Schedule
Week Number: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16
Week 1
Mon. Aug 27. Course Introduction. Building a Web Presence.
Reading:
- Megan O’Neil, “Confronting the Myth of the ‘Digital Native’,” Chronicle of Higher Education, April 21, 2014.
- Miriam Posner, Stewart Varner, and Brian Coxall, “Creating Your Web Presence,” ProfHacker, February 14, 2011.
- Ryan Cordell, “Creating and Maintaining a Professional Presence Online,” ProfHacker, October 3, 2012.
After Class:
- Purchase a Student Plan ($30) from Reclaim Hosting
- Take the Student Technology Survey
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Week 2
Mon. Sept 3. Labor Day - No Class.
Week 3
Mon. September 10. What is Digital History?
Readings:
- Miram Posner, “How Did They Make That?,” August 29, 2013. Click through to all the projects listed.
- Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, “Introduction: Promises and Perils of Digital History” and “Getting Started,” in Digital History, online edition (Center for History and New Media, 2005).
In Class:
- Install and Explore Wordpress
- Install a theme such as Period, Blog Mantara, or a theme of your choice. Build out your site and include an about page and a menu.
After Class:
- Submit the URL to your blog via the assignment submission form.
- Blog Post #1: Write a blog post that reviews one of the Digital History projects listed below. You may wish to consult the Organization of American Historian’s guidelines for reviewing digital history projects.
Due before the start of class September 17th. Submit a link to your blog post through the assignment submission form.
Projects for Review:
- Mapping Early American Elections
- Digital Harlem
- Geography of the Post
- Wearing Gay History
- Histories of the National Mall
- Hurricane Digital Memory Bank
- Language of the State of the Union, Mapping the State of the Union, and The State of the Union in Context
- September 11th Digital Archive
- Mining the Dispatch
- Valley of the Shadow
- Visualizing Emancipation
Week 4
Mon. Sept 17. Working With Primary Sources & Who Were the Progressives?
Reading:
- The American Yawp, Chapter 20
- Sam Wineburg, “Thinking Like a Historian,” Teaching with Primary Sources Quarterly 3, 1 (Winter 2010).
Basics of Visual Literacy, University of Maryland
After Class:
- Blog Post #2: Find five (5) primary sources from at least 3 different collections. Write a blog post that cites the items (including the databases they came from) in Chicago format. Summarize each source and discuss what you learned by reading it. What did you learn about searching for and finding primary sources on the internet? Due before the start of class September 24th.
Week 5
Mon. Sept 24. Secondary Sources & Copyright & Fair use
Reading:
- Caleb McDaniel, “How to Read for History”
- Roy Rosenzweig, “Can History Be Open Source: Wikipedia and the Future of the Past,” Journal of American History 93, 1 (2006).
- Cory Doctorow, “We’ll Probably Never Free Mickey, But That’s Beside the Point.” Electronic Frontier Foundation (2016)
- Corynne McSherry, “Court Upholds Legality of Google Books: Tremendous Victory for Fair Use and the Public Interest,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, November 14, 2013.
- Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, “Owning the Past,” in Digital History.
- George Mason Copyright Office, sections on copyright and fair use.
After Class
- Blog Post #3: Using the resources from class find a monograph and a journal article related to some aspect of the Progressive Era. In a blog post summarize the argument for each. Be sure to include citations for each in Chicago format. Due before the start of class October 1st.
Week 6
Mon. Oct 1. The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire & Omeka
Reading:
- Rose Cohen, “My First Job”
- Clara Lemlich, “Life in the Shop”
- William Shepherd, Eyewitness at the Triangle
- Echoes from the Triangle Fire. Dr. Price Suggests Co-operation Between the Waist Makers’ Union and the Board of Sanitary Control. Ladies’ Garment Worker, September, 1911. p.6.
- Richard A. Greenwlad. “The Burning Building at 23 Washington Place”: The Triangle Fire, Workers and Reformers in Progressive Era New York.” New York History 83, no. 1 (2002): 55-91.
- Miriam Posner, Up and Running with Omeka, The Programming Historian (2013).
- Guide to Creating Omeka Exhibits, The Albert Greenfield Digital Center for The History of Women’s Education.
- Explore Dublin Core, “Metadata Basics.”
- Exhibit Builder Tutorial
After Class:
- Skill Assignments #1 & 2: Using the primary sources that you gathered two weeks ago to create an Omeka collection of at least 5 primary sources. Each item should have complete metadata although not every Dublin Core field needs to be filled out. Be sure to include a reference to where you found the item and a rights statement if appropriate.
- After you’ve added the items to Omeka, create an exhibit that tells a coherent story about some aspect of Progressive Era history. Each exhibit should include 5 items with proper metadata and an image. Use prose to link these items together. Your exhibit should be between 400 and 750 words and structured/organized in a way that is suitable to the content. All secondary sources used to contextualize the items should be cited using Chicago format.
- Due before the start of class October 9th via the assignment submission form
Week 7
Tues. Oct 9. Reform in Progressive Era America & Timelines
Fall Break is October 8th. Monday classes meet Tuesday instead. Tuesday classes do not meet this week.
Before Class:
- Sign up for a Google account if you don’t already have one.
