Schedule last updated on 1/27/20
TH 1/23 First Day: Introduction to Course and Discussion of Recent National Archives Controversy
Readings Mentioned Today:
- “National Archives Exhibit blurs images critical of President Trump” (Joe Helm, Washington Post, January 2020)
- Various Twitter threads and responses to Helm’s reporting: Helm; Sarah Bond; Howard Dean, National Archives (2020)
- Society of American Archivists (SAA) statement on National Archives Exhibit (2020)
- Rightfully Hers: American Women and The Vote (National Archives Museum; 2019)
- Art of The March (Alessandra Rezzi, Dietmar Offenhuber, and Nathan Felde; Northeastern University Libraries / NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks, 2017)
- Women’s March on Washington Archive (Danielle Russell and Katrina Vandeven; University of Florida Libraries; 2018)
T 1/28 Physical Archives and Digital Contexts
ASSIGNMENT: Before class, post a link to one archives-related conversation or topic (articles, videos, photos, audio, blog posts, social media material shared publicly) from the past week / month to Slack, along with some brief context re: what you found interesting about this content.
Readings for Today:
- “Archives in Context and As Context” (Kate Theimer; Journal of Digital Humanities Vol. 1.2; Spring 2012)
- “The Transnational and The Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and The Shadows They Cast” (Lara Putnam; American Historical Review Volume 121.2; April 2016)
- “The Way We Write History Has Changed” (Alexis Madrigal; The Atlantic; January 2020) and “Becoming a Desk(top) Profession: Digital Photography and the Changing Landscape of Archival Research” (Ian Milligan; American Historical Association 2020)
- “Our Stories” (Christina Cauterucci; Slate; June 2019)
TH 1/30 Making Text Searchable
ASSIGNMENT: View at least one collections overview in Rhode Island Archival and Manuscript Collections Online (RIAMCO); does not have to be a Hay or Brown University collection, this is more an exercise in seeing how collections are described and organized (and a way to learn more about what local collections are in Rhode Island). Post a link to the collection information you viewed on Slack. You might also think about and discuss interesting aspects of the information provided here, the RIAMCO interface, the relationship between the perspectives of researchers, archivists, and subjects of collections material, or other topics.
Readings Mentioned Today:
- Google nGram Viewer
- “The Pitfalls of Using Google nGram to Study Language” (Sarah Zhang; Wired; October 2015)
- “What is Public Humanities?” (Robyn Schroeder; Day of Public Humanities; 2017)
- “How Badly is Google Books Search Broken, and Why?” (Ben Schmidt; Sapping Attention; February 2019)
- Bookworm: Hathi Trust
- Voyant
- “Lincoln Logarithms: Finding Meaning in Sermons” (Emory Libraries; 2013)
- “A Republic of Emails: What are the Contents?” (Max Kemman; November 2016)
- “Why You (A Humanist) Should Care About Optical Character Recognition” (Ryan Cordell; January 2019
- Reading the First Books: Multilingual, Early Modern OCR for Primeros Libros (2017)
- Anti-Slavery Manuscripts (Boston Public Library)
- “Search Engine Optimization for Digital Collections” (Kenning Arlitsch, Patrick O’Brien, Sandra McIntyre; 2011)
T 2/4 Digitization, Remediation, and Digital Archives
ASSIGNMENT: Bring something to class(or a representative sample / piece of context; context can be digital, like a photograph for reference, if you have more to say about how this attempt at digitization feels limited / insufficient) that you’d like to discuss (and are comfortable discussing) in the context of its potential digitization
Readings for Today:
- “Lost in Mass Digitization.” (Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, The Politics of Mass Digitization, 2019)
- “Colonial Violence and the Postcolonial Digital Archive” (Roopika Risam, New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy, 2019)
- “Sixteen Guiding Digital Preservation Axioms” (Trevor Owens; The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation; 2018)
- “Why Do We Digitize? The Case for Slow Digitization” (Andrew Prescott and Lorna Hughes; Archive Journal; September 2018)
TH 2/6 Trip to The John Hay Library (Meeting with Heather Cole, Curator for Literary and Popular Collections)
Readings for Today:
- Special Collections of The Brown University Library: A History and Guide (Samuel Streit et al; John Hay Library); you do not have to read the whole thing, but I’d like you to learn about and think about how an institution like The Hay changes over time
- Browse recent Hay-related blog posts on the Brown University Libraries blog to learn about recent activities at The Hay
T 2/11 “Born-Digital” Materials and Archives
Readings for Today:
ASSIGNMENT: Visit The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and post at least one link to something interesting you found there on Slack, with informal editorial commentary. Students interested in games / games studies may also want to look at the MS-DOS Games Collection.
