Course Schedule
Please see revised syllabus in Dropbox for updated readings and assignments.
Week One: Introductions // Platforms
Tuesday, January 21, 2020: Introductions // The Cultural New Deal
Discussion Questions: What are we doing here?
Assignments:
- Before Thursday, sign up for our course Slack channel and add an image of yourself to your profile.
- Read and leave at least one annotation on the syllabus (including policies, assignments, and schedules) using Hypothesis by class time on Thursday. Annotation means taking notes. This can include: things you want to add to, things you have questions about, things you think are interesting, cool, etc. You can also answer, add to, or clarify questions or comments from other students.
- See tutorial posted in #assignments channel in Slack if you are having trouble.
- Make sure to sign up for Hypothesis through the course group (use link above).
- Use the class group for your annotations. Annotations not made in the class group will not be graded.
- Send me a private message on Slack with your Hypothesis username so I know who’s who.
Resources:
Class Slides: https://slides.com/jdauteri/intro-class
Thursday, January 23, 2020: Syllabus // Information Technology
Discussion Questions: What are we doing this semester? What is information technology? Algorithms?!
Due:
- Read excerpt from Trouillot’s Silencing the Past, “Theorizing Ambiguity and Tracking Power,” 22-30 (access with your GMU credentials).
In-class:
- Review Syllabus and Slack
Digital Skills inventory- Discuss Trouillot reading
- How to succeed in this course
- Information technology crash course
Helpful resource: http://wcaleb.org/blog/how-to-read
Week Two: Digital History and the New Deal
Tuesday, January 28, 2020: Digital history // Writing for the Web
Discussion Questions: What is digital history? Can it transform historical research, writing, and publication?
Due:
- Read Megan O’Neil’s “Confronting the Myth of the ‘Digital Native.’”
- Read Sheila Brennan’s “Digital History.”
- Watch
Miriam Posner’s “How Did They Make
That?”
- Focus on: 0:00–6:07
- Watch discussion about Negro Travelers’ Green Book digital project: 6:08-8:49
In-class:
- Come to class ready to sign up for Reclaim Hosting (cost: $30)
- Writing for the Web Workshop
Assignments:
- Blog #1—Digital History and Project Review
- Due Tuesday, February 4 by start of class (not eligible for late days)
Thursday, January 30, 2020: New Deal Era: Rise and Decline
Discussion Questions: What cultural, economic, and political factors shaped the New Deal era? When did the New Deal era end and why?
Due:
- Before the start of class, write and turn in a good discussion question based on today’s readings and modeled on this handout. I will provide feedback on your questions and expect you to approach all readings with this framework in mind throughout the semester, whether you are discussion leader or not.
- Listen to The Memory Palace podcast episode “Hoover.”
- Read The American Yawp, “The Great Depression”: Sections I-IV, VII, XI, XIII-XIV.
- Read excerpt from Kenneth Bindas’ All This Music Belongs to the Nation: The WPA’s Federal Music Project and American Society (in Dropbox).
Still unclear about causes, actions, and outcomes of the Great Depression? This video can help. (Not required, but a good overview of what we will be considering this semester.)
Week Three: New Deal: Inclusion, Migration, and the Folk
Tuesday, February 4, 2020: A New Deal for Who?
Discussion Questions: How did different groups experience the New Deal? What factors led to different experiences?
Due:
Read The American Yawp, “The Great Depression”: Sections VIII-IX.- Read Mattea V. Sanders’ ‘I Got to Do Something to Keep my Family Up.’
- Read Chapter Three, “Of New Deals and Raw Deals,” from Cheryl Greenberg’s To Ask for an Equal Chance: African Americans in the Great Depression.
In-Class:
- Explore differences in the experiences of CCC employment
- Co-grading and critiques of first blog posts based on rubric
Assignments:
- Skill #1/Blog #2—New Deal sites/Juxtapose
- Due March 17 by start of class (Because this assignment involves travel, you have several weeks to complete it.)
Thursday, February 6, 2020: Migration and Folk Culture
Discussion Group 1: What is the impact of migration on American life in the 1930s?
Due:
- Read section V-VI from Chapter 23 of The American Yawp.
- Read “The Migrant Experience” from the Library of Congress.
- Listen to the Backstory podcast episode “Border Patrols: Policing Immigration in America.”
- You are encouraged to listen to the whole episode, but we will be focusing on the segment “The Deported” at 19:00-28:45 in the audio (transcript at bottom of webpage).
