This graduate course offered by Alan Liu in the UCSB English Department meets fall 2014, Tuesdays, 12:30 to 3:00 pm, in the department's Transcriptions Center, South Hall 2509.

Class 1 (Oct. 7) — Digital Humanities and the Humanities

          [Students are asked to do the readings for this class in advance of the course's first meeting]

• Focal Question What kind of "human" subject do the digital humanities speak from, to, for?

• Focal Readings ("focal readings" are chosen to prompt discussion in class)
• Plato, from Phaedrus (the myth of Theuth and the invention of writing) [PDF]
• Hippolyte Taine, "Introduction" to History of English Literature (1863) [online in sequential sections: I | II | III | IV | V | VI | VII | VIII]
• Marshall McLuhan, excerpts from Understanding Media (1964) (read excerpts from "Introduction" and "The Medium is the Message")
• N. Katherine Hayles, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (2012), read pp. 27-31 on "Scale Matters" [PDF] (Google Books version)
• Drew S. Burk, "Living Network Ecologies: A Triptych on the Universe of Fernand Deligny -- Part 1" (2013)
• See also on Deligny's "wander lines": Cartes et lignes d'erre

• Other Readings ("other readings" support or expand on themes of a particular class; students are free to browse, skip, or read at will)
• From "Humanities Computing" to Digital Humanities":
• Susan Hockey, "The History of Humanities Computing" (2004)
• John Unsworth, "What’s 'Digital Humanities' and How Did It Get Here?" (2012)
• Meredith Hindley, "The Rise of the Machines--NEH and the Digital Humanities: The Early Years" (2013)
• Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, "What is Digital Humanities and What's It Doing in English Departments?" [PDF] (2010)
• The early hypertext moment and hypertext literature:
• Robert Coover, "Literary Hypertext: The Passing of the Golden Age" (1999) 

Class 2 (Oct. 14) — State of the Field

• Focal Question Where is digital humanities? (methodologically, institutionally, socially, geopolitically)

• Focal Readings

• Alan Liu, "The State of the Digital Humanities: A Report and a Critique," Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 11.1-2 (2012): 8-41 [paywalled; UCSB students have free access through UCSB Library Proxy server]
• Matthew Jockers, "Welcome to the Big Tent," DH 2011 conference, Stanford U., 19-22 June 2011.
• Tom Scheinfeldt, "The Dividends of Difference: Recognizing Digital Humanities’ Diverse Family Tree/s" (2014)
• Stephen Ramsay, "On Building" (2011)
• Natalia Cecire, "Theory and the Virtues of Digital Humanities" (Introduction to section on "Conversations"), Journal of Digital Humanities 1.1 [PDF] (Winter 2011): 44-53.
• Amanda Phillips, "#transformDH -- A Call to Action Following ASA 2011" (26 October 2011); see also the #transformDH web site
• Postcolonial Digital Humanities (#dhpoco) Open Thread, 10-14 May 2013
• James Smithies, "Speaking Back to America, Localizing DH Postcolonialism" (2013)
• GO::DH (Global Outlook::Digital Humanities) [browse site]

• Other Readings
• Patrik Svensson, "Humanities Computing as Digital Humanities" (2009)
• Melissa Terras / U. College London Digital Humanities, "Infographic: Quantifying Digital Humanities" (2012) [download the PDF infographic]
• DiRT (Digital Research Tools) Directory and DARIAH-DE (Digital Research Infrastructure for Arts and Humanities), "TaDiRaH: Taxonomy of DH Research Activities and Objects" (2014)| see also explanation of TaDiRaH
• Browse titles in the tables of contents of the following essay collections or conferences:
• A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth (Blackwell, 2004)
• A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, ed. Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman (Blackwell, 2007)
• Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew K. Gold (University of Minnesota Press, 2012); open access edition, 2013.
• Literary Studies in the Digital Age: An Evolving Anthology, ed. Kenneth M. Price and Ray Siemens (MLA Commons, 2013)
• Digital Humanities 2014 conference, Lausanne, Switzerland, 7-12 July 2014.
• The Dark Side of the Digital conference, U. Milwaukee, 2-4 May 2013. See also the subsequent "In the Shadows of the Digital Humanities," special issue of Differences, 25.1 (2014) [paywalled; UCSB students have free access through UCSB Library Proxy server]
• Digital Humanities Panels at MLA 2014 (compiled by Mark Sample)

