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 8	Introductions
January 13	So What is Public Digital Humanities? Brennan, Sheila, “Public, First,” Debates in Digital Humanities. Stommel, “The Public Digital Humanities,” Disrupting the Digital Humanities.
January 20	No Class: Martin Luther King Day and Inauguration Day
January 27	Accessibility Hendren, “All Technology is Assistive.” Williams, “Disability, Universal Design, and the Digital Humanities.” WebAIM, “Introduction to Web Accessibility.” WebAIM, “Constructing a POUR Website.”
February 3	Archives and Collections Caswell, “Identifying and Dismantling White Supremacy in Archives.” Caswell, “Imaginging transformative spaces…” Tansey, “No one owes their trauma to archivists…” Whitelaw, “Generous Interfaces for Digital Cultural Collections.”
February 10	Digital Narratives and other Encounters Rosenzweig, ed. “Hypertext Scholarship in American Studies.” Branch, “Snow Fall.” National Geographic, “Into the Amazon.” Connection Established.
February 18	Visualizations Visualizing Information for Advocacy.
February 24	Fabrications Grayburn, “Teaching Archaeology of the Middle East in the Time of Daesh.” Hancock, et. al., “Bibliocircutry and the Design of the Alien Everyday” Sayers, “Why Fabricate?”
March 3	No Class: Spring Break
March 10	Design Elements, Principles, and Purposes Chimero, Shape of Design. Le Guin, “Mazes.”
March 17	Project Development and Management Garrett, “Meet the Elements,” Elements of User Experience.
March 24	Site Maps and Wireframing
March 31	Design Briefs
April 7	Project Updates; Open Lab
April 14	Project Updates; Open Lab
April 21	No Class: Easter Break
April 28	Project Presentations

Assignments

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: 1-2 pages that detail the purpose of the project, situates it amongst similar peer work, and summarizes 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.

Contributions to Interspaces (25%)

If the Project Prototype is a space to develop a project of your own, this assignment gives you the opportunity to work on an existing public project with a team of others. We will coordinate with Professor Heather Steffen and students in ENPH 5502 on specific work for Interfaces.

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.

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 include:

Create an account on Github and share your username with me.
Download and install Visual Studio Code, a text editor/IDE we will use for in-class work and assignments.
Create an account on Georgetown.Domains.

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.