This course, which fulfills the University Core Curriculum Technology Requirement for History majors, is intended to introduce students to the use of digital, interactive, and computational technologies in the discipline of History - meaning research, pedagogy and public history.
The course will have two components - classroom lectures/ discussions and practicums. (There will be assigned readings, listed below, for both components). The lectures/discussions will be intended to impart information and generate discussion about the use and impact of new media in the discipline of History and the practicums to provide hands-on training in some of these uses. Over the course of the term, students will be expected to master both theoretical concepts and practical techniques and to use both in their work (described below). Although whenever possible the week's practicum will correspond to the material covered in the lecture/ discussion, but this will not be possible every week (as evident in the weekly schedule, below).
In the practicum, students will be instructed in and assigned to create a digital archive , use a database program to manage it, prepare a web interface for such a database, analyze the data in the database, and prepare a multi-media, interactive presentation of some sort based on that archive, which could then be published on the Department's web site. This part of the course then would not only provide students with important, discipline-specific computer skills but also prepare them to do multi-media work in upper division History courses.
In the lectures/ discussions, students will learn about the history of media (beginning with print) and about the use of computers in the discipline of history since the 1960s. Later, we will move on to address theoretical questions about how the discipline of History and the work of the historian is being changed by interactive and multi-media technologies such as hypertext; digitalization and manipulation of texts, images and sounds (the basic sources of history); and data-capture and data-compression (making possible the reproduction and transfer of entire archives) -- and by related changes in publication, circulation and reading of history and in copyright, intellectual property law, and archival access policies.
Course Requirements:
1. Active participation in class discussions, both on-line and in class, and in practicums: 50% of semester grade.
2. Web-site review essay: 25%
3. Digital History Project Proposal :25%
II. Books for purchase for this course:
1. Dennis A. Trinkle, ed., Writing, Teaching and Researchin history in the Electronic Age (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998).
2. George Landow, Hypertext 2.0 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
III. Additional on-line readings
IV. Books on reserve in Lied Library:
William Friedham, A Web of Connections: A Guide to History on the Internet (McGraw-Hill: 1999)
Charles Harvey and Jon Peres, Databases in Historical Research: Theory, Methods and Applications (NY: St Martins, 1996).
Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray Computer: A History of the Information Machine (HarperCollins: 1997).
Greenstein, Daniel I. A Historian's Guide to Computing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Mawdsley, Evan, and Thomas Munck. Computing for Historians: An Introductory Guide. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993.
Tufte, Edward. Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative. Cheshire, Connecticut: Graphics Press, 1997.