Unit I: Getting Started
Week 1: Introduction and Historical Thinking
January 6 and January 8
Reading:
- Sam Wineburg, “Thinking Like a Historian,” TPS Quarterly
- A Model of Historical Thinking (PDF)
- WEB Du Bois, “The Propaganda of History,” Black Reconstruction in America (1935).
In Class:
- Course Overview
- Tell us about yourself! (you’ll need to be signed in to your MSU Google account
- Working with Historical Data Assessment: Help us improve our teaching!
- Historical Thinking: An Overview
- The Drama of Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Great Migration
Week 2: Power in History
January 13 and January 15
Reading:
- Trouillot, Michel-Rolph (1995), Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History – Chapter 1 & 2 (p 1-70)
- Johnson, Jessica Marie. “Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads.” Social Text, 36(4), 2018, 57-79. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-7145658
Writing:
- Reading Response: Select a theme from the readings for this week, and reflect on the ways that you might approach your work for the semester with it in mind. How do historical actors, record keepers, and historians work (sometimes inadvertently) to create and perpetuate power dynamics that prevent full and frank narratives about the past from being created and shared? How does work with historical data complicated this situation? Your reading response should be 500-600 words, and should be published by noon on Sunday, January 12. [Register for an account to post your reading response to this site.]
- For documentation on creating your first post, see https://wordpress.org/support/article/writing-posts/ and https://wordpress.org/support/article/wordpress-editor/.
In class:
- NY Times Textbook Interactive
- Discussion of reading reflections
- Discussion of silences in the historical process (Monday)
- Discussion of digital work and dehumanization (Wednesday)
- Object Labels
Week 3: Misuse of Computational Methods
January 20 [No Class: MLK Day] and January 22
Reading:
- Gutman, Herbert. Review of Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery by Robert William Fogel, Stanley L. Engerman. The Journal of Negro History Vol. 60, No. 1 (Jan., 1975): The World Two Cliometricians Made: A Review-Essay of F+E=T/C (p53-57) https://www-jstor-org.proxy2.cl.msu.edu/stable/2716794
- An Overview of T/C (p57-65) https://www-jstor-org.proxy2.cl.msu.edu/stable/2716795
- Select one of the following:
- Enslaved African Americans and the “Protestant Work Ethic” (p65-93) https://www-jstor-org.proxy2.cl.msu.edu/stable/2716796
- Positive Labor Incentives and Slave Work Habits (p93-138) https://www-jstor-org.proxy2.cl.msu.edu/stable/2716797
- The Slave Family, Slave Sexual Behavior, and Slave Sales (p138-215) https://www-jstor-org.proxy2.cl.msu.edu/stable/2716798
- An Archaic Historical Model (p215-227) https://www-jstor-org.proxy2.cl.msu.edu/stable/2716799
Writing:
- Reading Response: What went wrong with Time on the Cross, and how is it a lesson for your work going forward? Your reading response should be 500-600 words, and should be published by noon on Tuesday, January 21.
Unit II: Baseline Reading on Reconstruction and Jim Crow
Week 4: Reconstruction
January 27 and January 29
Reading:
For Monday:
- HARLOW, LUKE E. “Introduction: The Future of Reconstruction Studies.” Journal of the Civil War Era 7, no. 1 (2017): 3-6. www.jstor.org/stable/26070478.
- Brundage, W. Fitzhugh, Gary Gerstle, Thomas C. Holt, Martha S. Jones, Mark A. Noll, Adrienne Petty, Lisa Tetrault, Elliott West, and Kidada E. Williams. “The Future of Reconstruction Studies.” Journal of the Civil War Era 7, no. 1 (2017): 7-15. www.jstor.org/stable/26070479.
- THOMAS, BROOK. “The Unfinished Task of Grounding Reconstruction’s Promise.” Journal of the Civil War Era 7, no. 1 (2017): 16-38. www.jstor.org/stable/26070488.
- TAYLOR, JENNIFER WHITMER, and PAGE PUTNAM MILLER. “Reconstructing Memory: The Attempt to Designate Beaufort, South Carolina, the National Park Service’s First Reconstruction Unit.” Journal of the Civil War Era 7, no. 1 (2017): 39-66. www.jstor.org/stable/26070489.
- ROSEN, HANNAH. “Teaching Race and Reconstruction.” Journal of the Civil War Era 7, no. 1 (2017): 67-95. www.jstor.org/stable/26070490.
For Wednesday:
- Eric Foner, “‘Tocsin of Freedom’ Black Leadership of Radical Reconstruction” in Slavery, Resistance, Freedom. Chapter 6 (p.118-140)
- Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration. Chapter 6 (p265-313)
Reference:
- American Yawp, Chapters 15-17: http://www.americanyawp.com/index.html
- Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction (Harper Collins, 1988).
Week 5: Jim Crow Freedom’s Lawmakers Planning
February 3 and February 5
Reading:
- Gavins, Raymond. “Literature on Jim Crow.” OAH Magazine of History 18, no. 2 (2004): 13-16. www.jstor.org/stable/25163655.
- Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, “Somewhere” in the Nadir of African American History, 1890-1920
- Robin D. G. Kelley. “”We Are Not What We Seem”: Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South.” The Journal of American History 80, no. 1 (1993): 75-112. https://www-jstor-org.proxy1.cl.msu.edu/stable/2079698.