- “Web Archives and Their Collectors.” (Ian Milligan, History in The Age of Abundance? How The Web is Transforming Historical Research; 2019)
- “Ethical Considerations for Archiving Social Media Generated by Contemporary Social Movements: Challenges, Opportunities, Recommendations” (Bergis Jules, Ed Summers, and Dr. Vernon Mitchell Jr.; Documenting The Now White Paper; April 2018)
- Preserve This Podcast Zine (Dana Gerber Margie, Molly Schwartz, Sara Nguyen, and Mary Kidd; 2018)
- “The Triumphant Rise of The Shitpic” (Brian Feldman; The Awl, December 2014)
- “Saving Electronic Records from Rot and Decay” (Lorain Wang; The Iris: Behind The Scenes at The Getty; October 2016)
TH 2/13 Encounters with Digital Archives
ASSIGNMENT: Today’s readings feature reflections on particular digital archives and initiatives. On Slack, add a link to a digital archive you’ve spent some time with and discuss your experiences using it (it’s fine if those experiences don’t align with anything particular from the readings, but you may try to find ways to connect them if relevant).
Readings for Today:
- “Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads” (Jessica Marie Johnson, Social Text 36.4; December 2018)
- “The Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemings.” (Lauren Klein; American Literature 85.4; 2013)
- “‘To Suddenly Discover Yourself Existing’: Uncovering the Impact of Community Archives” (Michelle Caswell, Marika Cifor, and Mario H. Ramirez; The American Archivist 79.1; Spring/Summer 2016)
- Look at digital projects discussed in each reading: The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database (mentioned in Johnson); The Papers of Thomas Jefferson Digital Edition (mentioned in Klein); South Asian American Digital Archive (mentioned in Caswell, Cifor, and Ramirez)
T 2/18 NO CLASS: LONG WEEKEND
TH 2/20 Designing Digital Archives
ASSIGNMENT: Evaluate and informally review the design of a particular digital archive and its relationship to audience, content, and imagined use (feel free to re-visit archives previously discussed in class or on Slack)
Readings for Today:
- “Building Pleasure and The Digital Archive” (Dorothy Kim; chapter in Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and the Digital Humanities; eds. Elizabeth Losh and Jacqueline Wernimont; 2018)
- “Generous Interfaces for Digital Cultural Collections” (Mitchell Whitelaw; Digital Humanities Quarterly 9.1; 2015)
- “Indigeneous Knowledge Systems and Mukurtu CMS” (Kim Christen; The Design for Diversity Learning Toolkit; October 2018)
- “Mapping the Territory: Archiving the Trans Website in an Age of Search” (Avery Phelan Dame; Transgender Studies Quarterly Vol. 3.3-4; 2016)
T 2/25 Search, Algorithms, and Interfaces
Readings for Today:
- “A Society, Searching” (Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism; 2018)
- “What is An Algorithm?” (Ed Finn, What Algorithms Want: Imagination in The Age of Computers; 2018)
- Excerpts from “Indistinguishable from Magic: Invisible Interfaces and Digital Literature as Demystifier” (Lori Emerson; Reading Writing Interfaces: From The Digital To The Bookbound; 2014)
- Excerpts from Feminist in a Software Lab: Difference + Design (Tara McPherson; 2018)
TH 2/27 Digital Contexts for Community Archives (with Angela DiVeglia, Providence Public Library Special Collections)
Readings for Today:
- “‘What We Do Crosses Over to Activism’: The Politics and Practice of Community Archives” (Marika Cifor, Michelle Caswell, Alda Allina Migoni, and Noah Geraci; The Public Historian 40.2; May 2018)
- “Participatory and Post-Custodial Archives as Community Practice” (Sofía Becerra-Licha; EDUCAUSE Review 52.6; November/December 2017)
- “Post-Custodial Archiving for the Collective Good: Examining Neoliberalism in US-Latin American Archival Partnerships” (Hannah Alpert-Abrams, David A. Bliss, and Itza Carbajal; Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 2.1; 2019)
