NEAR E 485 A: Digital Media: The Middle East and Central Asia

Note: Reading/viewing will be posted in the ‘Modules’ section.

Download the Syllabus here

Module 1 Introducing Digital Humanities

Monday 3/28

• Welcome, introductions, class overview, Q&A
• What is digital humanities? What is text mining?
• TO DO: post introduction in Slack channel before Wednesday’s class.

Wednesday 3/30

• Evaluating DH Projects
• TO DO: Assignment 1 by Sunday 11.30pm

Module 2 Discoveries and Digital Archives

Monday 4/4

• Recap: What is Text and Data Mining in the Humanities?
• On Digital Archives:
  • how archives are created - video, slides
  • OCR 
  • hands on DSLab work

Wednesday 4/6

• Independent work: Learning about King Tut
  • Elizabeth Frood: Tutankhamun in Colour (2020)

  • Christina Riggs: Photographing Tutankhamun: How the Camera Helped Create “King Tut" (2018)

Module 3 Bias, Algorithms and Content Management Systems

Monday 4/11

• Tut Tales: Who was Tut? The hunt for the tomb
• Bias in archives, algorithms and lexicons
• Digital Literacy

Wednesday 4/13

• University of Washington’s Open Scholarship Commons
• Introduction to Omeka
• Metadata overview

Module 4 Digital Scholar Lab and Project Planning

Monday 4/18

• Introduction to Gale Digital Scholar Lab
• Searching the archives
• Developing a research question
• Building research projects

Wednesday 4/20

• Project management and planning
• Developing a Project Charter and Project One-Pager

**4/25 – 4/27 Collaborative Project Development, Team Meetings**

Module 5 Text Data Cleaning, Curation and Analysis

Monday 5/2

• Tut Tales: Egyptomania
• Creating, curating and cleaning datasets
• Quantitative or qualitative? Analysis and visualization in digital humanities
• Choosing tools and analysis methods

Wednesday 5/4

• Hands on practice with alternate tools – overview of Lexos and Voyant

Module 6 Narratives and Quantitative Analysis  

Monday 5/9

• Tut Tales: controversies and tours
• Historical narratives and microhistory
• Storymaps and timelines

Wednesday 5/11

• Digital Tools 1: Quantitative Analysis

Module 7 Qualitative Analysis and Mapping

Monday 5/16

• Digital Tools 2: Qualitative Analysis

Wednesday 5/18

• Named Entity Recognition and Mapping

Module 8 Network Analysis and Lab Work         

Monday 5/23

• Introduction to Network Analysis

Wednesday 5/25

• Hands-on Lab session

Module 9 Putting It All Together

Monday 5/30

• Capstone presentation of work

Wednesday 6/1

• Team presentations
• Review and comments due by 6/3
• Final projects due by 6/5