• Practicum: Getting Started in DH Course "practicums" are hands-on, small-scale exercises that ask students to experiment at a beginner's level with the tools of the digital humanities. The goal is not technical mastery but learning enough about the technologies to think about, and through, their concepts and also to discover which tools might be used in a student's future research.  In many cases, experience gained in the practicums will feed directly into discussion of conceptual issues in class. (See Assignments: Practicums).

• Class 2 Practicum Assignment - Getting Started in DH

Class 3 (Oct. 21) — Text Encoding

• Focal Question What is text from the point of view of data; what is data from the point of view of text?
  
  
• Focal Readings
• Yin Liu, "Ways of Reading, Models for Text, and the Usefulness of Dead People" [PDF or HTML] (2013)
• Alan Liu, "Transcendental Data: Toward a Cultural History and Aesthetics of the New Encoded Discourse" (2004) (read only pp. 49-63)
• Wikipedia article on "Markup Language"
• C. M. [Michael] Sperberg-McQueen and Lou Burnard.  "A Gentle Introduction to XML" (2004)
• Julia Flanders, "Basic Manuscript and Physical Document Encoding"
• Michael Witmore, "Text: A Massively Addressable Object" (2013)
• William Warner, Kimberly Knight, and UCSB Transliteracies History of Reading Group, "In the Beginning was the Word: A Visualization of the Page as Interface" (Flash animation)

• Other Readings
• Steven J. DeRose, David G. Durand, Elli Mylonas, and Allen H. Renear, "What is Text, Really?" [PDF] (1990)
• Susan Hockey, Allen Renear, and Jerome J. McGann, "Panel: What Is Text? A Debate On the Philosophical and Epistemological Nature of Text in the Light of Humanities Computing Research" (ALLC-ACH 1999 conference)
• Kari Kraus, "Conjectural Criticism: Computing Past and Future Texts" (2009) -- This essay occurs twice in the course schedule.  In this first pass through the essay, concentrate on the notion of the "allographic."
• Alan Liu, "Escaping History: New Historicism, Databases, and Contingency" [PDF] (originally published 2004; chap. 9 of Liu, Local Transcendence (2008); manuscript version provided here for open access) (read only pp. 317-23 on origins and theory of the relational database)

• Practicum: Encoding
  
• Class 3 Practicum Assignment - Encoding
• (Folder of Exercises on Student Work page)

Class 4 (Oct. 28) — Text Analysis (1): From Close Reading to Distant Reading

• Focal Question What is the relation between mid-20th century "formalist" and recent "data-centric" approaches to humanistic knowledge?
  

• Focal Readings
• Formalist "Close Reading"
• Cleanth Brooks,
• "The Heresy of Paraphrase" [PDF] from his Well Wrought Urn (1947) 
• "Keats's Sylvan Historian" from the same book
• Boris Tomashevsky, "Thematics" [PDF] (1925), [course password required]
• Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale (1928/1968), pp. 92-93
• Youtube introduction to Propp by chadafrican, (2013)
• Distant-Reading Approaches
• Stanford Literary Lab:
• Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees (Verso, 2005), pp. 1-33, 91-92 [purchase this book in paperback from the UCSB bookstore or elsewhere]
• Matthew L. Jockers, Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History (2013) -- Chap. 4: "Macroanalysis" [purchase this book as a paperback or Kindle book from online vendors]
• Ryan Heuser and and Long Le-Khac, "A Quantitative Literary History of 2,958 Nineteenth-Century British Novels: The Semantic Cohort Method" [PDF] (2012)
• Ted Underwood,
• "Where to Start with Text Mining?" (2012)
• "We Don’t Already Know the Broad Outlines of Literary History" (2012
• "Genre, Gender, and Point of View" (2013)
• Andrew Piper, "Reading's Refrain: From Bibliography to Topology" [PDF] (2013)

