Corsi di Studio del Dipartimento di Lingue e Letterature straniere e Culture moderne

DIGITAL HUMANITIES

DIGITAL HUMANITIES

Anno accademico 2023/2024

Sommario insegnamento

• Obiettivi formativi
• Risultati dell'apprendimento attesi
• Modalità di insegnamento
• Modalità di verifica dell'apprendimento
• Attività di supporto
• Programma
• Testi consigliati e bibliografia
• Note
• Strumenti didattici

Obiettivi formativi

This course contributes to the development of reading, writing and critical tools for literary study and interpretation for MA students.

It aims at introducing students to the theories and practices of using digital tools and methodologies for the study of North- American literature, with selected examples from 19th, 20th, and 21st century novels/authors. This course also aims at developing analytical skills for assessing digital literary projects and for thinking critically when reading and writing in online environments. It will also help students to develop digital writing and project planning skills.

This course addresses the following learning objectives (obiettivi formativi):

• Gaining specialized knowledge of the current landscape of the field of digital humanities in connection with North American Literature.
• Improve students' competence of the English language and its application in digital environments.
• Acquire the necessary knowledge of digital humanities theories, methodologies, and approaches to the study of North American Literature.
• Learning how to transmit the notions acquired.
• Acquire problem solving skills.

Risultati dell'apprendimento attesi

After this course, students will:

1. possess an in-depth understanding of some of key topics related to the field of digital humanities for U.S. literary studies;
2. gain broad knowledge of the emerging role of the digital humanities for the study of U.S. authors and historical periods;
3. possess a better ability to read and engage with scholarly texts and digital environments;
4. be able to use some skills used in digital humanities literary projects, understating their relevance according to different kind of research questions.

This course aims at developing abilities of critical thinking, independent study and initiative, and collaborative approaches. Seminar discussions, individual study of the syllabus, blog activities, designing and creating the digital projects, experimenting with the selected digital tools will help students to think critically about the digital resources employed to analyze North-American literary and cultural artifacts. They will learn to use digital applications for themselves building also on the critical reading and writing skills developed through the course, their collaboration on blogging platforms, and their articulations of research questions for specific data.                          

Modalità di insegnamento

This course is fully taught in English. No previous technical skills are required but students will experiment with some selected DH tools and methods. There will be seminar discussions of secondary texts and selected digital projects. Student participation to class discussions is expected as well as blogging activities (posting and commenting). There will be group activities and sessions dedicated to the experimentation with digital tools. Please refer to the schedule available in the course website.

Modalità di verifica dell'apprendimento

Weekly reading and discussion

Students will complete all weekly readings in advance of the class meeting and will take an active part in class discussions.

Blogging

Students will create their own blogging site in the first week of class. They will write 3 blog posts (due on Tuesday) that will be shared also on our course blog for the other students to read and comment on. The posts (400-600 words) will be in response to our weekly readings and class discussions. Students will post their responses, thoughts, questions, close readings, reflections on their own experimentations with DH tools presented in class.

Final project

Students may work individually or in pairs. The project will be delivered as a website: it can contain a digital archive, a map, an interactive visualization, a qualitative analysis of social media platforms linked with a specific novel/author/audience. The proposal (2 pages) will be submitted by week 5 (early November) and must include a clear research question; articulate the methods that will be used; the research plan. Throughout the course we will discuss together a variety of projects (also by students) and have 3 project workshops/tutorials to help students in the development of their digital humanities project. The last week of class will be dedicated to the student (short) presentations of the projects, which will be accompanied by a blog post to be included in the course blog.

Oral assessment

The oral exam will focus on the student project to test the students understanding of the course materials, and the theoretical and methodological issues explored in the class. Students will need to show an in-depth understanding of the broad field of digital humanities and its relevance for U.S. literary studies, and of the various approaches and debates connected with the topics and tools examined, including relevant examples of digital projects.

Grading

Participation and blogging: 20%

Final project: 50%

Oral assessment: 30%

Non-attending students

Students attending less than 70% of this course need to get in touch with Dr. Pignagnoli (preferably at the beginning of the semester) to discuss the final project to be presented during the oral assessment, as well as the blog posts.

All assessments will be in English.

Attività di supporto

Students will be supported in the creation of their blogs and research projects with specific sessions dedicated to the use of DH tools.

Programma

Course Title: The Digital Humanities and U.S. Literary Studies

Course Blog: https://dhunito23.wordpress.com

This is the site containing the teaching material related to DIGITAL HUMANITIES: The Digital Humanities and U.S. Literary Studies, taught by Dr. Virginia Pignagnoli in Fall 2023.

