Digital Public Humanities

This course is designed as an intensive exploration of the intersections of Public and Digital Humanities. As such it is a course in applied Public Humanities, and will examine how presence and use of digital media and tools affects the practice of humanities research and pedagogy. The course emphasizes praxis and tacit knowledge, so we will investigate topics through making and critiquing prototypes based on student interests.

By the end of the course, students should:

  • Acquire a broad knowledge of the different approaches—methodological, topical, intellectual—taken by practitioners of digital humanities;
  • Deconstruct a variety of genres of digital public humanities work;
  • Understand (and appreciate!) different roles one can play in digital public humanities work, and how to support public humanities work through/with digital technology;
  • Become familiar with web design + development, web servers, databases and other data structures, and content management systems;
  • Learn basic project management, including steps and skills to conceive, design, develop, and implement a public humanities resource in digital form.

 

Schedule

January 7 (W) Introductions
January 12 So What is Public Digital Humanities?
January 19 No Class: Martin Luther King Day
January 26 Reviewing Digital Humanities Work

Find a collection of reviews in Reviews in DH that interests you. Read them, and visit the projects mentioned.
February 2 Archives and Collections
February 9 Digital Narratives and other Encounters
February 17 (T) Archives and Collections
February 23 Accessibility
March 2 No Class: Spring Break
March 9 Design Elements, Principles, and Purposes
March 16 Site Maps and Wireframing
March 23 Project Updates; Open Lab
March 30 Design Briefs
April 6 No Class; Spring Break
April 13 Project Updates; Open Lab
April 20 No Class: Easter Break
April 27 Project Presentations

Assignments

Annotated Bibliography (25%)

To help you developing your thinking for your Project Prototype, this assignment asks you to gather at least 12 sources and write a modest annotation for each. At least three of the sources should be published research works (journal articles, academic monographs, other similar formats). Other potential sources include digital tools, software, publishing platforms.

Project Prototoype (50%)

The Project Prototype provides you the space to conceive, design, and develop a public humanities project of your own. It is a space for practicing the underlying technologies for front-end web development and design while also considering the purpose, scope, and content of a public project. The Project Prototype consists of the following phases, each with a deliverable:

  • Strategy: A 1-page description that details the purpose of the project, situates it amongst similar peer work as described in your Annotated Bibliography, and outlines what successful completion of the project entails.
  • Scope: A list of any number of features or requirements that your project needs to include to successfully realize the project as described in the Strategy.
  • Site Map: A diagram showing the breadth and depth of your project’s overall information architecture.
  • Wireframes: One wireframe each for your project’s home page and an internal page.
  • Design Brief: 1-2 page description of the particular design aesthetics for your project. Color palette, typography, imagery, tone.
  • Working Web Pages: At least two working HTML pages based on all the preceding work for the prototype.

Class Engagement (25%)

I hope you’ll attend each class, and not simply appear in each class. As this course is part of a program titled Engaged and Public Humanities, I do hope you’ll commit to an intentional and consistent engagement with the course. Engagement with the class can take myriad forms, and I’m happy to work with you to develop good ways to attend to all the things in the class.

Addendum

Requirements

All reading for the course will be provide for free, either as hyperlinks to materials published elsewhere or shared through the course website and/or Canva. The only other technical requirements for the course is to create an account on Georgetown.Domains for some in-class exercises and for hosting your project prototype.

Working in Groups

Digital work is very often collaborative in nature, so I encourage you to work together in groups on a project. For grading purposes, if you do decide to work as a group, I will require a brief written description of how the team worked together and how each person contributed to solving problems presented by a particular assignment. So, you’re free to turn in a particular assignment as a group, but I need to know that 1) everyone in the group participated in the assignment, and 2) there was transfer of knowledge among the group, meaning that everyone in the group learned from each other. In most digital projects outside this class, team members will specialize in a particular area, and it’s safe to assume that once this class is over you will choose a particular area or two as a specialty. But for this class, I expect you to learn about and contribute to all the areas involved in the creation of a digital project.