1. Contextualizing

To be completed by May 13th

If you joined the course late and it is now May 13th or later, contact Dr. Graham immediately; click here for contact details.

Watch

Sometimes the embed seems to not load, at least for me. If that happens to you, just watch it on youtube (click on the youtube logo).

(My speaking notes for the video)

Read

I would suggest that you follow these instructions to get set up with a hypothesis account; hypothesis can let you annotate your online reading, and I find this helps with retention and understanding. You are not required to use hypothesis, though I encourage it.

  • Read the full thread by Amalia Skarlatou Levi and explore links of interest; make a note of anything interesting keeping in mind what you’ve already heard/read (you can use hypothes.is if you’re so-inclined). Pair that thread with this one. Share anything interesting you’ve found in our social space. A handy getting-started approach to making notes on things you find online is to think of the three W’s: the weird, the wonderful, the worrying. Also keep track of anything you read or anything interesting you find; a useful tool for that is Zotero.

Optional Extra

Gaffield, C. ‘Clio and Computers in Canada and Beyond: Contested Past, Promising zpresent, Uncertain Future’ Canadian Historical Review 101.4 559-584 pdf

Caswell, M. ‘Seeing Yourself in History: Community Archives and the Fight Against Symbolic Annihilation’. The Public Historian 2014, 36, 26–37, doi:10.1525/tph.2014.36.4.26.

Do

  1. Join the class Discord (click on that link for instructions on how to use Discord if you’ve never encountered it before); you will have been sent an invitation link to join via your Carleton email account.

  2. Get yourself a proper text editor; Sublime Text or Atom are good and free (though Sublime will periodically ask you to register). A text editor lets you edit any file on your machine, and create text files like .csv or .md or .txt or write python or R code. The file extension on a file - .doc or .xls or .txt etc - tells your computer what program to use to open or run the file. With a text editor, when you ‘save as’, you can specify the extension you want when you give the filename - you just keep on typing: my-new-text-file.txt.

  3. Everybody has to do the Github tutorial, to create an account there. Once you’ve done that, and while signed into Github, go to my example hist3814a starter repo and download a copy of it (instructions). Unzip, and use that folder to organize your work. It contains templates for how I want you to keep track of your work.

  4. Read and make sure you’re clear on the basic idea behind these tutorials and what I am after.

  5. Take a look at the suggested sequences of technical work; decide whether you will do the newcomer sequence, the standard sequence, or the going-further sequence.

  6. Then complete the appropriate tutorials by the due date to the best of your ability. For part one, these should not take very long as they are mostly about getting your machine set up for doing digital history. If you are trying to do this course with an iPad or a Chromebook, please get in touch with me before you begin.

  7. Use the template provided in the repo you copied in step 3 to write your log and to write your reflection. Use markdown conventions to indicate headings, emphasis, bullets, links, etc. The reflection prompt is below:

Drawing on what you’ve read (and/or your notes from what you’ve listened to), discuss your idea of what ‘digital history’ might be prior to starting this course, and think through whether any of the materials we’ve seen this week confirm or upset those notions. What kinds of ‘digital silences’ did you encounter? What has excited you? Finally, where do you want to go, with digital history?

When You Get Stuck

There is no shame, there is no trick! You will get stuck. When you do, make a post in the help channel in Discord indicating what tutorial you’re working on, the error message that you are receiving, share a screenshot, explain what you were trying to do. There is no shame in asking for help; I do not want to learn that you have been suffering in silence trying to figure things out on your own. People who ask for help learn faster and have a better experience in this class and generally do better. You may ask me privately for help in Discord; we can screenshare and voice-chat as needed.

I will be in Discord nearly every day, and always on Wednesday afternoons.

Submit Your Work

Put any ephemera you create as you do the tutorials into the part one folder in your copy of the github repo I provided. Then, upload your materials to your online repo. Make sure your log and reflection are up to date. Submit the link to the part one folder in your version of the repo using this form.