Readings

Readings should be done before the class period for which they’re listed.

1/15:

• Lisa Spiro, “Defining the Values of Digital Humanities” in Matthew K. Gold, ed., Debates in the Digital Humanities (University of Minnesota Press, 2012). https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctttv8hq.6 (pages 23-30, the Proposed Values section)
• What is Digital Humanities? https://whatisdigitalhumanities.com/ (Refresh the page a few times)

1/22:

• Tom Scheinfeldt, “Where’s the Beef? Does Digital Humanities Have to Answer Questions?” https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled-88c11800-9446-469b-a3be-3fdb36bfbd1e/section/3c03ecdb-2dcf-4597-8fc4-e42f8dcc21e1#p1b2
• Miriam Posner, “How Did They Make That?” (video), https://miriamposner.com/blog/how-did-they-make-that-the-video/

1/27:

• Laura de Moya Guerra, “Are the digital humanities exclusive?” History@Work, 26 May 2022, https://ncph.org/history-at-work/are-the-digital-humanities-exclusive/
• George Williams, “Disability, Universal Design, and the Digital Humanities” https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled-88c11800-9446-469b-a3be-3fdb36bfbd1e/section/2a59a6fe-3e93-43ae-a42f-1b26d1b4becc

1/29:

• Excerpts from Safiya Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism 
• Howard Rambsy II, “African American Scholars and the Margins of DH,” PMLA 135, no. 1 (2020): 152-158.
• Explore the website of the Recovery Hub for American Women Writers, https://recoveryhub.siue.edu

2/3:

• Peggy Aldrich Kidwell, “The Adding Machine Fraternity at St. Louis: Creating a Center of Invention, 1880-1920,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 22, no. 2 (2000): 4-21, https://i-share-sie.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01CARLI_SIE/1fjplmc/cdi_proquest_miscellaneous_28787914
• Lizzie O’Shea, “What Ada Lovelace can teach us about digital technology,” Inside Story, 9 September 2019, https://insidestory.org.au/what-ada-lovelace-can-teach-us-about-digital-technology/ (Excerpted from Future Histories, Verso Books, 2021)

2/5:

• Mia Sato, “How Google Perfected the Web,” The Verge, 8 January 2024, https://www.theverge.com/c/23998379/google-search-seo-algorithm-webpage-optimization

2/10:

• Choose from this list of AI fictions – Plan ahead! These are in a variety of formats, but all are fairly long.
  • A Murder at the End of the World (tv show, currently on Hulu)
  • Robin Sloan, Sourdough (novel, available at Edwardsville Public Library in hardcover, audiobook, and ebook)
  • Mrs. Davis (tv show, currently on Peacock)
  • 2001: A Space Odyssey + Interstellar (movies, 2001 on Tubi and Interstellar on Netflix)
  • The Imitation Game + WarGames (movies, both on Max)
  • Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (novel, available at Edwardsville Public Library in hardcover, audiobook, and ebook)
  • Artificial Intelligence + I, Robot (movies, Artificial Intelligence on Pluto and I, Robot on Hulu)
  • Karel Čapek, Rossum’s Universal Robots + Metropolis (1927) (play and movie, both freely available)
  • Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (novel, available at Edwardsville Public Library in hardcover, audiobook, and ebook)

2/12:

• Choose two items from this list of AI non-fiction
  • Chris Gilliard, “The Deeper Problem with Google’s Racially Diverse Nazis,” The Atlantic
  • Viktoria Tomova, “AI Solutions for Domestic Labor May Exacerbate Inequities,” TechPolicy
  • Victoria Turk, “How AI Reduces the World to Stereotypes,” Rest of World,
  • Susan D’Agostino, “Facial Recognition Heads to Class. Will Students Benefit?” Inside Higher Ed
  • Karen Hao, “AI Is Taking Water from the Desert,” The Atlantic
  • Mizy Clifton, “Black teenagers twice as likely to be falsely accused of using AI tools in homework,” Semafor

2/17:

• Adam Schrader, “UNESCO Has Teamed Up with Interpol to Build a Virtual Museum of Stolen Cultural Artifacts,” Artnet, 13 October 2023, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/unesco-virtual-museum-stolen-cultural-objects-2374871
• Andrew Ba Tran, Claire Healy, and Nicole Dungca, “Search the Smithsonian’s Records on Human Remains,” Washington Post, 15 December 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/interactive/2023/human-remains-database-smithsonian-museum/

