archiva.netPaula Petrik

Course · HIST 697 · AY 2010

History and New Media.

Graduate seminar on digital history at George Mason University. The long-running CHNM-affiliated course on what historians can do with the web, the database, and the archive.

Course description

HIST 697 is the introductory graduate seminar in digital history at George Mason. The course assumes that students arrive with the standard toolkit of a working historian — archival research, source criticism, narrative writing — and asks what that toolkit can become when extended into the digital tools the field has accumulated since the late 1990s. Students leave the course with a working digital project of their own, not a paper about digital history.

Required texts

  • Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).
  • William J. Turkel and Alan MacEachern, The Programming Historian (online, evolving edition).
  • Selected articles from the Journal of American History, American Historical Review, and Public Historian on the digital-history field.

Schedule (15 weeks)

  1. Introduction. What is digital history? The CHNM intellectual lineage and what it claims.
  2. Reading the web: source criticism for born-digital primary material.
  3. Archives, databases, and the difference between the two.
  4. Text encoding and TEI for historical documents.
  5. Geographic information systems for historians.
  6. Visualisation: when chart and map clarify and when they mislead.
  7. Quantitative methods and the sample question for historians.
  8. Mid-term project workshop.
  9. Digital pedagogy: assignments that use the toolkit students will go on to teach with.
  10. Open-access publishing and the political economy of scholarly communication.
  11. Long-form digital narrative and the question of voice online.
  12. Sustainability — what happens to a digital project after the grant ends.
  13. Project workshop.
  14. Project workshop.
  15. Project presentations.

Project

Each student designs and implements a digital-history project across the semester. The project must address a substantive historical question, must be implemented in a public-facing form (a working website, a published dataset, a working interactive visualisation), and must include a short methodological essay describing what the digital dimension contributed to the historical argument.

Assignments

  • Weekly reading responses (15%)
  • Source-criticism exercise on a born-digital primary source (15%)
  • Mid-term project proposal and methodology brief (20%)
  • Final project (working public-facing form) (40%)
  • Final project methodological essay (10%)