Seminar Schedule and Reading List
This was a first iteration of this course. Though I had some topics in mind I knew I wanted to cover, for the most part I wanted to be responsive to the tools and methods that would be most useful for the students in the class and the projects they were working on. Below is the schedule as it ended up running.
The discussion and workshop topics don’t align with each other – each student was asked to run a seminar discussion twice, and they chose their topics (mostly from a list of suggested topics) and the week they would present in. The workshop topic order was largely defined by what was upcoming in their assignments – for example ensuring we covered TEI and MySQL before their digitization assignments were due.
The readings for weeks 3-12 were chosen by the students presenting in those weeks. In addition to these seminars, a 2-hour workshop was held as part of the HIST489 seminar series on ‘digital tools, tips and tricks to make your honours year easier’ that covered various basic digital tools.
The discussion and workshop topics don’t align with each other – each student was asked to run a seminar discussion twice, and they chose their topics (mostly from a list of suggested topics) and the week they would present in. The workshop topic order was largely defined by what was upcoming in their assignments – for example ensuring we covered TEI and MySQL before their digitization assignments were due.
The readings for weeks 3-12 were chosen by the students presenting in those weeks. In addition to these seminars, a 2-hour workshop was held as part of the HIST489 seminar series on ‘digital tools, tips and tricks to make your honours year easier’ that covered various basic digital tools.
Discussion Topics (50 minutes each session)
Week 1: What is digital history
Week 3: Digital representations in GLAM sector
Week 4: Visualising time
Week 5: Open Access and Open Scholarship
Week 6: Scholarly Blogging/Vlogging/Podcasts
Week 7: Gaming and historical apps etc
Week 8: Accessibility
Week 9: Crowdsourcing
Week 10: Visualising spatial history
Week 11: Copyright
Week 12: YouTube History
- (No set readings this week)
- Tim Hitchcock, ‘Confronting the digital’, Cultural and Social History, Vol 10, Issue 1, 2013, p.9-23
- Andrew Prescott, ‘I’d rather be a librarian’, Cultural and Social History, Vol 11, Issue 3, 2014, p.335-341
- Anna Nilsson Hammar, ‘Digital History’, Scandia, Vol 81, Issue 2, 2015, pp.99-110
Week 3: Digital representations in GLAM sector
- Jane Zhang, ‘Digital Archival Representation: Approaches and Challenges’, in Organization, Representation and Description through the Digital Age, 89-101. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter (2018).
- S. Wellington and G. Oliver, ‘Reviewing the Digital Heritage Landscape: The Intersection of Digital Media and Museum Practice’, in The International Handbooks of Museum Studies, eds S. Macdonald and H. Rees Leahy, (2015)
- Julie Higashi, ‘The Destruction and Creation of a Cityscape in the Digital Age: Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum’, Museum International 70, no. 1-2 (2018): 104.
Week 4: Visualising time
- Stephen Boyd Davis, Emma Bevan, Aleksei Kudikov, ‘Just in Time: Defining Historical Chronographics’, in Bowen, J.P. et al. (eds.), Electronic Visualisation in Arts and Culture, (London: Springer-Verlag, 2013).
- Stefan Tanaka, ‘Pasts in the Digital Age’, in Dougherty, Jack, Nawrotski, Kristen (eds.),Writing History in the Digital Age, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, Digitalculturebooks, 2013).
- Stephen Boyd Davis, Florian Kräutli, ‘The Idea and Image of Historical Time: Interactions between Design and Digital Humanities’,Visible Language,Vol. 49, No. 3, December 2012, pp 101-119.
Week 5: Open Access and Open Scholarship
- Laura M. Stevens, ‘From the Editor: Getting What You Pay For? Open Access and the Future of Humanities Publishing’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Vol.32, no.1, Spring 2013, pp.7-21
- Jana Bacevic, and Chris Muellerleile, ‘The Moral Economy of Open Access’, European Journal of Social Theory, Vol.21, no.2, 2018, pp.169-188, DOI:
- George Veletsianos and Royce Kimmons, ‘Assumptions and Challenges of Open Scholarship', The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, Vol.13, No.4, October 2012, pp.167-189.
Week 6: Scholarly Blogging/Vlogging/Podcasts
- Andrew McGregor, ‘The Power of Blogging: Rethinking Scholarship and Reshaping Boundaries at Sport in American History’, Journal of Sport History, vol. 44, no. 2, 2007, pp.239-256.
- Carl Gombrich, ‘Vlogging and Academic Work’,
- Carl Gombrich, ‘Academic Vlogging II’,
- Carl Gombrich, ‘Update on vlogging for academic purposes’,
- Peter Alegi, ‘Podcasting the Past: Africa Past and Present and (South) African History in the Digital Age’, South African Historical Journal, vol. 64, no. 2, 2012, pp.206-220.
