Module 2 is another foundational module, intended to get you thinking about the “building blocks” of digital history: digitized sources and data. The readings and discussion will prompt you to think about the impact of the digitization of historical sources as well as the ways historians interact with data. The technical activities will provide you with tools to deal with research photos, which may prove useful in your group projects or future research.
Readings/Discussion
1. read Lara Putnam, “The Transnational and the Text Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast” in American Historical Review 121, no 2 (April 2016): 377-402.
2. read Jonathan Blaney and Judith Siefring, “A Culture of non-citation: Assessing the digital impact of British History Online and the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 11, no 1 (2017).
3. read Christof Schoch, “Big? Smart? Clean? Messy? Data in the Humanities,” Journal of Digital Humanities 2, no 3 (2013).
4. read S.L. Ziegler, “Open Data in Cultural Heritage Institutions: Can We Be Better Than Data Brokers?” Digital Humanities Quarterly 14, no 2 (2020).
5. read Michelle Moravec, “What would you do? Historians’ ethics and digitized archives,” 2016.
6. read the table of contents of Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein’s Data Feminism, specifically, their description of the 7 Principles of Data Feminism. (If you are interested, feel free to read part or all of the whole book to learn more about any of the principles, but it is not required.)
7. explore the Slave Voyages ; Old Bailey Online ; and/or Death by Numbers databases
8. read Dan Cohen, “The Writing Is on the Wall for Handwriting Recognition,” Humane Ingenuity (newsletter), November 25, 2025.
9. participate in the class discussion on humanities data, digitization, and born-digital sources
Technical Activities (Required)
1. BEFORE CLASS create free accounts with Claude.ai (requires US cell phone number) and Transkribus
2. during class, we will experiment with Claude.ai, Gemini, and Transkribus for transforming research photos into text
Technical Activities (Optional)
3. download/install Tropy for organizing and annotating archival research photos; watch the Introduction to Tropy video then try to import and organize 5-10 of your own research photos OR download and use some sample photos from an electronic database like Chronicling America or Early English Books Online (VPN required).
4. download/install Zotero for organizing secondary sources and generating formatted citations / bibliographies; check out the Quick Start Guide in the Zotero documentation then try to import and organize 5-10 secondary sources from JSTOR or some other online database. GMU also has an InfoGuide on Zotero if you would like to explore it in more depth.