• Other Readings
• Chad Wellmon, "Big Humanities" (2014) (on 19th-century philology as "big data")
• Kate Singer, "Digital Close Reading: TEI for Teaching Poetic Vocabularies" (2013)
• Tanya Clement, "Text Analysis, Data Mining, and Visualizations in Literary Scholarship" (2013)
• Stanford Literary Lab (Sarah Allison et al.), "Style at the Scale of the Sentence" [PDF] (2013)

• Practicum: Trying Some Text Analysis Tools
• Class 4 Practicum Assignment - Trying Some Text Analysis Tools
• (Folder of Exercises on Student Work page)
   
• Other Assignment Due Students should by this date submit to the instructor a list of "possible blog posts" for the blog post assignment in the course.

Class 5 (Nov. 4) — Text Analysis (2): Topic Modeling

• Focal Question For the humanities, what is the relationship between a "topic"? a "theme"? a "model"? and "meaning"?
  

• Focal Readings
• Ted Underwood, "Topic Modeling Made Just Simple Enough" (2012)
• David M. Blei, "Topic Modeling and Digital Humanities" (2012)
• Matt Burton, "The Joy of Topic Modeling" (2013)
• Ted Underwood, "What Kinds of "Topics" Does Topic Modeling Actually Produce?" (2012)
• Matthew L. Jockers
• "The LDA Buffet is Now Open; or, Latent Dirichlet Allocation for English Majors" (2011)
• Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History (2013) -- Chap. 8: "Theme" [purchase this book as a paperback or Kindle book from online vendors]
• Also: play with the topic models from his corpus that Jockers provides interactive access to on his "500 Themes from a corpus of 19th-Century Fiction" page.  (For an example of how someone can use this page to do a kind of "close reading" of his topic-model results, see Bill Benzon, "Reading Macroanalysis 6.4: Themes and how they evolve over time" [2014])
• Andrew Goldstone and Ted Underwood, "The Quiet Transformations of Literary Studies: What Thirteen Thousand Scholars Could Tell Us" [PDF] (2014) (preprint version)
• See Andrew Goldstone's site for exploring and visualizing the topic models on which "The Quiet Transformations of Literary Studies" is based. (See also Andrew Goldstone's new site for exploring and visualizing topic models 40 years of the Signs journal)
• John Mohr and Petko Bogdanov, "Topic Models: What They Are and Why They Matter [PDF]," (2013) [paywalled; UCSB students have free access through UCSB Library Proxy server] | [open-access manuscript version] 

• Other Readings
• Lisa M. Rhody,"Topic Modeling and Figurative Language" (2012)
• Benjamin M. Schmidt, "Words Alone: Dismantling Topic Models in the Humanities" (2012) -- Read the introductory section (up until the section on "topic modeling at sea")

• Practicum: Trying Topic Modeling
• Class 5 Practicum Assignment - Trying Topic Modeling
• (Folder of Exercises on Student Work page)
  
  
• Other Assignment Due In class on this date, students will either form up into teams for their mock project prospectus assignment or decide to work individually on that assignment.
  

