HIST289

Course Schedule - Fall 2025 (Subject to Change)

Week 1

Thursday, August 28
Introductions and Course Overview

Software Installations
Exercise: Timeline_JS Assignment Turn it in here by Tuesday 9/2

Week 2

Tuesday, September 2
What is History? Digital Humanities? Digital History?

Readings:

John Arnold, History: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 1-14.
Anne Burdick, “From Humanities to Digital Humanities,” in Digital Humanities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 1-26.
Stephen Robertson, “The Differences between Digital Humanities and Digital History,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016 available at: http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/76 (or https://muse.jhu.edu/book/46383 CH 25)
Jonathan Zimmerman, “Here’s my AI policy for students: I don’t have one,” Washington Post, August 29, 2023, Accessed Sept 12, 2023. Link to pdf of article

Assignment: Reading Response(Due before class)

Thursday, September 4
Slavery - what was it like?

Readings:

Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave Narrrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853, David Wilson, ed., (North Carolina Press, 2011), 44-46, 62-175.

Assignment: Reading Response(Due before class)

Week 3

Tuesday, September 9
Mapping - Points

Reading:

Emily Johnson and Anastasia Salter, “Map,” Critical Making in the Age of AI (Amherst College Press, 2025)

Website Review: Medieval Murder Map

Copy, rename, and move this form to complete the assignment. Paste the associated url into Canvas here

Exercise: Mapping Lab - Points [We will begin this in class, you do not need to start before hand]

Thursday, September 11
Our Data?

Readings:

Ellen Gruber Garvey, “‘facts and FACTS’: Abolitionists Database Innovations,” in “Raw Data” is an Oxymoron, Lisa Gitelman, ed. (Cambridge, Ma: MIT Press, 2013), 89-102.

Exercise Identifying Ads

Week 4

Tuesday, September 16
Slavery and Freedom in Ohio / XML

Reading:

Matthew Salafia, “Fugitive Slaves and the Borderland” from Slavery’s Borderland: Freedom and Bondage Along the Ohio River (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2013): 165-184.

XML Readings:

Exercise VSCode XML Setup Guide and VScode XML Ease of Use

Thursday, September 18
Slavery and Freedom in Ohio cont. / XML

Reading:

R.H.M Blackett, “Western Kentucky and Ohio” in The Captive’s Quest for Freedom: Fugitive Slaves, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, and the Politics of Slavery (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2018): 222-268

Exercise Encode a Recipe

Week 5

Tuesday, September 23
Website Review: Freedom on the Move

Copy, rename, and move this form to complete the assignment. Paste the associated url into Canvas here.
Assignment: Upload Mac N’ Cheese xml **Rememnber, I just want you to try

Finding AdsInstructions on Finding Ads

Thursday, September 25
XML/PEI (Proctor Encoding Initiative)

LAB

Week 6

Tuesday, September 30
Runaway Slaves in the US

Readings:

Franklin and Schweninger, Runaway Slaves, 5 & 9 and Appendix 7 “Runaway Slave Database” (Moved)
Stephanie Camp, Closer to Freedom, Ch 2

Thursday, October 2
Interpretations of Runaways

Readings:

Franklin and Schweninger, Runaway Slaves, 5 & 9 and Appendix 7 “Runaway Slave Database”
Antonio Bly, “‘Indubitable Signs’: Reading Silence as Text in New England Runaway Slave Advertisements,” Slavery & Abolition 42:2 (2021): 240-268.

Week 7

Tuesday, October 7
Runaway Slaves in US, cont / ARC StoryMaps

Readings:

Susanna Ashton and Jonathan D. Hepworth, “Jackson Unchained: Reclaiming a Fugitive Landscape,” The Appendix, November 5, 2013
Amani Marshall, “‘They Will Endeavor to Pass for Free’: Enslaved Runaways’ Performances of Freedom in Antebellum South Carolina,” Slavery & Abolition 31, no. 2 (2010): 161-180.
I.M Nick, “In the Name of Freedom: A Corpus Linguistic Analysis of Personal Names Recorded in Fugitive Slaver Advertisements Published in New York and New Jersey 18th-Century Newspapers,” Names 70:3(2022): 12-23. (Moved)

AssignmentReading Response

Exercise - ESRI StoryMaps and StoryMap.JS

Turn in the Assignment here Due OCT 13

Thursday, October 9
Advanced Mapping / QGIS

Website Review Mapping Inequality

Copy, rename, and move this form to complete the assignment. Paste the associated url into Canvas [here.

In Class Exercise Recreate a Map from Mapping Inequality

QGIS Tutorials for Take-Home Learning: Work through these tutorials outside of class to prepare for your final mapping project - recreating the 1860 slave population distribution map using IPUMS census data and historical shapefiles.