- Raiford, Leigh. “Photography and the Practices of Critical Black Memory.” History and Theory 48, no. 4 (2009): 112-29. www.jstor.org/stable/25621443.
- Williams, Kidada E. They Left Great marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I. Introduction & Ch. 5
- Baldwin, Davarian L. Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, The Great Migration, and Black Urban Life. Introduction, & select 2 chapters that look interesting
Reference:
- American Yawp, Chapters 18-22: http://www.americanyawp.com/index.html
- Leon Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (Vintage, 1998).
Unit III: Computational Approaches to Historical Data
Week 6: Received and Derived Data Sets
February 10 and February 12
Reading:
- Leon, Sharon, “The Peril and Promise of Historians as Data Creators,” [bracket] (2019): www.6floors.org/bracket/2019/11/24/the-peril-and-promise-of-historians-as-data-creators-perspective-structure-and-the-problem-of-representation/
- Posner, Miriam (2015), Humanities Data, a Necessary Contradiction
- Gitelman, Lisa & Virginia Jackson. Raw Data is an Oxymoron. Introduction (p 1-14)
- Rawson, Katie & Trevor Muñoz. Against Cleaning
- Graham, Milligan, & Weingart’s The Historian’s Macroscope (themacroscope.org) : The Limits of Big Data, or Big Data and the Practice of History
- Schöch, Christof. Big? Smart? Clean? Messy? Data in the Humanities.
- Optional: Wickham, Hadley. “Tidy Data”
- OCRed Texts — must be logged into Google Drive from your MSU account.
- White, Richard. “What Is Spatial History?” The Spatial History Project, February 1, 2010. http://web.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/pub.php?id=29.
- Guldi, Jo The Spatial Turn in History
- Gibbs, Frederick W. New Forms of History: Critiquing Data and Its Representations
- Drucker, Johanna. Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display
- D’Ignazio, Catherine and Lauren F. Klein. Feminist Data Visualization (Read around)
- Weinryb Grohsgal, Leah (2016), “The NEH ‘Chronicling America’ Challenge: Using Big Data to Ask Big Questions.”
- Walsh, Brandon & Sarah Horowitz, Introduction to Text Analysis, Introduction for Students, Why Read with a Computer?, Google NGram Viewer, Close Reading and Sources, Distant Reading, and How Computers Read Texts
- Graham, Milligan, & Weingart. “Basic Text Mining: Word Clouds, their Limitations, and Moving Beyond” in The Historian’s Macroscope
- Underwood, Ted. Topic Modeling Made Just Simple Enough.
- Google N-Gram
- Examining OCR in Chronicling America
- Google Books dataset builder https://lib.msu.edu/gds/
- Chronicling America [AfAm newspapers]
- Preparing Text for Analysis (Sample: NA Slave Narratives)
- Voyant and Voyant Tools Index Documentation
- (Sample Data: DocSouth Slave Narratives)
- MALLET GUI
- Named Entity Recognition
- Project Proposals due February 28
- Natalie Wreyford, Shelley Cobb. Data and Responsibility: Toward a Feminist Methodology for Producing Historical Data on Women in the Contemporary UK Film Industry.
- Santa Barbara Statement on Collections as Data (Version 2, 2018)
- Flanders, Julia and Trevor Muñoz. “An Introduction to Humanities Data Curation”
- Padilla, Thomas and Brandon Locke. Humanities Data Curation Record.
- Add a well-formed inquiry question to your project proposal as a comment by Wednesday’s class.
- Reading Response: Your reading response should be 500-600 words, and should be published by noon on Friday, March 13.
- No class: Individual meetings with instructor on March 16
- Work Plan due March 20
- No class
- Annotated Bibliographies due March 27
- Zeheng: Abbott, Israel B. (#2884) [page 1] thru Cain, Everidge (#2679) [page 35]
- Yiwen: Cain, Lawrence (#2678) [page 35] thru Farrow, Simeon P. (#2473) [page 73]
- Hussey: Fayerman, George L. (#2472) [page 73] thru Holloway, John (#2267) [page 107]
- Johnson: Holloway, Richard (#2266) [page 107] thru Maul, January (#2061) [page 143]
- Manchester: Maxwell, Henry J. (#2060) [page 143] thru Rainey, Edward C. (#1855) [page 174]
- Mitchell: Rainey, Joseph H. (#1854) [page 143] thru Straker, Daniel A. (#1649) [page 205-6]
- Russell: Strickland, Henry (#1648) [page 206] thru Young, Prince (#1444) [page 243]
Week 7: Geospatial and other Graphic Visualizations
February 17 and February 19
Reading:
In class Monday:
In class on Wednesday:
Week 8: Computational Text Analysis
February 24 and February 26
Reading:
In class Monday:
In class Wednesday:
Writing:
Week 9: Spring Break
March 2 and March 4
Week 10: Approaches to Data: Ethics and Curation
March 9 and March 11
Reading:
Writing:
Join the course Slack Workplace.
Unit IV: Project Development
Week 11: Research Strategies for Contextualizing Historical Data
March 16 and March 18
All of our Project Materials will be located in this Google Drive folder.
Week 12: Contextual Research
March 23 and March 25
Writing:
Week 13: Working Sessions: Massaging your data
March 30 and April 1
Week 14: Working Session: Additional Data Creation
April 6 and April 8
Directions for Editing Items in Omeka S
Week 15: Working Session: Framing your data
April 13 and April 15
Unit V: Wrapping Up
Week 16: Presentations
April 20 and April 22