Week 7: Gaming and historical apps etc
- Esther Wright, ‘On the promotional context of historical video games’, Rethinking History, Vol. 22, No.4 (2018), pp.598-608.
- Dawn Spring, ‘Gaming history: computer and video games as historical scholarship’, Rethinking History, Vol. 19 No. 2 (2015), pp.207-221.
- Martin Wainwright, ‘Teaching Historical Theory through Video Games’,
- The History Teacher, Vol. 47, No. 4 (August 2014), pp.579-612
Week 8: Accessibility
- Belén Ruiz, José Luis Pajares, Francisco Utray, and Lourdes Moreno, ‘Design for All in multimedia guides for museums’, Computers in Human Behaviour, Vol. 27, 2011, pp 1408-1415.
- Peter Brophy, and Jenny Craven, ‘Web Accessibility’, Library Trends, Spring 2007, Vol. 55, no. 4, pp 950-972.
- Joel Taylor & Kate Gibson, ‘Digitisation, digital interaction and social media: embedded barriers to democratic heritage’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, Vol. 23, No. 5, 2017, pp 408-420.
Week 9: Crowdsourcing
- Daren C. Brabham, ‘Concepts, Theories, and Cases of Crowdsourcing’, Crowdsourcing (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2013), pp. 1-40.
- Trevor Owens, ‘Making Crowdsourcing Compatible with the Missions and Values of Cultural Heritage Organisations’, in Mia Ridge (ed), Crowdsourcing our Cultural Heritage (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), pp.269-279.
- Leah Mitchell, ‘Crowdsourcing the Art Museum’, in Amy K. Levin and Joshua G. Adair (eds), Defining Memory: Local Museums and the Construction of History in America’s Changing Communities, 2nd ed (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), pp. 229-242.
Week 10: Visualising spatial history
- Ian N. Gregory and Alistair Geddes, ‘Introduction: From Historical GIS to Spatial Humanities: Deepening Scholarship and Broadening Technology,’ in Ian N. Gregory and Alistair Geddes (eds.), Historical GIS and Spatial History, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), pp.ix-xix.
- David J. Bodenhamer, ‘Beyond GIS: Geospatial Technologies and the Future of History’, in Alexander Von Lünen and Charles Travis (eds.), History and GIS: Epistemologies, Considerations and Reflections, (London: Springer, 2013), pp.1-13.
- Vincent Brown, ‘Mapping a Slave Revolt: Visualising Spatial History through the Archives of Slavery’, Social Text, Vol.33, no.4, December 2015, pp.134-141.
Week 11: Copyright
- Andrew Charlesworth, ‘Digital Curation, Copyright, and Academic Research’, The International Journal of Digital Curation, Issue 1, Vol. 1, Autumn 2006.
- June. M. Besek, ‘Copyright Issues Relevant to the Creation of a Digital Archive: a Preliminary Assessment’, January 2003.
- Grace Abbott, Tweedy Frith, ‘Does New Zealand’s copyright regime need updating for the digital age?’, April 3 2019.
Week 12: YouTube History
- Michael Newman, ‘Preface’ Video Revolutions: On the History of a Medium, Columbia University Press, 2014, pp. vii-xii.
- Peter B. Kaufman, ‘Oral History in the Video Age’, The Oral History Review, vol. 40, no. 1, 2013, pp. 1–7
- T. Mills Kelly, ‘Making: DIY History’, Teaching History in the Digital Age, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2013, pp. 102–125.
- The Great War: A Week by Week Exploration of WW1
- Extra History: Slightly Dramatized Explorations of Various Topics
- Historia Civilis: Primarily a Classics Channel that Presents a Combination of Fact and Opinion
Workshop Topics (1 hour 50 minutes each session)
Week 2: Digital searching (with Shannon Wellington, ATL)
Good search practices, and an introduction to various search features in the National Library Catalogue in particular
Week 3: TEI (with Max Sullivan, VUW)
An introduction to basic text mark up and the Text Encoding Initiative.
Suggested reading:
Week 4: Introduction to databases and analysis
An introduction to database basics including ‘what is a database’, why and how do we sample data, data checking and cleaning, and some basic statistics often used by historians
Week 5: Intro to MySQL
An introduction to relational databases in general, then a step by step guide to using MySQL
Week 6: Creating a website
An introduction to Weebly, but much of it would apply to any website creation platform. Included thinking about the look and feel of the website, copyright issues, how to ‘build’ pages and embed HTML features from external sources, Google Analytics, SEO, and some thoughts on Blogs and writing for the web.
