Outcomes

1. This course will enable you to analyze and assess historical documents, artifacts, and other primary sources through the lens of digital history methods, critically applied, and you will develop awareness of the ways digital tools change what it is possible to know about the past.
2. At the same time, this ability will enable you to analyze and assess critically digital tools and methods from a historical perspective.
3. Given that this is an online course, another outcome will be your ability to conduct such research independently. However, no one operates in a vacuum; digital historians collaborate to troubleshoot or develop technologies, and through open practices to data sharing and reuse, learn to build upon each others’ work in a collaborative fashion.
4. Another outcome will be the ability to translate the results of digital methods into historical argument.
5. Digital work is often necessarily therefore a kind of public work, and a final outcome therefore will be a professionalized presence online.

Texts

See the weekly work section. All readings are open access.

Real Names Policy

You do not need to use your real name or identity on any public-facing work that you do in this course. Nor do you need to explain to me that you wish to use a pseudonym. It is sufficient that you send an email to me with the following message:

‘I would like to use the following username in all public-facing work: xxxxxxxx’

…where xxxxx is the name you have selected. For safety’s sake, if you decide to use a pseudonym, do not use one that you have used on any other website or social media platform.

When Life Intervenes

There’s nothing we can’t roll with, in this class. That said, it is a compressed time frame: so if something comes up, just let me know:

When something comes up and this course has to move to the backburner, contact me and we can figure out something else to do, or something else that will help you be successful here. It’s our course - we can change things up as we need to.