Readings:
- Excerpt from Michael McGerr, “Chapter 3: Transforming Americans” in A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
- Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives
- Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, Chapter 10
After Class:
- Skill Assignment #3: Over the course of this semester make a timeline that chronicles important developments in the Progressive Era. You should have roughly 20 events including major labor strikes, social movements, and legislative accomplishments. Events can be drawn from class lectures, readings, and research but each event’s entry must include an accurate date, a several sentence description, links to more information where relevant, and an image if possible. This assignment, unlike most skills assignments, is due December 17th by 7:30pm.
Week 8
Mon. Oct 15. The Suffrage Movement & Databases Pt I
Before Class:
- Sign up for AirTable
Reading:
- Excerpt, “Power and Politics: Women in the Progressive Era, 1900-1920” in DuBois, Ellen Carol, and Lynn Dumenil. Through Women’s Eyes: An American History with Documents. 2nd ed, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009.
- “Spreadsheet Thinking vs Database Thinking”
- Mark Merry, “Designing Databases for Historical Research,” especially part D.
- Lev Manovich, “Database as a Genre of New Media,” AI & Society 14 (2000)
After Class:
- Skill Assignment #4
- Due before the start of class October 29th.
Week 9
Mon. Oct 22. Databases Pt II & Midterm
We’ll work on our databases for the first half of class and take the midterm in the second half.
Readings:
- Airtable, Setting Up Field Types
- Airtable, A Beginners Guide to many-to-many relationships
- Airtable, Linking Between Tables
After Class:
- Skill Assignment #4 due before the start of class October 29th. (see directions from Oct 15)
Week 10
Mon. Oct 29. Segregation, Urbanization & Spatial History
Reading:
- Excerpt from McGerr, Michael E. A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870 - 1920. 2005.
- Richard White, “What is Spatial History?”
Edward L. Ayers & Scott Nesbit, “Seeing Emancipation: Scale and Freedom in the American South,” Journal of the Civil War Era, Vol 1 No 1 (2011): 3-24.
- Explore: Visualizing Emancipation
Week 11
Mon. Nov 5. Jim Crow & Mapping
Reading:
- Mark S. Foster, “In the Face of ‘Jim Crow’: Prosperous Blacks and Vacations, Travel and Outdoor Leisure, 1890-1945”, The Journal of Negro History, vol. 84, no. 2, Apr. 1999, pp. 130–49. Crossref, doi:10.2307⁄2649043.
- Keppler.gl User Guide
- Familiarize yourself with The Negro Motorist Green-Book
After Class:
- Skill Assignment #5 (Due before the start of class November 12th)
Week 12
Mon. Nov 12. Women and the City. Text Mining.
Reading:
- Maureen A. Flanagan, “Gender and Urban Political Reform: The City Club and the Woman’s City Club of Chicago in the Progressive Era” in The American Historical Review
- Ted Underwood, “Where to Start with Text Mining,” The Stone and the Shell, August 14, 2012.
- Ted Underwood, “Seven Ways Humanists are Using Computers to Understand Text,” The Stone and the Shell, June 4, 2015.
- Dan Cohen, “Searching for the Victorians,” October 4, 2010.
- Explore: Cameron Blevins, “Topic Modeling Martha Ballard’s Diary”
- Experiment with:
After Class:
- Skill Assignment #6 (Due before the start of class November 26th.)
Week 13
Mon. Nov 19. No class.
- Work on your Timelines due Dec 17.
Week 14
Mon. Nov 26. Immigration and Visualizations.
Reading:
- Excerpts from Roger Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy Since 1882 (pdf)
- * John Theibault, “Visualizations and Historical Arguments,” in Writing History in the Digital Age, edited by Kristen Nawrotzki and Jack Dougherty (University of Michigan Press, 2013).
- Explore the visualizations created by Mike Bostock.
Before Class:
- Sign up for Plot.ly
After Class:
- Skill Assignment #7 Due before the start of class December 3rd.
- Digital Past Tool Survey
Week 15
Mon. Dec 3. Security, Sustainability, Ethics in the Age of Algorithms
Reading:
- Dan Goodin, “Why passwords have never been weaker,” Ars Technica, August 20, 2012.
- Mat Honan, “How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking,” Wired, August 6, 2012.
- Mat Honan, “How I Resurrected My Digital Life After an Epic Hacking,” Wired, August 17, 2012.
- Jennifer Howard, “Born Digital, Projects Need Attention to Survive,” Chronicle of Higher Education, January 6, 2014.
- Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, “Preserving Digital History,” in Digital History (2006).
- * Kieran Healy, “Using Metadata to Find Paul Revere,” June 9, 2013.
- Safiya Noble, “A Society, Searching” excerpt from Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism.
After Class:
- Blog Post #5: Choose one of the two following topics and write a blog post:
- Topic 1: How sustainable is the digital work that you have don’t in this course? What would it take to sustain the assignments you have completed? Which assignments can you export from the web services where you created them?
- Topic 2: How secure is your digital life? Who has access to your information? What kinds of things might hackers, corporations, political parties, or states be able to figure out about you from that information? What is the significance of government surveillance? What can you do to improve your digital security?
- Due December 17th by 7:30pm.
Week 16
Mon. Dec 17. Portfolios Due by 7pm.
- No Final Exam.
- Skill Assignment #8: Use your website for the course to create a portfolio of all your work in this class.
- Your portfolio should be a page on your website that links to all of the assignments and blog posts you have completed for this class.
- Include images of the assignments where appropriate and be sure to make the site attractive.
- With each skill assignment include a short discussion about how the assignment contributed to your understanding of the Progressive Era and Digital History. The text on this page should be between 500 and 700 words.
- Your portfolio is due December 17th by 7:30pm.