MITH 610 introduces students to current topics and critical issues in the field of Digital Studies. MITH itself functions not just as a space for the class, but also as a laboratory for experimenting with digital methods, and getting acquainted with people on campus (and in the DC area) who are doing work in the digital humanities.

For example this past Spring MITH 610 was broken up into 3 modules: Reimagining the Archive, Media Archaeology and Data Stories. In the Data Stories module we worked with students to understand how social media APIs operate, and explored how to do data collection and documentation while being guided by the principles of Advocacy by Design. Advocacy by Design centers ethical questions of why we are interested in pursuing particular sets of research questions in order to better understand how we carry out the research, interpret our findings, and speculate about possible futures that they entail. These conversations compel us to ask how people are represented in, or are subjects of, academic work. Who reads and uses our work? Who collaborates and contributes to our work? Providing a welcoming and collaborative space for asking these questions is a central part of MITH’s vision for digital studies at UMD, which you can also see reflected in its core values.

One somewhat mundane, but never the less significant, challenge we often face when working as a group with different technologies is what we call The Laptop Problem. Fortunately, students come to class with a computer of some kind. It’s almost a given, especially in a field like digital studies. On the plus side this means that students arrive to class already equipped with the tools of the trade, and we don’t need to manage an actual set of machines for them to use. However on the down side everyone comes with a slightly different machine and/or operating system which can make it very difficult for us to craft a single set of comprehensive instructions for. Much time can be lost time simply getting everyone set up to begin the actual work.

We were also stymied by another problem. In introducing social media data collection we wanted to go where the Digital Humanities generally (and wisely) fears to tread: The Command Line. In the previous Media Archaeology module, students examined and experimented with MITH’s Vintage Computing collection, which involved working directly with older hardware and software interfaces, and reflecting on the affordances that they offer. If you are curious about what this involved here’s a short Twitter thread by Caitlin Christian-Lamb that describes (with some great pictures) some of her work in this module:

We thought it would be compelling to introduce social media data collection by using the command line interface, as an example of a (relatively) ancient computer interface that continues to be heavily used even today, particularly in Cloud environments. But because of The Laptop Problem we weren’t guaranteed everyone would have the same command line available to them, or that they would even have access to it. One way of solving The Laptop Problem is to provide access to a shared virtual environment of some kind where software is already installed. This is when we ran across Google Cloud Shell.

Since the University of Maryland uses Google’s GSuite for Education for email and other services, students are (for better or worse) guaranteed to have (at least one) Google account. As part of Google Cloud they offer any account holder the ability to go to a URL https://console.cloud.google.com/cloudshell which automatically launches a virtual machine in the cloud, and give you a terminal window directly in your browser for interacting with it. It is a real Debian Linux operating system, which can used without having to install any software at all.

We developed a short exercise that walked students through how to launch Google Cloud Shell, get comfortable with a few commands, install the twarc utility, and use it to collect some Twitter data directly from Twitter’s API. twarc has been developed as part of MITH’s involvement in the Documenting the Now project, and allowed  students to collect Twitter data matching a query of their choosing, store it in the native JSON format that Twitter themselves make available, and download it for further analysis.

Describing all the intricate details of this data flow was well beyond the scope of the class. But it did present an opportunity for demystifying how Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) take their shape on the web, and to describe how these services make structured data available, and to who. Matt likes to refer to refer to this experience as Little Big Data. To bookend the exercise students wrote about what they chose to collect and why, and reflected on what the collected data, and the experience of collecting it said to them in the shape of a short data story. Look for a few of these stories in subsequent posts here on the MITH blog.

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Winter Term 2018: Jan 2 – 22 (click here to enroll)
In-class meeting: Tuesdays / Thursdays 1 – 4:30 PM in 0301A Hornbake (MITH offices)
Online or Team Time: Mondays / Wednesdays unless indicated by *

Instructors:

Purdom Lindblad
Stephanie Sapienza
Ed Summers
Raff Viglianti

This course will frame and support collaboration on digital research with emphasis on introducing digital humanities workflows and research practices. The goal is to provide ‘small bites’ of each stage of digital work, from a survey of common theoretical and practical methodologies, to learning about project management, writing literature reviews and grant applications. By the end of the course, you will have the ability to scope, design, pitch, and participate in a digital project.

For students who are part of the DSAH or are seeking a MITH Internship, this course will provide a strong foundation from which to approach the practicum requirement.

Module 1: Survey of common DH Methodologies

Tuesday January 2 (in-class meeting)
*Wednesday January 3 is an in-class meeting

This module will introduce common methodologies in the Digital Humanities, such as archives, text encoding, and spatial humanities. We will survey theoretical papers, practical examples, and common critiques to DH.

Module 2: Project Management Part I (DH Workflows)

Thursday, January 4 (in-class meeting)
Monday, January 8 (online/team time)
Tuesday, January 9 (in-class meeting)

This module will introduce the fundamentals of digital project management and establishing your project’s workflow, and methods for collaboration. We will discuss how to structure your project data, create a team charter, and use selected project management tools. Project proposals resulting from work in this module will articulate the purpose and approach of your project, while the team charter states how things such as shared credit will work across the project’s lifecycle.

