UWO History 513 2007-08 - Digital History

History 513 is a year long graduate course on digital history that emphasizes both the presentation of history on the web and in interactive systems, and the use of computational techniques to work with digital resources. It is required for students in the public history program; other graduate students may take it with my permission.

Participants

Schedule

We meet weekly on Wednesdays from 12:30 to 3:30 pm in SSC 4317. Seminar discussions alternate with studio sessions. If you'd like to meet with me, send me e-mail at wturkel@uwo.ca to arrange a time.

Prerequisites

There are no prerequisites for the course other than a willingness to learn new things and the perseverance to keep working when you're confused or when you realize that you could spend a lifetime learning about the topics and technologies that we will cover in class, and still not master them all. Students will come into the course with very different levels of experience and expertise. Some, maybe most, will be familiar only with the rudiments of computer and internet use. Others may already be skilled programmers.

Readings

There are three kinds of readings listed in the syllabus. Readings for Discussion must be done by every student in the class, as they will form the basis of our seminar and studio discussions. Technical Background Readings provide some of the detail about particular methods, techniques or technologies. You should read as many of these as you can, skipping only the ones that you are already familiar with or the ones that are completely over your head. (You might also want to read these before you tackle the discussion readings each week). Finally, there are lists of books for Further Reading. You will probably only read these if you are especially interested in the week's topic or need more information to implement a particular project.

Evaluation

You will be graded on your participation in seminar discussions (35%), on your reflective blogging (35%; see below) and on the work that you do on studio exercises and projects (30%). Your final grade will reflect how much you've learned or accomplished, rather than any overall level of technical attainment.

Blogging

Every student in the class will have an academic blog and will be expected to make regular posts to it. This use of blogging is to encourage you to engage in 'reflective practice,' that is, to force you to think about your learning and research as you are doing it. This process was described by Donald Schön in The Reflective Practitioner (London: Temple Smith, 1983):

In each instance, the practitioner allows himself [or herself] to experience surprise, puzzlement, or confusion in a situation which he finds uncertain or unique. He reflects on the phenomena before him, and on the prior understandings which have been implicit in his behaviour. He carries out an experiment which serves to generate both a new understanding of the phenomena and a change in the situation… He does not keep means and ends separate, but defines them interactively as he frames a problematic situation. He does not separate thinking from doing… Because his experimenting is a kind of action, implementation is built into his inquiry.

Different bloggers have very different styles. Some people like to keep what amounts to a lab notebook, others a daily diary. Some write short, off-the-cuff entries, others prefer to write well-crafted essays. If you have never blogged before, spend some time familiarizing yourself with existing digital history blogs.

Before the first class (12 Sep 2007) you should go to Blogger and create an account and a blog. If possible, create the blog under your own name (e.g., http://johndoe.blogspot.com); if not, choose something professional sounding. Post an introductory message about yourself and then send me the URL of your blog so that I can add you to the course blogroll for History 513.

Use of Computers

You will obviously be using computers for this course. If you don't have one of your own, you can use a machine in one of the campus computing labs. Unlike many other courses, however, I also encourage you to use your own computer (if you have one) during seminar discussions. Take notes, look things up on the web, blog about the ongoing discussion, send backchannel text messages to other people in the room. To get the most out of the course, you will want to experiment with new forms of interaction and learning.

Wikipedia

In this class you will be exposed to a lot of relatively new technical terms and ideas. You should get in the habit of looking these up in Wikipedia whenever you come across something unfamiliar. You've probably heard that Wikipedia is an unreliable source. That's true, but it's true of any source. One of our early seminar discussions will focus on reading Wikipedia critically; during the course you will also have the experience of writing a Wikipedia article and monitoring its subsequent revision.

Studio Exercises and Projects

The best way to learn how to do something is to try to do it yourself. I've set aside regular time where you will be working on individual exercises and group projects. The individual exercises are pitched at different levels of difficulty. Many are optional: instead of requiring that every student work through the same exercises, I would like you to choose problems that you find interesting and challenging.

To give you some idea of how hard I think a particular problem is, I've marked each as

Easy. You should be able to do this exercise without any programming, and it will take a couple of hours or less.
Medium. It took me somewhere between an hour and a couple of days to do this, and I had to write some code.
Hard. I think this should be possible, but I haven't tried it yet.

Since everyone will be doing something different, you should be blogging as you work on exercises or projects. If you write code, I would be happy to see a demonstration of it; and if you write something truly cool, we'll put it on the server. Small teams will also be working together to create group projects for the end of the year.

Required Texts

Cohen, Daniel J. & Roy Rosenzweig. Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2005. Full text available online; if you'd prefer to read a paper copy it can be ordered inexpensively from Amazon, Chapters, etc.

Saffer, Dan. Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices. Peachpit Press, 2006. Full text not available online; copies are available in the UWO Bookstore or from online retailers.

Schriebman, Susan, Ray Siemens and John Unsworth, eds. A Companion to Digital Humanities. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Full text available online; the hardcover is prohibitively expensive, and we won't be reading the whole thing.

Optional Studio Text

Dan O'Sullivan and Tom Igoe. Physical Computing: Sensing and Controlling the Physical World with Computers. Thomson Course Technology, 2004. This excellent book covers some of the techniques that we will be using in studio, but at a lower level than we need. It really is optional, so don't feel like you have to buy a copy. It is most useful for students with some prior exposure to electronics and programming.