Category Archives: Announcements

Room Change

Beginning tomorrow, Friday the 24th, our class will meet in Rayzor 121 instead of in Duncan College. Please be sure to complete the readings for tomorrow before coming to class and be prepared to discuss them. As you read, you should think generally about these questions: What are the challenges confronting historians who wish to digitize primary sources or use sources that are already digitized? What are the potential benefits?

Academic Integrity Policies

As mentioned in the What to Expect section of the syllabus, this course encourages and will often require collaboration. Working with others is among the stuff digital humanists like. It’s also part of your "Team Participation" grade for this class.

Asking for help is central to the ethos of fields like programming and digital history, as evidenced by Q&A forums like Digital Humanities Questions and Answers and Stack Overflow. Spend very much time on these forums, and you’ll also learn that "Googling it" is one of the first things that digital humanists and programmers do when they get stuck.

Collaboration should not excuse violations of academic integrity, however, and such violations will still be reported to the Honor Council. You can collaborate in this course and still honor the Honor Code so long as you carefully follow these guidelines (some of which are borrowed or paraphrased from the list of course policies in Rice COMP 140. (Click “Continue reading” below to read the guidelines for this course.)

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Welcome to Digital History Methods!

This will be our course homepage for HIST 318; consider bookmarking it and plan to return to it frequently for announcements, pre-class instructions, and further details on assignments. Be sure to read the syllabus carefully before our next class. You also need to complete this brief survey about your interests and previous experiences with history classes and digital technology. If you have time, you may also enjoy browsing some of the older posts on this page, which came from an earlier course introducing undergraduate and graduate students at Rice to some major issues in digital history.

Next Up: Sharon Leon

Our final meeting of the year will be this Thursday with Sharon Leon, who blogs at [bracket] and tweets at @sleonchnm. The plan is to meet for dinner at 6:30, after which we will have a hands-on workshop with Sharon at 7:30 p.m. in Sewall 133. Sharon will also be giving a public talk on Friday at noon in Huma 328.

Next Up: DH Workshop

Next week we have a very special event on campus: a three-day workshop on various topics having to do with Digitization in the Humanities. I encourage you register to attend at least one of the six sessions, each of which will consist of a two-hour how-to tutorial followed by a one-hour open lab. You must RSVP!!

Up Next: Video Chat

Next Thursday, we will be having dinner together, followed by a video conference with several special guests. Click below to find out more about them!

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GIS Training

The GIS Center here at Rice is soon beginning a fresh round of “short courses” on using GIS mapping software, so if this is something that interests you (particularly after last semester’s visits from Nesbit and Guldi), I encourage you to check them out! Two of our Masterclass participants, Sophie and Wright, can also fill you in on the GIS Center, as both of them are using it for projects of their own.

Up Next: Natalie Houston and Neal Audenaert

Don’t forget that we will be having our first meeting of the semester this Friday at 5:30 in Keck Hall, Room 101 (the building with Valhalla). Dinner will be provided for everyone at the beginning.

Our guests for the workshop this Friday afternoon are Natalie Houston and Neal Audenaert. They have received a start-up grant from the NEH Office of Digital Humanities to build a program they are calling The Visual Page.

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Up Next: Jo Guldi

Our next speaker Jo Guldi will be here next Thursday for a talk at 5 p.m. and a workshop to follow at 7:30 p.m., per our usual schedule. Jo is the author of Roads to Power: Britain Invents the Infrastructure State, and she will be talking about a new digital history project called Paper Machines. You can read more about how it works on Profhacker.

Digital History Lecture at UH

This Friday at 2:30 p.m., Andrew Torget will be delivering a talk on digital history at the University of Houston entitled, “The Promise and Perils of Doing History in the Digital Age.”

Torget has come up before on this blog, since he also participated with Scott Nesbit in this Interview on Digital History. As an alumnus of the Valley of the Shadow Project, the founding director of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab, and leader of several other digital history projects, Torget’s interests are right in line with this course. Hope some of you can make it!