Class 6 (Nov. 13: Special Day for Class: Thursday) — Social Network Analysis
             (Class visit by Mark Algee-Hewitt and Ryan Heuser, Associate Directors for Research at the Stanford Literary Lab)

• Focal Question What is a "network" and why is it a model today for everything? What is not a network or resists the network model?
• Guest participants: Mark Algee-Hewitt and Ryan Heuser, co-associate directors of the Stanford Literary Lab.  Please read in advance France Moretti, "'Operationalizing': Or, The Function of Measurement in Modern Literary Theory" [PDF] (Stanford Lit Lab Pamphlet #6, 2013)

• Focal Readings
• Wikipedia article on "Social Networks"
• David Easley and Jon Kleinberg.  Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World, Chap. 1 (Overview) [PDF] (2010) -- read only Chap. 1
• Stephen P. Borgatti,, et al. (2009), "Network Analysis in the Social Sciences" [PDF] [paywalled; UCSB students have free access through UCSB Library Proxy server]
• Scott B. Weingart, "Demystifying Networks, Parts I & II" (2011)
• Franco Moretti, "Network Theory, Plot Analysis," Stanford Literary Lab Pamphlet #2 (2011)
• Elson, David K., Nicholas Dames, and Kathleen R. McKeon, "Extracting Social Networks from Literary Fiction" [PDF] (2010)
• Elijah Meeks and Scott B. Weingart, "Introduction to Network Analysis and Representation" (play with the interactive tutorial on network visualization models and parameters)

• Other Readings
• John Scott, "Social Network Analysis" (1988) [paywalled; UCSB students have free access through UCSB Library Proxy server]
• Stacy Margolis, "Network Theory circa 1800: Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn" (2012) [paywalled; UCSB students have free access through UCSB Library Proxy server]
• Alan Liu, "From Reading to Social Computing" (2013)
• A few humanities social network projects: -- Browse the following projects:
• Six Degrees of Francis Bacon: Reassembling the Early Modern Social Network (2013)
• Kindred Britain (2013) (see also essays & documentation from the developers)
• SNAC (Social Networks & Archival Contexts) | Prototype (2010-)
• RoSE (Research-oriented Social Environment) (2009-) (created at UCSB): About | White Paper [PDF]
• Yaddo Circles Prototype (demo video)
• Mapping the Republic of Letters (2008-)

• Practicum: Trying Social Network Analysis
  
• Class 6 Practicum Assignment - Trying Social Network Analysis
• (Folder of Exercises on Student Work page)

• Other Assignment Due Students (or teams) should by this date submit to the instructor a paragraph sketching the gist of a "possible mock project prospectus" for the mock project prospectus assignment in the course.  The paragraph is only provisional; it does not prevent changes in plan in future.

Class 7 (Nov. 18) — Digital Visualization & Mapping

• Focal Question What can be diagrammed/mapped, and what not?  How does the relationship between visualizable and unvisualizable data create a sense of the world and our place in it?
  
• Focal Readings
• Background: a few pieces to provoke thought about the history and intellectual traditions of visualization and mapping:
• Albert Borgmann, Holding On to Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium (1999) - Introduction
• John Bender and Michael Marrinan, The Culture of Diagram (2010), Chap. 1 [PDF]
• Fernand Braudel and Annales historiography (e.g., Table of Contents [PDF] from The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1976)
• Michel Foucault, "Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias" [PDF]" (1967)
• Terrigal High School, New South Wales, Australia, "Introduction to Aboriginal Art" [slideshow, PPT]
• Visualization:
• Graham Odds, "How To Design Better Data Vizualizations" (2014)
• Lev Manovich, "What Is Visualization?" [PDF] (2011)
• Sabrinia Bresciani and Martin J Eppler, "The Risks of Visualization: A Classification of Disadvantages Associated with Graphic Representations of Information" [PDF] (2008)
• Sites to Browse:
• Steven Lubar and Massimo Riva, course syllabus and resources for "Visualizations in the Humanities: From the Cabinet of Curiosities to the Geoparser" (2013)
• Mapping:
• Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees (Verso, 2005), pp. 35-64 [purchase this book from the UCSB bookstore or elsewhere]
• Zephyr Frank, "Layers, Flows And Intersections: Jeronymo José De Mello And Artisan Life In Rio De Janeiro, 1840s-1880s" [PDF] [paywalled; UCSB students have free access through UCSB Library Proxy server]
• Øyvind Eide, "The Area Told as a Story: An Inquiry into the Relationship Between Verbal and Map-based Expressions of Geographical Information," [PDF], Ph.D. thesis, King's College, 2012. Listen only to Eide's presentation of his thesis in audio form (with accompanying slides):
• Audio of talk by Eide about his thesis (talk starts at 8:20 in the recording and finishes at 58:40)
• Slides for talk [PDF]
• Jason Farman, "Map Interfaces and the Production of Locative Media Space" [PDF] (2015)
• Sites to Browse:
• The Spatial History Project (including Richard White, "What is Spatial History?" [2010])
• ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World
• HyperCities
• Neatline Projects (see demos on Neatline site)
• Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761
• Google Lit Trips (using the downloadable .kmz files that overlay literary maps over satellite maps requires Google Earth)
• See also Walking Ulysses ("Enter into the world of James Joyce's novel, Ulysses, by following its characters as they walk the streets of Dublin on June 16, 1904")

