A Graduate Seminar on Digital Medieval Methods (Spring 2021)
Digital technologies have played an active role in Medieval Studies for more than four decades, medievalists have since used computational methods, and many scholars are currently engaged with digital methods and tools to enhance their research. This course will offer an overview on the history and theoretical trends regarding digital resources and tools applied to medieval and early modern disciplines. An introduction on the emergence of the Digital Humanities and its relationship with medievalist and early modern scholars will precede an analysis of the pioneering projects. Students will become familiar with the main methodologies, technologies and projects ranging from the collection of digitized primary sources to the exploration of the main channels of scholarly publication and communication. While covering namely projects related to literary and historical genres, the course will merge readings on digital humanities at large -theoretical and practical- and medieval literary works -primary sources and secondary readings. Some of the fields we will analyze will be digitization, metadata curation, digital scholarly editing, as well as other digital approaches, such as historical and literary mapping, stylistics and authorship studies, stemmatology, or digital paleography.
This course is taught in English and is open to graduate students from all A&S departments, especially those interested in historical studies and digital methods.
The goals of this course are:
As a result of this seminar, students should be able to:
The assignments and distribution of the final grade will be as follows:
Attendance and Participation (20%): This course will consist of weekly readings and discussions. To facilitate the discussions, students will write short responses following a list of key questions proposed by the instructor and they will bring to class their own. In each class, there will be a designated student who will be responsible to start and “lead” the class. In addition to the list of readings, each unit has a Featured Projects section that students will analyze and discuss in class.
Digital Assignments (15%): At the end of almost every class there will be a small “technical” assignment (“How to section”). For these exercises, there will be a tutorial to be completed at home, while class time will be mainly for troubleshooting.
Oral Presentation “The history of a discipline” (15%): Each student will do one oral presentation about the history of a digital method in his/her discipline, and analyze a pioneer project and an ongoing one (English, MLL, History, etc.). - February 11
Attendance to DH Events (10%): The student will have to attend at least 2 DH events from a list of activities that will be updated on this website.
Review of a DH project (20%): one of the two writing assignments of this course consists of a critical review conceived as it was to be sent to one of these journals: Reviews in Digital Humanities or A review journal for digital editions and resources. A first draft will be required on March 11th, and a final version on April 4th.
A DH Grant proposal(20%): Depending on the interest of each of you, you will have to write a DH grant proposal consisting of a digital prototype preferably related to one of the topics seen in class. At the end of the semester students will present their DH projects in front of the class and they will receive feedback from their peers (April 29th). The final proposal should be submitted before May 6th.
Thursday, 28 January 2021
Thursday, 4 February 2021
In this session, we explore the beginnings of the DH and the role of one of the pioneers of humanities computing, Roberto Busa and his Index Thomisticus. We analyze the role of medievalist in the awakening of the discipline, as well as the type of earliest projects (Concordances, Author Attribution, or Digital Editions). We frame some guidelines to analyze DH project.
Optional
Thursday, 11 February 2021
Each student must offer a 15 minutes presentation featuring a digital approach within his/her field (English, MLL, History). The presentation must include:
In addition to this list, every student must add another reading belonging to his/her discipline or interests in consultation with the professor (Start by checking the “DH General Readings recommended for this Course” and the Readings for Day 3).
Thursday, 18 February 2021
We will focus on digitization of primary sources (codex, manuscripts, and early printed books) from different points of view. Frist, how do digitization and materiality fits within Medieval studies (Bamford & Fancomano); second what is data curation (Muñoz and Flander) and what types of metadata are there (Riley); we will discuss as well the best practices on sharing data and digital knowledge production (Brown). Finally, we will explore data interoperability and the digital identification of historical objects, making a case for the semantic metadata standards (Ehrmann).
Optional
If you attend the Workshop "Stop using Word. Just write Markdown!" DH@UM , please make sure you understand how your terminal works. You can follow the basic steps in this tutorial at The Programming Historian: Introduction to the Bash Command Line. Also, if you want to start downloading the packages to work with Pandoc, read: Sustainable Authorship in Plain Text using Pandoc and Markdown.
Thursday, 25 February 2021
We will explore the concept of digital archive and some of the main projects in the last decades. Some of the readings tackle the theory of the “archive” and the implications behind the selection of the objects. We will present two platforms to easily create digital archives and exhibitions.
Other examples not Medieval
Thursday, 4 March 2021
This session explores the principles of digital textual scholarship and the possibilities of scholarly editions. We present as well the basics of text encoding.
Others (not Medieval):
Check Franzini’s Catalog of Digital Editions and Patrick Sahle’s Digital Scholarly Editions for more examples to discuss in class.
Thursday, 11 March 2021 (Asynchronous class)
This session continues the topic of digital editing focusing on the process of publication.
Thursday, 18 March 2021
This session will be devoted to the basic principles of text analysis featuring some DH key readings (Jockers, Sinclair, Rockwell). We will see examples of digital corpora (collections of written material) and some of the potentialities to explore them (Drucker, Jänicke et al.).
Optional
Other:
Voyant: https://voyant-tools.org
Thursday, 25 March
Remember: Sunday, April 4th the final draft for the DH project review is due.
Thursday, 1 April 2021
Make an account with RStudio Cloud
Thursday, 8 April 2021
Optional (Case studies)
Other projects:
Thursday, 15 April 2021
Thursday, 22 April 2021
Defense of your grant proposal
Digital History:
Stephen Robertson. “Digital History Readings”
List of tool:
This syllabus takes inspiration from: Steven E. Jones DIG 6178 (Spring 2020), and Chris Alen Sula INFO 657
This are the list of event where you can participate in order to obtain the 10% of "Attendance to DH Events"
Code released under the https://github.com/surjithctly/documentation-html-template
For more information about copyright and license check choosealicense.com.