- “Decolonizing Attribution: Traditions of Exclusion” (Jane Anderson and Kimberly Christen; Journal of Radical Librarianship; Vol. 5; June 2019)
T 3/3 Digital Publics
Readings for Today:
- “Place: Networked Place” (Kazys Varnelis and Anne Friedberg; Networked Publics; 2008)
- Excerpts from The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media (Nathan Jurgenson; 2019)
- “Who Controls the Public Sphere in an Era of Algorithms? Questions and Assumptions” (Laura Reed and danah boyd; Data and Society; May 2016) and Case Studies (Robyn Caplan and Laura Reed; Data and Society; May 2016)
- “How Your Phone Betrays Democracy” and “One Nation, Tracked” (Charlie Wurtzel and Stuart A. Thompson; New York Times; December 2019); see The Privacy Project for additional stories
TH 3/5 Collections, Cultural Objects, People, and Data
Readings for Today:
- “Critical Questions for Big Data” (dana boyd and Kate Crawford; Information, Communication, and Society; Vol. 15; 2012)
- “On A Collections As Data Imperative” (Thomas Padilla; Library of Congress; 2017)
- “(Cyber) Ethnographies of Contact, Dialogue, Friction: Connecting, Building, Placing, and ‘Doing’ Data” (Radhika Gajjala, Erika M. Behrmann, and Jeanette M. Dillon; The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities; Ed. Jentery Sayers; 2018)
- “Difficult Heritage and The Complexities of Indigeneous Data” (Jennifer Guliano and Carolyn Heitman; Journal of Cultural Analytics; August 2019)
T 3/10 Some Perspectives on Data in The Context of Digital Public Humanities Projects
Readings for Today:
- “Against Cleaning” (Katie Rawson and Trevor Muñoz; Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019; Eds. Lauren Klein and Matt Gold; 2019)
- “Generative Tensions: Building a Digital Project on Early African American Race Film” (Miriam Posner and Marika Cifor; American Quarterly 70.3; 2018)
- “How We Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Open Data: A Case Study in the Harvard Art Museums’ API” (Andrea Ledesma and Leah Burgin; Medium; 2016)
- “The NEH ‘Chronicling America’ Challenge: Using Big Data to Ask Big Questions” (Mike Ashenfelder; The Signal: A Library of Congress Blog; August 2016)
TH 3/12 Data, Metadata, and Digital Archives
Readings for Today:
- “Digital Archiving: The Seven Pillars of Metadata” (Matthew Hillyard; The National Archives [UK]; March 2018)
- Who’s Driving The Bus? or How Digitization is Influencing Archival Collections” (Kathleen McCarty Smith, David Gwynn, Beth Ann Koelsch, and Jennifer Motszko; The Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies Vol. 6; 2019)
- “AI in The Archives” (Dan Cohen; Humane Ingenuity Newsletter; September 2019)
- “Classification Along The Color Line: Excavating Racism In The Stacks” (Melissa Adler; Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 1.1; 2017)
- Useful reference document: Understanding Metadata: What is Metadata, and What is it for? (Jenn Riley; National Information Standards Organization; 2017)
T 3/17 Visualizing Data
Readings for Today:
- “Unremembering the Forgotten” (Tim Sherratt; Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019; Eds. Lauren Klein and Matt Gold)
- Excerpts from How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information (Alberto Cairo; 2019)
- “Mapping A Slave Revolt: Visualizing Spatial History through the Archives of Slavery” (Vincent Brown; Social Text 33.4; 2015)
- Excerpts from W.E.B. Dubois’ Data Portraits (Eds. Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Brit Russert; 2018)
TH 3/19 Working With (And Against) Data
Readings for Today:
- “The Power Chapter” (Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein; Data Feminism; 2020)