• Other Readings
• The Guardian, "Holy Infographics: The Bible Visualized" (2013)
• Andrea Lau and Andrew Vande Moere, "Towards a Model of Information Aesthetics in Information Visualization"  (2007)
• David Rumsey, "Reading Historical Maps Historically: How Spatial Technologies Can Enable Close, Distant and Dynamic Interpretations" (opening keynote at DH 2011 conference) (Youtube video; keynote begins at 37 min., 50 sec. in video) (See also David Rumsey Map Collection)
• Maria Popova, "An Atlas of Alternative Maps" (2014)
• John Klima, Project Gallery
• See also Rita Raley, "Statistical Material: Globalization and the Digital Art of John Klima" (2003)  [paywalled; UCSB students have free access through UCSB Library Proxy server]

• Practicum: Mapping an Idea
• Class 7 Practicum Assignment - Visualizing and Mapping
• (Folder of Exercises on Student Work page)

Class 8 (Nov. 25) — Digital Time: Pastness, Archives, and Media Archaeology for the Digital Age

• Focal Question How do past or present media technologies articulate different ideas of time?  For example, how do their processes or logics construct various senses of the "past" or of the "new"?

• Focal Readings
• Background: a few pieces to provoke thought about the history and intellectual traditions of mediated time and history:
• Aboriginal Australia Art and Culture Centre, Alice Springs: "Dreamtime," "Meaning of the Dreamtime," "Introduction to Aboriginal Art"  (See also Wikipedia article on "Dreamtime")
• Alan Liu, "Friending the Past: The Sense of History and Social Computing" (2011) [paywalled; UCSB students have free access through UCSB Library Proxy server]
• Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" [PDF] (1967)
• David Lowenthal, "Material Preservation and its Alternatives" (1989) [paywalled; UCSB students have free access through UCSB Library Proxy server]
• Browse site of The Long Now Foundation; and read Michael Chabon, "The Omega Glory" [PDF] (02006)
• The Idea of "Archives":
• Luciana Duranti, "Archives as a Place" (1996)
• Kate Theimer, "Archives in Context and as Context" (2012)
• Yuk Hui, "Archivist Manifesto" (2013)
• Media Archaeology:
• Friedrich A. Kittler, from Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986, trans. 1999), "Preface" and "Introduction" [PDF]
• Wolfgang Ernst, from Digital Memory and the Archive [PDF] (ed. Jussi Parikka, 2013). Read the two following essays:
  
• "Archives in Transition: Dynamic Media Memories"
• "Experimenting with Media Temporality: Pythagoras, Hertz, Turing"
• Jussi Parikka, from What is Media Archaeology (2012), "Archive Dynamics: Software Culture and Digital Heritage" (requires course password)
• Lisa Gitelman, from Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (2006), "Introduction: Media as Historical Subjects" (requires course password)
• Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, from Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (2008), "'Every Contact Leaves a Trace': Storage, Inscription, and Computer Forensics," pp. 36-50 (requires course password)

• Other Readings
• Alan Liu, "Imagining the New Media Encounter" (2008)

• Practicum: Something Old, Something New
• Class 8 Practicum Assignment - Temporality
• (Folder of Exercises on Student Work page)

Class 9 (Dec. 2) — Critical Digital Humanities: Making It Different

• Focal Question How do the digital humanities contribute to the humanities vision of interpretive and sociocultural "difference"?