Week 7: Visualisations
A broad overview of visualisations, the good and the bad and why they are used to communicate information. Included playing with some Google Charts coding generally, then all together for a WordTree, using a Word Cloud to help us decide what words to focus on. Very quick overview at the end of the class of such tools as Timeline, StoryMap, Juxtapose, and Genially.
Suggested reading:
Week 8: Mapping
Began with an overview of types of maps, and more detail on choropleth maps. Moved onto playing with Google Maps and Google Earth Pro, and maps in Google Charts.
Week 9: Intro to R
Included: what is R; the different sections of the R-Studio screen; writing scripts; including metadata in scripts; data types; saving; opening files; storing objects; importing and exporting data; basic data manipulation in R; useful terminology used by R to help with Google searches. Worked through these in a hands on session.
Week 10: Network analysis in R
We worked through an online tutorial by Jesse Sadler in which she uses historical data and creates a series of increasingly complex network analysis maps in R. This also introduced students to GitHub and exporting data and code from there.
Week 11: Working on student specific tools for their final assignments; and writing for the web
At this stage in the year each student had different needs for their final assignments, so an individual plan was made for each of them for this class. Tools covered included additional direction on network maps; further instruction on Google Charts; a refresher on infographics, Timeline, and Google Maps; some options on turning XML into HTML; and an introduction to using Voyant for text analysis.
Week 12: Student presentations
Good search practices, and an introduction to various search features in the National Library Catalogue in particular
Week 3: TEI (with Max Sullivan, VUW)
An introduction to basic text mark up and the Text Encoding Initiative.
Suggested reading:
- http://www.ultraslavonic.info/intro-to-xml/
- http://teibyexample.org/TBE.htm
- https://tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/SG.html
Week 4: Introduction to databases and analysis
An introduction to database basics including ‘what is a database’, why and how do we sample data, data checking and cleaning, and some basic statistics often used by historians
Week 5: Intro to MySQL
An introduction to relational databases in general, then a step by step guide to using MySQL
Week 6: Creating a website
An introduction to Weebly, but much of it would apply to any website creation platform. Included thinking about the look and feel of the website, copyright issues, how to ‘build’ pages and embed HTML features from external sources, Google Analytics, SEO, and some thoughts on Blogs and writing for the web.
Week 7: Visualisations
A broad overview of visualisations, the good and the bad and why they are used to communicate information. Included playing with some Google Charts coding generally, then all together for a WordTree, using a Word Cloud to help us decide what words to focus on. Very quick overview at the end of the class of such tools as Timeline, StoryMap, Juxtapose, and Genially.
Suggested reading:
- Alberto Cairo, The Functional Art: an introduction to information graphics and visualization, New Riders, 2013
- Alberto Cairo, The Truthful Art: data, charts, and maps for communication, New Riders, 2016
- Alberto Cairo, http://www.thefunctionalart.com/
- Nathan Yau, Visualize This: the flowingdata guide to design, visualization, and statistics, Wiley Publishing, Indianapolis, 2011
- Nathan Yau, Data Points: Visualization that means something, John Wiley and Sons Inc, Indianapolis, 2013
- Nathan Yau, https://flowingdata.com/
- Stephen Few, Show me the numbers: designing tables and graphs to enlighten, Analytics Press, Burlingame, 2012
- Stephen Few, http://www.perceptualedge.com/
- Georgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec, Dear Data, Particular Books, 2016
- Georgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec, http://www.dear-data.com/
- Nate Silver, https://fivethirtyeight.com/
Week 8: Mapping
Began with an overview of types of maps, and more detail on choropleth maps. Moved onto playing with Google Maps and Google Earth Pro, and maps in Google Charts.
Week 9: Intro to R
Included: what is R; the different sections of the R-Studio screen; writing scripts; including metadata in scripts; data types; saving; opening files; storing objects; importing and exporting data; basic data manipulation in R; useful terminology used by R to help with Google searches. Worked through these in a hands on session.
Week 10: Network analysis in R
We worked through an online tutorial by Jesse Sadler in which she uses historical data and creates a series of increasingly complex network analysis maps in R. This also introduced students to GitHub and exporting data and code from there.
Week 11: Working on student specific tools for their final assignments; and writing for the web
At this stage in the year each student had different needs for their final assignments, so an individual plan was made for each of them for this class. Tools covered included additional direction on network maps; further instruction on Google Charts; a refresher on infographics, Timeline, and Google Maps; some options on turning XML into HTML; and an introduction to using Voyant for text analysis.
Week 12: Student presentations