- Feminist Data Manifest-No (Cifor, M., Garcia, P., Cowan, T.L., Rault, J., Sutherland, T., Chan, A., Rode, J., Hoffmann, A.L., Salehi, N., Nakamura, L.; 2019)
- “Teaching Data Literacy for Civic Engagement: Resources for Data Capture and Organization” (Brandon Locke and Jason Heppler; KULA: knowledge creation, dissemination, and preservation studies 2.1; 2018)
- Datasets (TBD)
T 3/24 NO CLASS: SPRING RECESS
TH 3/26 NO CLASS: SPRING RECESS
T 3/31 Place, Archives, and Digital Scholarship
Readings for Today:
- The Built/Unbuilt Square, Sample Philly, and other excerpts from Monument Lab: Creative Speculations for Philadelphia; (Eds. Paul M. Farber and Ken Lum; 2019)
- “Fugitive Libraries” (Shannon Mattern; Places; October 2019) and Reading Zimbabwe (Nontsikelelo Mutiti and Corey Tegeler)
- “Family Photos Connect Iowans to History” (Iowa Culture; September 2019) and Fortepan Iowa and Fortepan
- Atlascope (Norman B. Leventhal Map and Education Center at the Boston Public Library)
TH 4/2 Audio and Digital Archives: Sonic Archives and Podcasts About Archival Materials
Readings for Today:
- “Podcasts and Public History” (Jim McGrath; NCPH History@Work Blog; September 2019)
- “Ronald Reagan’s Long-Hidden Racist Conversation with Richard Nixon” (Tim Naftali; The Atlantic; July 2019)
- “The Magical Post-Horn: A Trip to the BBC Archive Centre in Perivale” (Leslie McMurtry; Sounding Out: a Sound Studies Blog; September 2016)
- “Hearing Eugenics” (Jacqueline Wernimont; Sounding Out; July 2016)
- Historically Yours (University of Iowa Special Collections (2017-18)
T 4/7 Digital Project Development Session (details TBD)
TH 4/9 The Long History of Digital Archives
Readings for Today:
- Excerpts from Digital History (Roy Rosenzweig and Dan Cohen; 2005)
- “The Death and Life of Digital Archives” (Will Fenton; Slate; November 2015)
- “A Map of Hundreds of Noise Complaints in 1920s Manhattan, and Four Other Stupendous Digital History Projects” (Rebecca Onion; Slate; December 2013) and “Five More Digital Archives and Exhibits We Loved in 2014” (Rebecca Onion; Slate; December 2014)
- The Walt Whitman Archive; The September 11 Digital Archive; Valley of The Shadow; Digital Schomburg; UbuWeb
T 4/14 Artists and Digital Archives
Readings for Today:
- Collect the WWWorld: The Artist as Archivist in The Internet Age (319 Scholes; November 2012 Exhibition)
- “From Paint to Pixels” (Jacoba Urist; The Atlantic; May 2015)
- “Artist Archives and Digital Art History: Imagining The Possibilities” (Erin Dickey; Artists’ Studio Archives; March 2016
- “Speculative Space: Artists Working With Data” (Vanessa Berry; Artlink; March 2017)
- “Art in the Archives: An Artist’s Residency in the Archives of the London School of Economics” (Sue Donnelly; Tate Papers Vol. 9; Spring 2008)
- “Creative Fellowship” (Providence Public Library; overview of ongoing Creative Fellowship program)
TH 4/16 Digital Project Development Session (details TBD)
T 4/21 Grants, Labor, and Digital Publics
Readings for Today:
- NEH Office of Digital Humanities Grant Proposal Guidelines
- “Precarious Labor and the Digital Humanities” (Christina Boyles, Anne Cong-Huyen, Carrie Johnston, Jim McGrath, and Amanda Phillips; American Quarterly 70.3; 2018)
- “Archives-Based Digital Projects in Early America” (Molly O’Hagan Hardy; The William and Mary Quarterly Vol. 76.3; July 2019)
TH 4/23 Speculative Archives (TBD)
T 4/28 Digital Archives in The Anthropocene
Readings for Today:
- “Material Provocations in The Archives” (Dani Stuchel; Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 2.3; 2019)
- “Digital Humanities in The Anthropocene” (Bethany Nowviskie; Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 30.1; December 2015)
- “Archives in The Anthropocene” (Purdom Lindblad; Social Justice and Digital Humanities Speaker Series, University of Houstons Arté Publico Press; February 2018)