Module 3: Project Management Part II (Version Control)

Wednesday, January 10 (online/team time)

Digital work relies on collaboration and version control. Version control enables you to keep track of your many revisions, the various contributions to the project by team members, and repair mistakes. This module will introduce Git and GitHub as well as best practices for collaborating on a shared digital project.

Module 4: Writing DH Literature Reviews and Environmental Scans

Thursday, January 11 (in-class meeting)

DH research typically incorporates or creates digital resources; how should those be discussed and integrated into literature reviews for academic writing? In this module we will look at relevant examples, including journals focusing on the review of digital resources such as Scholarly Editing and American Quarterly. You will also work on your own DH literature review for your final project.

Module 5: Prototyping + Assessment

Tuesday, January 16 (in-class meeting)
Wednesday, January 17 (online/team time)

One challenge working with digital approaches is to anticipate the look and feel of the finished project. We will draw from design concepts and practices to produce many possible versions of a digital project, exposing the constraints and opportunities of each version. In this module, your team will produce paper and digital prototypes.

Module 6: Grants, Budgeting, Professional & Social Networking

Thursday,  January 18 (in-class meeting)
*Monday January 22 is an in-class meeting, presentations

In this module we’ll discuss how to talk about and persuade others to buy into your project by workshopping a quick elevator pitch, a conference presentation, and a grant proposal. We will cover how to think through the financial aspects of your project and create a project budget. Finally, we will discuss the social and political aspects of working within digital humanities communities of practice. We will cover alternative academic careers, building social networks, and modes of research.

The post MITH Winter Term Course: Anatomy of DH Research appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

DSAH offers graduate students a chance to combine the critical study of new forms of digital media and identity with creative and analytical practices utilizing digital media as well as the application of computational tools and techniques to traditional areas of humanistic study. All students complete two core courses: MITH 610, Introduction to Digital Studies, the DSAH Colloquium in Digital Studies, MITH 729, as well as a “praxis” course and other electives. MITH staff, Raff, Ed, and Purdom, have worked closely with Matt to develop and co-teach modules for MITH 610. These modules draw on the day-to-day work and expertise at MITH on topics such as TEI and scholarly editing, network analysis, and data storytelling.

DSAH students, and any student interested in digital scholarship, have a myriad of opportunities to participate in the rich extra-curricular environment for digital studies at Maryland. These opportunities include the African American History, Culture, and Digital Humanities initiative, AADHum, which features a reading group and Incubator series, MITH’s Digital Dialogues, and special events, such as the 2017 Society for Textual Scholarship conference. Matt says, “The DSAH Certificate has already proven tremendously exciting and rewarding to direct. It represents an extremely diverse and talented intellectual community. It feels as if there’s a real cohort there, which, together with the participants in AADHum, has been truly energizing.” The current DSAH cohort come from English, Women’s Studies, American Studies, Communication, Theatre/Performing Arts, and the iSchool, enriching interdisciplinary conversations while encouraging focused digital work within each student’s home discipline.

As one of the sponsors of DSAH, MITH is committed to providing another home base on campus for students working in digital studies. This year MITH hosted DSAH students collaborating on creative and experimental research. Jeffrey Moro, Setsuko Yokoyama, Kyle Bickoff, and Andy Yeh recently presented their experimental research on 3D printing at the 2017 R-CADE symposium. Their panel, Critical Unmaking:  DRM, Proprietary Networks, and Versioning Variances in 3-D Printing Technologies, responds to a growing “blackboxing” of technology, and interrogates paths through which to productively break down and break open the 3-D printer across a variety of critical lenses and methodologies. Robert Burgard and Brittni Ballard spent the Spring semester pursuing a project titled “A Conspiracy of Fake News: Linguistic Links between Fake News and Conspiracy Theory.” The main goal is to ascertain whether a link exists between those who write fake news and those who write conspiracy theories. The project will examine rhetorical techniques found in both to determine any commonalities and will involve fieldwork and interviews with people working in various dis-information fields such as UFO sightings and Ghost Hunters. The objective is to produce a publishable paper as well as develop a tool to identify whatever linguistic links are revealed.

Beyond DSAH, Purdom is leading MITH’s expanding curricular initiatives, including MITH 388, Internship in Digital Humanities. The internship, now enrolling for Fall 2017, introduces students to the theory and practice of digital research either through a small project of their own or as contributors to existing MITH research initiatives. This year’s interns, Elliot Frank and Cooper Kidd, are contributing to DocNow. Elliot is exploring the use of Jupyter notebooks as a way to document how to collect and analyze data from the Twitter API. He is specifically looking at how to extract cliques of users within a specific individual’s social network to see if it can provide insight into a discipline such as the digital humanities. Cooper, worked through preliminary Python modules and is working on a sociological examination of learning a new technology. Cooper’s work will help MITH restructure ways of introducing students to technical skills.

We’re excited to explore how these curricular initiatives can foster new and exciting work by our local community of students and faculty.

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