Readings

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

1/14:

• 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)

1/21:

• 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/

1/26:

• 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

1/28:

• 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

2/2:

• 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)

2/4:

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

2/9:

• Choose from this list of AI fictions – Plan ahead! These are in a variety of lengths and formats.
  • Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel,” https://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-content/uploads/sites/226/2015/12/Borges-The-Library-of-Babel.pdf
  • Arthur C. Clarke, “The Nine Billion Names of God,” https://faculty.winthrop.edu/kosterj/writ510/readings/The%20Nine%20Billion%20Names%20of%20God.pdf
  • E. Lily Yu, “In the Forests of Memory,” Vice, 25 November 2018, https://www.vice.com/en/article/in-the-forests-of-memory/
  • Italo Calvino, “The Burning of the Abominable House,” 1977, from Numbers in the Dark, https://www.ruanyifeng.com/calvino/2008/12/the_burning_of_the_abominable_house_en.html [Mentions of violent crime and SA]
  • Annalee Newitz, “When Robot and Crow Saved East St. Louis,” Slate 29 December 2018, https://slate.com/technology/2018/12/annalee-newitz-short-story-when-robot-and-crow-saved-east-st-louis.html
  • Ray Bradbury, “The Pedestrian,” The Reporter, 7 August 1951, https://www.riversidelocalschools.com/Downloads/pedestrian%20short%20story.pdf
  • Katharine Duckett, “The Ones Who Look,” Reactor Magazine, 1 July 2020, https://reactormag.com/the-ones-who-look-katharine-duckett/
  • Cat Rambo, “Red in Tooth and Cog,” Escape Pod, 21 December 2017 (story OR podcast episode), https://escapepod.org/2017/12/21/escape-pod-607-red-tooth-cog/
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer, S1 Ep8 “I Robot, You Jane” [Hulu]
  • Star Trek: Strange New World, S3 Ep4 “A Space Adventure Hour” [Paramount]

2/11:

• Choose two items from this list of AI non-fiction. These are all fairly critical of AI. I invite you to engage critically with them in turn! If there are statements you feel are inaccurate or misrepresentative, holes in the coverage, assumptions you find problematic, note those and bring them up! This is an opportunity for what I hope will be a robust discussion. If there’s another article you’ve found particularly insightful about AI, email me to see if you can swap it out for one of these.
  • Nilesh Christopher, “OpenAI is huge in India. Its models are steeped in caste bias.” MIT Technology Review
  • Victor Tangermann, “AI Coding is Massively Overhyped, Report Finds,” Futurism
  • Victoria Turk, “How AI Reduces the World to Stereotypes,” Rest of World
  • James Andrews, “The 1970 Law That Solves AI’s Legitimacy Crisis,” TechPolicy
  • Marcus Olang, “I’m Kenyan. I don’t write like ChatGPT. ChatGPT writes like me.” this man’s mind
  • Michael Geoffrey Asia, “The Emotional Labor behind AI Intimacy,” Data Workers’ Inquiry (This links to a landing page with trigger warnings. If you choose this piece, make sure to click through to the actual essay.)
  • Dara Kerr, “Elon Musk’s xAI datacenter generating extra electricity illegally, regulator rules,” The Guardian
  • Mizy Clifton, “Black teenagers twice as likely to be falsely accused of using AI tools in homework,” Semafor

2/16:

• Explore the UNESCO Virtual Museum of Stolen Cultural Objects, https://museum.unesco.org/
• 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/

2/18:

• 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.)

2/23:

• “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/

2/25:

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

3/2:

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

3/4:

• 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/. 

3/16:

• 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.

3/18:

• 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
• Deimosa Webber-Bey, “Data Quilts,” Runaway Quilt Project, http://runawayquiltproject.org/dataquilt/

3/23:

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

3/25:

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

3/30:

• 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

4/1:

• 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/

4/6:

• Howard Rambsy II and Kenton Rambsy, “Charting 25 Million Black Novel Pageviews,” Black Lit Network, https://blacklitnetwork.org/datavis/charting-25-million-black-novel-pageviews#expanded
• Howard Rambsy II and Kenton Rambsy, “25 frequently discussed African American novels,” Black Lit Network, https://blacklitnetwork.org/datavis/25-frequently-discussed-african-american-novels#expanded
• “Every Last Drop,” http://everylastdrop.co.uk/

4/8:

• Play through Erstwhile and Seedship

4/13:

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

4/15:

• “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

4/20:

• 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