Updated QGIS 3.x Tutorial (Recommended): Installing QGIS and Adding Layers (QGIS 3.0) by Geospatial Historian team

Programming Historian QGIS Tutorials (Note: Based on older QGIS 2.x - interface differences expected): Installing QGIS and Adding Layers (QGIS 2.x) Creating New Vector Layers in QGIS Georeferencing in QGIS Geocoding Historical Data in QGIS

Week 8

Tuesday, October 14
Advanced Mapping cont. / QGIS

Reading:

Susan Schulten, “The Cartography of Slavery and the Authority of Statistics,” Civil War History 56:1 (2010): 5-32.

Final Mapping Project Goal: Using QGIS skills from these tutorials, you’ll recreate the historic “Map showing the distribution of the slave population in the southern states of the United States. Compiled from the census of 1860” using IPUMS census data and 1860 US boundary shapefiles.

Thursday, October 16
FALL BREAK - NO CLASS

Week 9

Tuesday, October 21
Cool DH Reading / Mapping with AI

Readings:

Cameron Blevins, “Space, Nation, and the Triumph of Region: A View of the World from Houston,” The Journal of American History 101:1 (2014): 122-147.
Assignment: Mapping #3 - Slave Populations in QGIS turn in assignment here

Thursday, October 23

Mapping with QGIS (Game-ified)

Week 10

Tuesday, October 28
Distant Reading Primer

Johanna Drucker, “Data Mining and Text Analysis,” in The Digital Humanities Coursebook (Routledge, 2021),110-120.
Cameron Blevins,“Topic Modeling Martha Ballard’s Diary,” April 1, 2010
Eleanor Stribling, “A Bossy Sort of Voice: Quantifying gender bias in “Harry Potter” with Python and NLTK” Medium May 4, 2018 (don’t worry about the code)
Aatish Bhatia, “Watch an A.I Learn to Write by Reading Nothing but Jane Austen,” The New York Times, April 27, 2023 (accessed 9/11/23)

Website Review - “Mining the Dispatch”

Copy, rename, and move this form to complete the assignment. Paste the associated url into Canvas.

Tutorial - Distant Reading with Voyant and nocodefunction.com

Thursday, October 30
Runaway Slave Narratives / Distant Reading with LLMs

Readings:

Selections from “From Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. Written by Himself,” “From Slavery Days in Old Kentucky. A True Story of a Father Who Sold His Wife and Four Children. By One of the Children,” and “From Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or, the Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery,” in The Long Walk to Freedom: Runaway Slave Narratives, Devon W. Carbado and Donald Weise, eds., (Beacon Press, 2012): 39-66, 69-88, and 205-228.

Tutorial -
Reading Across Texts

Week 11

Tuesday, November 4
Distant Reading with AI Code Assistant

Narrative of Henry Bibb

Tutorial

Thursday, November 6
Visualizations / Tableau

Readings:

Nathan Yau, Data Points: Visualization That Means Something, selected chapters

Week 12

Tuesday, November 11
Digital Humanities and Data

Readings:

Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein, “CH 6 - The Numbers Don’t Speak for Themselves,” in Data Feminism (Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press, 2020), 149-172.
John Theibault, “Visualizations and Historical Arguments”
Jessica Marie Johnson, “Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads,” Social Text 36:4 (2018): 57-79.

Thursday, November 13
Visualizing Data II - Humanities Provocations / Final Projects

Readings:

Johanna Drucker, “Graphic provocations: What do digital humanists want from visualization?” (watch the lecture)
Lauren Klein, “What Data Visualization Reveals: Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and the Work of Knowledge Production,” Harvard Data Science Review 4:2 (2022): 1-34.

Website Review (Un)Silencing Slavery

Copy, rename, and move this form to complete the assignment. Paste the associated url into Canvas.

Week 13

Tuesday, November 18
Final Project Workday (and some cool additional tools like Inky, OpenRefine, and GEPHI)

Billy Perrigo, “OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour to Make ChatGPT Less Toxic,” TIME, January 18, 2023
Content Moderator Sim

Thursday, November 20
Final Project Workday

THANKSGIVING BREAK (Nov 24-28)

Week 14

Tuesday, December 2
Final Project Workday

Thursday, December 4
Final Project Workday

Week 15

Tuesday, December 9
Presentations and/or Final Project Workday

Thursday, December 11
Presentations

Course Evaluations

Final Project Due: Sunday, December 14, 2025 @ 8:30pm

For the complete syllabus including learning goals, assignments, and policies, see the Syllabus