In-Class:
- Soundcite workshop
Assignments:
- Skill #2/Blog #3: Soundcite
- Due Friday, February 14 by 11:59pm
Week Four: Data for Humanists
Tuesday, February 11, 2020: GUEST LECTURE–Laura Crossley
Data for the Humanities
Due:
- Download the OsageIA dataset and the Open Refine tool to your computer. See Slack message in #general for more details.
- Read Trevor Owens’ piece “Defining Data for Humanists: Text, Artifact, Information or Evidence?”
- Read “Against Cleaning,” by Katie Rawson and Trevor Muñoz.
In-Class:
- Structured data workshop using OpenRefine
Resources:
- Thomas Padilla’s Getting Started with Open Refine
Thursday, February 13, 2020: Building a Database with Omeka
Due:
- Bring in a digital image of a person, place, or thing you care about for Omeka workshop.
- By Thursday, read and annotate Omeka Documentation for Adding Items, Working with Dublin Core.
- Read Omeka Project page.
Read excerpt from Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media, 213-228 (in Dropbox).
In-class:
- Install Omeka on Reclaim
- Uploading items and inputting metadata
- Installing plugins and CSV Import plugin demo
Resource:
- Installing Omeka Class User Guide
- Omeka Classic User Guides (general)
- CSV Import Plugin Documentation
- Uploading Plugins to Omeka (on Reclaim)
Assignments:
- Skill #3: Build a database using Omeka’s CSV importer
- Due Thursday, February 20 by start of class (not eligible for late days)
Week Five: Politics and Popular Culture
Tuesday, February 18, 2020: New Deal in Entertainment
Discussion Group 2: Can popular culture be political?
Due:
- Read Morris Dickstein’s “How Song, Dance, and Movies Bailed us out of the Depression.”
- Read Dan DiPiero’s TiK ToK: Post-Crash Party Pop, Compulsory Presentism and the 2008 Financial Collapse.
- Listen to the radio documentary “Ballad for Americans.”
In-Class:
- Song analysis exercise
Thursday, February 20, 2020: The Cultural Front
Discussion Group 3: What is the laboring of American culture?
Due:
- Everyone: Read Introduction from Michael Denning’s The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture (in Dropbox).
- Read your assigned chapter from Denning:
- “The Tenement Thinking”: Ghetto Pastorals
- Nicole C.; Patrick D.; Olivia H.; Caterina I; Amy N.; Scarleth R.; Charles W.; Cassidy S.; Phi-Long T.
- Grapes of Wrath: “The Art and Science of Migratin'”
- Megan B.; Trevor B.; Samantha B.; Trinity H.; Brynn L.; Dairo M.; Maddy M.; John R.; Chris C.
- Cabaret Blues
- Kathryn D.; Emerald F.; Caroline K.; Julie K.; Mikaela M.; Malcolm P.; Lindsay R.; Indri S.
- “Who’s Afraid of Big Bad Walt?” Disney’s Radical Cartoonists
- Emily B.; Taylor F.; Ryan K.; Michael L.; Eva L.; Roan M.; Hannah M.; Christina S.; Giancarlo B.
- The Politics of Magic: Orson Welle’s Allegories of Anti-Fascism
- Benjamin C.; Megan E.; Madison H.; Kyle T.; Emily K.; Kennedy L.; Ellys M.; Tiffany R.; Jackie S.
- “The Tenement Thinking”: Ghetto Pastorals
In-Class:
- Co-Grade and critique Omeka assignment
Assignments:
- Blog #4: Popular Culture and Politics
- Due Friday, February 28 by 11:59pm
Week Six: Historical Research and Libraries in the Digital Age
Tuesday, February 25, 2020: GUEST LECTURE–Tony Guidone
Historical Research in the Digital Age
Due:
- Read Ian Milligan’s “Illusionary Order: Online Databases, Optical Character Recognition, and Canadian History, 1997–2010” (Mason login required).
In-Class:
- Digitized primary sources workshop
Thursday, February 27, 2020: Libraries as Information Technology
Due:
- Read Ian Milligan’s “Historians’ archival research looks quite different in the digital age.”
In-Class:
- Discussion on libraries and how to find primary and secondary sources
- Find primary source from New Deal-era newspaper and a secondary source to contextualize it
Assignments:
- Blog #5: Historical Research in the Digital Age
- Due Thursday, March 5 by start of class
- Midterm Study Guide posted today (there will be terms from next week on this study guide).