• Focal Readings
• The Deformance Thesis
• Lisa Samuels and Jerome J. McGann, "Deformance and Interpretation" (1999) [paywalled; UCSB students have free access through UCSB Library Proxy server]
• Stephen Ramsay, "Algorithmic Criticism" (2008)
• Mark Sample, "Notes Towards a Deformed Humanities" (2012)
• Rosa Menkman, The Glitch Moment(um) [PDF] (2001) (read pp. 7-32: "Introduction," "Glitch Manifesto," "A Technological Approach to Noise," and "The Perception of Glitch")
• See also Menkman's site: http://rosa-menkman.blogspot.com/
• Penn State Studio|Lab, Playing the Archive project (browse the "archive" and its resources)
• Douglas B. Kell and Stephen G. Oliver, "Here is the Evidence, Now What is the Hypothesis? - The Complementary Roles of Inductive and Hypothesis-driven Science in the Post-genomic Era" [PDF] (2003)[paywalled; UCSB students have free access through UCSB Library Proxy server]
• The Transform Thesis (also see some of the readings for Class 2)
• Alan Liu, "Where is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?" (2012)
• Todd Presner, "Critical Theory and the Mangle of Digital Humanities" [draft version; PDF] (2012)
• Tara McPherson, "Why Are the Digital Humanities So White? or Thinking the Histories of Race and Computation" (2012)
• Adeline Koh and Roopika Risam, ed., #DHpoco “Open Thread: The Digital Humanities as a Historical ‘Refuge’ from Race/Class/Gender/Sexuality/Disability?” (May 10-14, 2013)
• See also Postcolonial Digital Humanities (#DHpoco) "Founding Principles"
• Anne Cong-Huyen, "Transformative Asian/American Digital Humanities" (2013)
• Michael Widner, "The Digital Humanists' (Lack of) Response to the Surveillance State" (20 Aug. 2013) (see also Widner's summary of Twitter and other debates about his post)

• Other Readings
• Deform:
• Amy Leggette, "From the Digi-Flânerie Field Guide: Approaching Data as Artifact" (2013)
• Benjamin J. Robertson, "Shuffle Culture: Archive, Mashup, Apparatus, Human" (2013)
• Transform:
• Patrik Svensson, "Envisioning the Digital Humanities" (2012)
• David M. Berry, "Introduction: Understanding the Digital Humanities" [PDF] (2012)
• Todd Presner, "The Ethics of the Algorithm: Close and Distant Listening to the Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive" [PDF] (2012); plus images for essay.
• "The Dark Side of the Digital" - browse schedule and materials:
• MLA Panel (2012)
• The Dark Side of Digital Humanities – Part 1, by Wendy Chun
  The Dark Side of Digital Humanities – Part 2, by Richard Grusin
  The Dark Side of Digital Humanities – Part 3, by Patrick Jagoda
  The Dark Side of Digital Humanities – Part 4, by Rita Raley
  Summary of Panel by Alexis Lothian
• U. Milwaukee Conference (2013)

• Practicum
• Class 9 Practicum Assignment - Make It Different
• (Folder of Exercises on Student Work page)

Class 10 (Dec. 9) — Student Presentations of Project Prospectuses

• Other Assignment Due Student mock project prospectuses (description of assignment) should be online by this date (please place a post or link for your prospectus in the folder for Project Prospectus on the Student Work page for this course.  For effective presentations, students may want to create other online resources or slideshow presentations.