> jean_bauer on "Design a digital history curriculum: what would you include?" http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/design-a-digital-history-curriculum-what-would-you-include#post-1008 Mon, 21 Feb 2011 16:11:57 +0000 jean_bauer 1008@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ I also concur with everything said by William Turkel. You'll find almost all of that in my syllabus, although since we only had 1 semester and a research paper requirement I didn't have time to teach my students to program, just recognize what XML --> XSLT --> HTML looks like. It kind of blew their minds. jean_bauer on "Design a digital history curriculum: what would you include?" http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/design-a-digital-history-curriculum-what-would-you-include#post-1007 Mon, 21 Feb 2011 16:08:13 +0000 jean_bauer 1007@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ I don't know if this will help (or just be yet another conflicting syllabus) but I taught a course at the University of Virginia for Spring 2010 which might give you some new ideas. It was a senior seminar and more of a "philosophy of digital history" class. Basically, I wanted my students to think hard about the sources they encountered whether digital or analog and recognize how the ways in which information is recorded effects the kind of analysis historians can perform later. The course was called "From Vellum to Very Large Databases: Historical Sources Past, Present, and Future" and we had hands-on experience with all the sources (holding medieval manuscripts, setting type by hand, georeferencing a historical map, etc). The course website is <a href="http://www.jeanbauer.com/vellum_to_vldb.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.jeanbauer.com/vellum_to_vldb.html</a> and includes a detailed syllabus with possible research paper topics. Hope that helps. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me. william.j.turkel@gmail.com on "Design a digital history curriculum: what would you include?" http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/design-a-digital-history-curriculum-what-would-you-include#post-1006 Mon, 21 Feb 2011 16:06:02 +0000 william.j.turkel@gmail.com 1006@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ In the introductory course, I think it is important to find a balance between presenting history on the web and using digital sources to do research. At the least, such a course should also cover <ul> <li>How search engines work and how to get the most out of them</li> <li>Where digital sources come from</li> <li>How digital information differs from more familiar analog media</li> <li>How information can be measured and manipulated with computational tools</li> <li>Reading and writing markup like HTML and XML</li> <li>The separation of form from content</li> <li>Open content, open access and open source; Creative Commons</li> </ul> I like to mix seminar discussion with active learning. I've found that students work harder and learn more on individual or small group projects than large-group ones. Programming is best taught and learned by working closely with someone who already knows how to program. cforster on "2-3 DH Articles for a survey of Literary Criticism" http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/2-3-dh-articles-for-a-survey-of-literary-criticism#post-901 Fri, 21 Jan 2011 17:47:11 +0000 cforster 901@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ Replying to @<a href='http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/profile/ryan'>Ryan</a> Cordell's <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/2-3-dh-articles-for-a-survey-of-literary-criticism#post-899">post</a>: So these are perhaps unsurprising suggestions given our mutual UVA pedigree, but I think something of Jerome McGann's makes a lot of sense. I know folks have actually used games of IVANHOE (played in class, on paper, or via blogs) with some success (though I'm too timid to do that). Something from Radiant Textuality makes sense. These pieces are available online: <ul> <li><a href="http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/jjm2f/blackwell.htm">Marking Texts in Many Dimensions</a></li> <li><a href="http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/jjm2f/old/deform.html">Deformance and Interpretation</a></li> </ul> EDIT: Added five minutes later when this, also rather unoriginal, thought occurred to me: Something from Franco Moretti's Graphs, Maps, and Trees could work well I think (or even the whole book; it is delightfully short). Ryan Cordell on "2-3 DH Articles for a survey of Literary Criticism" http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/2-3-dh-articles-for-a-survey-of-literary-criticism#post-899 Fri, 21 Jan 2011 15:47:51 +0000 Ryan Cordell 899@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ This spring I'm teaching a survey of literary criticism. We need to cover many of the major movements during the semester, and I will only have 1 week to devote to DH. I do, however, want my students to be aware of this increasingly influential field--and, of course, the field I'm most interested in myself. What 2-3 articles would you include in such a survey? They'd need to be fairly broad--for students who aren't necessarily interested in DH (at least not yet). Stephen Ramsay's "Algorithmic Criticism" (<a href="http://tiny.cc/d81s6" rel="nofollow">http://tiny.cc/d81s6</a>) was suggested on Twitter. Other ideas?