The course provides a general introduction to the Digital Humanities with a focus on U.S. Literary Studies. We will explore various approaches and methodologies, and we will experiment with digital tools and techniques. We will engage with debates around this field of study, such as the problem of defining the digital humanities, offering an overview of recent critical approaches and applications (e.g., dh and intersectionality). Students will learn how to analyze digital projects and design their own digital humanities project.

We will cover the following topics: Introduction to DH for U.S. literary studies; Digital Humanities: history, methods, definitions; Critical Approaches to DH; Distant Reading & Digital Textuality; DH and U.S. Literature (Melville); DH and U.S. Literature (Dickinson, Whitman); DH and U.S. Literature (Stein, TS Eliot, ZNH, R. Wright, Toni Morrison); Social Media & C21 U.S. Lit; Visualization and Mapping; Media and Computing; Editing and Archives.

This course will introduce students to the following digital tools: WordPress; Hypothes.is; Google N-Grams; Voyant Tools; DocNow; twarc; Hydrator; GoogleMaps; StoryMaps; Flourish; Ed; PubPub; Scalar; Onodo; Hypothes.is.

The digital projects we will analyze include: Around DH in 80 days; Torn Apart/ Separados; Colored Conventions Project; The Readers’ Thoureau; Melville Electronic Library; Whitman Archive; The Waste Land iPad; Mapping Inequality, Redlining in New Deal America; Mapping the Green Book; The Viral Texts Project.

The Lab Sessions will be the following: Building a WordPress blog; Designing your DH project; Workshop on the Students DH Projects; Annotation; Text Mining; Social media analysis; Mapping; Exploration of DH tools.

Course reader

All texts included in our course schedule for weekly readings will be available in the course reader on our course blog.

Non-attending students will also study:

Eve, Martin Paul, The Digital Humanities and Literary Studies, Oxford UP 2022. Available in open access here.

Course reader:

• Burrows, Simon, and Michael Falk. “Digital Humanities.” In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory, John Frow ed. Oxford UP: vol. 3, 2022, pp. 1692 -; 1710.
• Hockey, Susan. “The History of Humanities Computing.” In A Companion to Digital Humanities, Susan Schriebman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth eds. Blackwell Publishing, 2004, pp. 3-19.
• Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. “What Is Digital humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?” ADE Bulletin 150 (2010), pp. 55-61.
• Hughes, Lorna, Panos Constantopoulos, and Costis Dallas. “Digital Methods in the Humanities:Understanding and Describing their Use across the Disciplines.” In A New Companion to Digital Humanities, 2nd Edition, Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth eds. Wiley-Blackwell 2016, pp. 150-170.
• Berry, David M. and Anders Fagerjord. Digital Humanities: Knowledge and Critique in a Digital Age. Chapter 2: “Genealogies of the Digital Humanities.” Polity 2017.
• Gold, Matthew K. and Lauren F. Klein. “A DH That Matters.” In Debates in the Digital Humanities, Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein eds. University of Minnesota Press 2019, pp. ix-xiv.
• Boyles, Christina. “Intersectionality and Infrastructure. Toward a Critical Digital Humanities.” In People, Practice, Power. Digital Humanities Outside the Center, Anne McGrail, Angel David Nieves, and Siobhan Senier, eds. University of Minnesota Press, 2021, pp. 118-126.
• Berry, David M. and Anders Fagerjord. Digital Humanities: Knowledge and Critique in a Digital Age. Chapter 8: “Towards a Critical Digital Humanities.” Polity 2017.
• So, Richard Jean, and Edwin Roland. “Race and Distant Reading.” PMLA, vol. 135, no. 1, 2020, pp. 59-;73.
• Risam, Roopika. “What Passes for Human?: Undermining the Universal Subject in Digital Humanities Praxis.” Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and the Digital Humanities, Elizabeth Losh and Jacqueline Wernimont, eds. University of Minnesota Press, 2018, pp. 39-;56. 
• Smucker, Janneken. “Access and Empowerment: Rediscovering Moments in the Lives of African American Migrant Women.” The Digital Black Atlantic, edited by Roopika Risam and Kelly Baker Josephs, University of Minnesota Press, 2021, pp. 49-;57. 
• Manoff, Marlene. “Archive and Library.” In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory, John Frow ed. Oxford UP: vol. 4, 2022, pp. 2545 -; 2563.
• Byron, Mark. “Close Reading.” In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory, John Frow ed. Oxford UP: vol. 2, 2022, pp. 1637 -; 1661.
• Underwood, Ted. "A Genealogy of Distant Reading." DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly 11.2 (2017).
• Lavagnino, John. “Digital textuality.” In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory, John Frow ed. Oxford UP: vol. 2, 2022, pp. 1710 -; 1724.
• Fiennemann, Niels Ole. “E-Text.” In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory, John Frow ed. Oxford UP: vol. 1, 2022, pp. 318 -; 350.
• Reiter, Nils, Marcus Willand, Evelyn Gius. “A Shared Task for the Digital Humanities Chapter 1: Introduction to Annotation, Narrative Levels and Shared Tasks.” Cultural Analytics, 2019.
• Kelley, Wyn. “Melville by design.” In Teaching with Digital Humanities: Tools and Methods for Nineteenth-century America Literature. Jennifer Travis and Jessica DeSpain, eds. University of Illinois Press, 2018, pp. 57-70.
• Ohge, Christopher. “Digital Melville: Computation and Dead-Reckoning.” In A New Companion to Herman Melville, Wyn Kelley and Christopher Ohge, eds. 2022, pp. 313-328.
• Hallen, Cynthia L. “Data approaches to Emily Dickinson and Eliza R. Snow.” In Teaching with Digital Humanities: Tools and Methods for Nineteenth-century America Literature. Jennifer Travis and Jessica DeSpain, eds. University of Illinois Press, 2018, pp. 71-81.
• Earhart, Amy E. “’After a hundred years/ Nobody knows the place,-;‘: Notes Toward Spatial Visualizations of Emily Dickinson.” Special Issue: Networking Dickinson. The Emily Dickinson Journal. 23.1 (2014): 98-105.
• Lord et al., "Exploring erotics in Emily Dickinson's correspondence with text mining and visual interfaces," Proceedings of the 6th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL '06), Chapel Hill, NC, USA, 2006, pp. 141-150.
• Waitinas, Catherine. “Putting students ‘In Whitman's hand.’” In Teaching with Digital Humanities: Tools and Methods for Nineteenth-century America Literature. Jennifer Travis and Jessica DeSpain, eds. University of Illinois Press, 2018, pp. 153-166.
• Clement, Tanya E. “‘A thing not beginning and not ending’: using digital tools to distant-read Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans.” Literary and Linguistic Computing, Vol. 23: 3, 2008, pp. 361-;381.
• Belasco, Susan. “Whitman’s Poems in Periodicals: Prospects for Periodicals Scholarship in the Digital Age.” The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age. Amy E. Earhart and Andrew Jewell, eds. University of Michigan Press, 2011, pp. 44-;62.
• Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. “Archives Without Dust.” Bitstreams: The Future of Digital Literary Heritage, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021, pp. 15-;38.
• Driscoll, Beth and Denel Rehberg Sedo. “Faraway, So Close: Seeing the Intimacy in Goodreads Reviews.” Qualitative Inquiry 25 (2018): 248 - 259.
• Taylor, Toniesha L. “Signifying Shade as We #RaceTogether Drinking Our #NewStarbucksDrink ‘White Privilege Americana Extra Whip.’” The Digital Black Atlantic, edited by Roopika Risam and Kelly Baker Josephs, University of Minnesota Press, 2021, pp. 138-;49. 
• Pignagnoli, Virginia. “Intersubjectivity.” Post-postmodernist Fiction and the Rise of Digital Epitexts. Ohio State UP, 2023, pp. 71-88.
• Thomas, Bronwen. “Old Wine in New Bottles? Retelling and Reimagining the literary with social media.”Literature and Social media. Routledge, 2020, pp. 36-48.
• Cuff, Dana, et al. “Introducing Urban Humanities.” Urban humanities: New practices for reimagining the city. MIT Press, 2020, pp. 1-37.
• Connolly, N. D. B. et al. “Mapping inequality: ‘Big data’ meets social history in the story of redlining”. In The Routledge Companion to Spatial History. Routledge 2018, pp. 502-524.
• Roine, Hanna-Riikka. "Computational Media and the Core Concepts of Narrative Theory." Narrative, vol. 27 no. 3, 2019, p. 313-331.
• Risam, Roopika and Alex Gil. "Introduction: The Questions of Minimal Computing." Digital Humanities Quarterly, Vol 16.2 (2022).
• Cordell, Ryan et al. “Going the Rounds: Virality in Nineteenth-Century American Newspapers.” University of Minnesota P, 2022.

Note

Course overview and schedule is available at https://dhunito23.wordpress.com

While no previous knowledge of DH is required, students must have basic computer literacy skills and are expected to bring their own laptops.

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