Week Seven: Thinking Through Algorithms
Tuesday, March 3, 2020: Digital Citizenship
Discussion Group 4: How do algorithms and online platforms change and impact society?
Due:
- Watch Cathy O’Neil’s The Truth about Algorithms.
- Read excerpt from Safiya Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (in Dropbox).
- Read Hannes Grassegger & Mikael Krogerus’ “The Data That Turned the World Upside Down: How Cambridge Analytica used your Facebook data to help the Donald Trump campaign in the 2016 election.”
- Related videos suggested but not required:
Thursday, March 5, 2020: Critical DH
Discussion Group 5: How are digital humanists critiquing structures of power and recovering marginalized voices?
Due:
- Read Angela Haas’s “Wampum as Hypertext: An American Indian Intellectual Tradition of Multimedia Theory and Practice”
- Related projects (suggested but not required):
- Miriam Posner’s “What’s Next: The Radical, Unrealized Potential of Digital Humanities”
- Related projects:
- OPTIONAL: Read Michael Kramer’s “GLOBAL JUKEBOXES & CELESTIAL MONOCHORDS—ALAN LOMAX, HARRY SMITH, & THE DIGITAL STUDY OF FOLK MUSIC”
- Related projects:
Assign:
- Midterm Exam posted on Blackboard at noon today
- Due by 11:59pm Sunday, March 8
Week Eight: Spring Break!
Week Nine: The Folk and Documentary Ideal // Image Analysis
Tuesday, March 17, 2020: The Folk and the Documentary Ideal
Discussion Group 6: What is the role of documentary in the 1930s?
Due:
- Excerpts from William Stott’s Documentary Expression and Thirties America, chapter 2 and chapter 6 (in Dropbox).
In-class:
- Analyzing and comparing documentary from the 1930s
Thursday, March 19, 2020: Image Annotation and Glitching
Due:
- Read and annotate the Exhibit Builder and Exhibit Image Annotation documentation.
- Trevor Owens’ “Glitching Files for Understanding: Avoiding Screen Essentialism in Three Easy Steps”
- Read Michael Kramer’s piece “Glitching History.”
In-class:
- Image analysis and glitching workshop
- Migrant Mother
- Skull and Dust Bowl
- Install Omeka plugins
Assignment:
- Skill #4/Blog #6: Image Analysis
- Due Friday, March 27 by 11:59pm
Week Ten: Copyright and Public Domain // Text Mining
Tuesday, March 24, 2020: Copyright, Fair Use, and the Public Domain
Discussion Group 7: What is the impact of copyright law and the public domain on American life and culture?
Due:
- Read and annotate Mason’s Copyright Basics
- Watch Kirby Ferguson’s Ted Talk “Creativity is a Remix.”
- Watch video from Creative Commons.
Thursday, March 26, 2020: Life Histories and Text Analysis
Due:
- Read about the American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936 to 1940 collection
- Race and Place: Dialect and the Construction of Southern Identity in the Ex-Slave Narratives.”
- Miriam Posner’s Investigating Texts with Voyant Tools
- Explore Google Ngram Viewer
Resources:
In-Class:
- FWP: “…a 20-million word experiment in collective writing.” — Pathfinder Magazine
- Voyant Tools workshop
Assignments:
- Skill #5/Blog #7: Text Analysis
- Due Friday, April 3 by 11:59pm
Week Eleven: Long Civil Rights Era // Timelines
Tuesday, March 31, 2020: Long Civil Rights Era
Discussion Group 8: What is the long civil rights era?
Due:
- Read section XII from Chapter 23 of The American Yawp.
- Read p.5-11 of Introduction from Jennifer Ritterhouse’s Discovering the South: One Man’s Travels Through a Changing America in the 1930s.
- Read Chapter Four, “Of New Deals and Raw Deals,” from Cheryl Greenberg’s To Ask for an Equal Chance: African Americans in the Great Depression.
Thursday, April 2, 2020: WPA Ex-Slave Narratives and Timelines
Discussion Questions: How do historians use timeline to present the past? What are the possibilities and limitations of oral histories?
Due:
- Read the Introduction to Catherine Stewart’s Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project (in Dropbox).
- Read A Note on the Language of the Narratives.
- Listen to your assigned ex-slave narrative and mark down important personal moments from the interview.