2/19:

• Lara Putnam, “The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast,” American Historical Review 121, no. 2 (2016): 377-402
• Miya Norfleet, “The Smithsonian wants to help St. Louis digitize its Black history,” St. Louis on the Air (STLPR), 6 September 2024, https://www.stlpr.org/show/st-louis-on-the-air/2024-09-06/the-smithsonian-wants-to-help-st-louis-digitize-its-black-history (The assigned “reading” here is the podcast, not the article that accompanies it.)

2/24:

• “Types of Editions,” METRO Resources, Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website, https://chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/types-editions#hypertextedition
  NB: The final link in this piece is broken. You can access the example hypertext edition here: http://thebookoftheduchess.co.uk/
• Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus,” annotated by Esther Schor, Nextbook Press, https://nextbookpress.com/new-colossus/

2/26:

• Frederick Douglass, “Speech on the Dred Scott Decision,” May 1857, excerpts, https://www.utc.edu/sites/default/files/2021-01/fddredscottspeechexcerpt2018.pdf

3/3:

• Stephen Grandchamp, “Introduction to Voyant Tools,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQbf6V77ScA

3/5:

• Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics (New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 1954), Introduction and Chapter 5
• Howard Rambsy, “How the ‘New York Times’ Covers Black Writers,” Public Books, 10 Oct 2022, https://www.publicbooks.org/how-the-new-york-times-covers-black-writers/. 

3/17:

• K. K. Rebecca Lai and Jennifer Medina, “An American Puzzle: Fitting Race in a Box,” New York Times, 16 October 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/10/16/us/census-race-ethnicity.html. Lovejoy provides free access to the New York Times for students via this link.

3/19:

• Nancy Smith, “Data Quilts: Exploring Environmental Data through Textile Art,” Data Science by Design, 8 August 2023, https://datasciencebydesign.org/blog/exploring-environmental-data-through-textile-art

3/24:

• Mark Monmonier, How to Lie with Maps (University of Chicago Press, 1991): 1-18

3/26:

• Jack Dougherty and Ilya Ilyankou, “Map Your Data” in Hands-On Data Visualization (O’Reilly, last updated 12/2024), https://handsondataviz.org/map.html

3/31:

• Langston Hughes, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44428/the-negro-speaks-of-rivers
• Mira Kittner, “Tracing ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers,’” https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/b0b9c700ed3aff2a93b62a5f1eb6da84/tracing-the-negro-speaks-of-rivers/index.html
• “The lines that shape our cities,” https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/0f58d49c566b486482b3e64e9e5f7ac9

4/2:

• Edward Relph, “A Place-Related Autobiography,” Placeness, Place, Placelessness, https://www.placeness.com/50-2/
• Explore the Unseen St. Louis website and choose an entry to read, https://unseenstlouis.substack.com/

4/7:

• Play through Erstwhile and Seedship

4/9:

• Gabi Kirilloff, “Interactive Fiction in the Humanities Classroom: How to Create Interactive Text Games Using Twine,” Programming Historian (2021), https://programminghistorian.org/en/lessons/interactive-text-games-using-twine

4/14:

• Spencer Chang, “We’re All (Folk) Programmers,” Reboot, 1 July 2024, https://joinreboot.org/p/folk-programmers

4/16:

• “How the Media Covered the Civil Rights Movement: Black Newspapers,” Alabama Public Radio, 11 December 2013, https://www.apr.org/arts-life/2013-12-11/how-the-media-covered-the-civil-rights-movement-black-newspapers
• Tiffany Karalis Noel, “Conflating culture with COVID-19: Xenophobic repercussions of a global pandemic,” Social Sciences & Humanities Open vol. 2, no. 1 (2020), https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590291120300334?via%3Dihub

4/21:

• Zach Coble and Jojo Karlin, “Reference Rot in the Digital Humanities Literature: An Analysis of Citations Containing Website Links in DHQ,” Digital Humanities Quarterly vol. 17, no. 1 (2023), https://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/17/1/000662/000662.html