In-class:
- Discuss narratives and experiment with timeline software
Assignments:
- Skill #6/Blog #8: Timelines
- Due Friday, April 10 by 11:59pm
Week Twelve: Regionalism and Race // Mapping
Tuesday, April 7, 2020: Regionalism in Federal One
Discussion Group 9: What is the role of regionalism in the New Deal era?
Due:
- Read Introduction to Peter Gough’s Sounds of the New Deal: The Federal Music Project in the West:
- Read About page of the Works Progress Administration: Federal Music Project project from WYNC. Listen to a recording or two.
- Read “America Eats: Pioneers of Food Writing” by Camille Bégin and explore the What America Ate project.
Thursday, April 9, 2020: Tourism, Race, and Digital Mapping
Discussion Group 10: What is the connection between tourism, race, and citizenship? How can digital mapping help us understand the past?
Due:
- Read Richard White’s “What is Spatial History?,” https://web.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/pub.php?id=29.
- Read excerpt from Marguerite Shaffer’s See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880-1940 (in Dropbox).
- Read the online exhibit The American Guide Series: American Culture Defined from Utah State University (all pages-see navigation top right).
Read Sarah Bond’s piece “Mapping Racism And Assessing the Success of the Digital Humanities.”
Resources:
- Discovering the South interactive map.
Assignments:
- Skill #7/Blog #9: Mapping
- Due Tuesday, April 21 by start of class
- On Tuesday, bring in a preliminary historical question for your final project. Be prepared to workshop this in class and turn in to Professor Jess for comments.
Week Thirteen: Federal Art // Archives
Tuesday, April 14, 2020: Federal Art Project
Discussion Group 11: How did the Federal Art Project impact local communities?
Due:
- Historical question for final project.
- “New Deal for Public Art” by Marlene Park and Gerald Markowitz (in Dropbox).
- Read Livia Gershon’s piece, “What Kind of Work is Masculine?”
Resources:
- Familiarize yourself with FAP projects.
Thursday, April 16, 2020: Archives in the Digital Age
Discussion Questions: What’s is an archive? How does it get there? How has this changed in the digital age?
Due:
- Read “The Artifactual Elements of Born-Digital Records” Part One and Part Two.
- Read “Bias, Perception, and Archival Praxis” interview.
Resources:
- Explore the Library of Congress’ Web Cultures Web Archive and the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
Assignments:
- Hand out final project scope
- Proposal due Thursday, April 30 by start of class
- Final project due Thursday, May 7 by 11:59pm
Week Fourteen: Archives and Anticommunism
Tuesday, April 21, 2020: Visit to Mason Special Collections
*MEET IN FENWICK 2001 (MAIN READING ROOM) TODAY*
Discussion Questions: What was the impact of the Federal Theater Project on America in the 1930s? What were the FTP’s limitations and successes? Who were its critics? What does the archive allow us to understand about the past?
Due:
- Read and annotate the Special Collections policies before coming in.
- Read excerpt from Elizabeth A. Osborne’s Staging the People: Community and Identity in the Federal Theatre Project (in Dropbox).
In-class:
- Visit to Mason’s Special Collections in Fenwick Library to engage with primary source materials on the Federal Theater Project
Assignments:
- Blog #10: Archives
- Due Tuesday, April 28 by start of class
Thursday, April 23, 2020: Anticommunism and the New Deal
Discussion Question: How did anticommunism impact the New Deal?
Due:
- Read The American Yawp, “The Great Depression”: Section X.
- Read excerpt from Ellen Schrecker’s Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (in Dropbox).
In-class:
- Analysis of HUAC minutes and primary sources related to Federal One and anticommunism
Week Fifteen: Project Workshop // Legacies of the New Deal
Tuesday, April 28, 2020: Legacies of the New Deal
Due:
- Bring in a “reading” that you would assign to help those understand the experience of a college student in 2019.
- Michael Hobbes’ digital essay “FML: Why millennials are facing the scariest financial future of any generation since the Great Depression..”
In-class:
- Student-led discussion: What are the legacies of the New Deal? What can the New Deal-era teach us about our current moment?
Thursday, April 30, 2020: Final Project Workshop
Due:
- Final project proposal.
- Read Nick Babich’s “The Magic of Paper Prototyping.”
In-class:
- How do we present our research to the public?
- Paper prototyping workshop and peer review.
Assignments:
- Final Project Due: Thursday, May 7
