Reading the Schedule
The readings, exploration, keyword research, and archival searches listed under each date are due in class that day; the in-class practicums will be held during class time and you should come prepared to work on them (we will let you know what preparations will be necessary before class).
You can find the full class syllabus and policies here.
PART I: Shakespeare in Many Forms: Text Encoding
Week One
Thurs., Sept. 6:
Introduction
Week Two
Mon., Sept. 10:
Read:
- William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Acts 1–2, Norton Critical Edition
- Julia Flanders, Syd Bauman, and Sarah Connell “Text Encoding Fundamentals with TEI” (in the “Course Materials” section of our Blackboard site)
Thurs., Sept. 13:
Read:
- William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Acts 3–5
- Optional: David Birnbaum, “Even Gentler Introduction to XML”
Write discussion board exploration post:
Critical Approaches to Reading The Tempest: Authority, Race, Gender
Week Three
Mon., Sept. 17:
Read:
- William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Folger Digital Texts edition
- Folger guide to using Early English Books Online
Write discussion board exploration post:
Thurs., Sept. 20:
Archive search:
- Bring in an archival document published between 1550 and 1650 that relates to magic/religion and the production and control of knowledge and post it to Blackboard. Identify a passage or two from The Tempest that you think connects with your document and include that with your discussion board post.
Explore (no post required):
In-Class Practicum:
- Text encoding fundamentals; marking up Shakespeare’s Tempest
Week Four
Mon., Sept. 24:
Read:
- William Davenant and John Dryden The Tempest; or, The Enchanted Isle, EEBO-TCP edition
Thurs., Sept. 27:
Read:
- Leah Marcus, “The Blue-eyed Witch” (in Norton)
Archive search:
- Bring in an archival document published between 1550 and 1650 that relates to gender
Explore (no post required):
- The Tempest, Bodleian First Folio edition and EEBO-TCP XML
In-Class Practicum:
- Advanced text encoding; applying analytical encoding to Shakespeare’s Tempest
Week Five
Mon., Oct. 1:
Read:
- Aimé Césaire, A Tempest
Weds., October 3 (by midnight):
Document selections and draft annotations of The Tempest due
Thurs., Oct. 4:
Archive search:
- Bring in an archival document published between 1550 and 1650 that relates to race or colonialism
Explore (no post required):
- The Tempest; or, The Enchanted Isle, EEBO edition
In-Class Practicum:
- Imagine you are reading the Tempest online and you see this annotation…
- Does it provide useful information and independent context for the person reading the Tempest
- Does it provide the key document details (Title, date, author, genre)?
- Is it written from an editorial perspective?
- Does it connect persuasively, usefully, and interestingly with the text in the Tempest?
Historical and Literary Contexts
Week Six
Mon., Oct. 8:
NO CLASS
Thurs., Oct. 11:
Read:
- Paul Dingman, “Tagging Manuscripts: How Much is Too Much?”
- Optional: Julia Flanders and Matthew Jockers “A Matter of Scale”
Write discussion board exploration post:
- Using the Word Tree tool with either Shakespeare’s or Davenant and Dryden’s Tempest (or both, if you like), find three keywords that seem significant to you and look them up with the Early Modern Print tool. In what other contexts do you find these key terms? You can start by pasting the text you want to examine into the Word Counter tool to see which words are particularly common in the play you examine. You can copy the text of A Tempest from the EEBO-TCP link that we read, or download a plain-text file here. For The Tempest, you can copy a plain-text version of the Folger edition from here.
In-Class Practicum:
- Digital publication of encoded texts
PART II: Frankenstein, Textual Corpora, and Digital Textual Analysis
Week Seven
Mon., Oct. 15:
Read:
- Frankenstein, Norton Critical edition [Volumes I and II]
- Jill Lepore, “The Strange and Twisted Life of Frankenstein“
Thurs., Oct. 18:
Read:
- Frankenstein, Norton Critical edition [Volume III]
- Optional: Katie Rawson and Trevor Muñoz, “Against Cleaning
Week Eight
Mon., Oct. 22:
Read:
- Benjamin M. Schmidt, “Vector Space Models for the Digital Humanities”
In-Class Practicum:
- Fundamentals for working in R Studio
Mon., Oct. 22 (emailed before midnight that evening):
Text encoding projects due
Thurs., Oct. 25:
Read:
- Ryan Heuser, “Word Vectors in the Eighteenth Century, Episode 1: Concepts” and “Episode 2: Methods”
- Optional: Mary Poovey, “‘My Hideous Progeny’: The Lady and the Monster”(in Norton and on Blackboard in the Course Materials folder)
- Optional: Ted Underwood, “Seven Ways Humanists are Using Computers to Understand Text”
In-Class Practicum:
- Basic text analysis with R
In-Class Practicum:
- Locating and evaluating corpora; preparing texts for large-scale analysis.
- Here is a list of some corpora that might be used for analysis; we will talk about how each is framed and discuss how to locate and evaluate additional corpora during class:
- Women Writers Online
- Women Writers in Review
- DocSouth
- Visualizing Early Print (several corpora, fifteenth through eighteenth centuries)
- Project Gutenberg
- Victorian Women Writers Project
- Civil War Governors
Week Nine
Mon., Oct. 29:
Read:
- Benjamin M. Schmidt, “Introductory Vignette“
- Optional: David McClure, “(Mental) Maps of Texts”
Explore (no post required):
- Shelley-Godwin Archive: Frankenstein
In-Class Practicum:
- Corpus development and data preparation
Weds., Oct. 31:
Tufts University is hosting a Frankenreads-athon for any who are interested
Thurs., Nov. 1:
Read:
- Lynn Cherny, “Visualizing Word Embeddings in Pride and Prejudice”
- Optional: Benjamin M. Schmidt, “Exploratory Vignette“
Explore (no post required):
In-Class Practicum:
- Analyzing corpora with word2vec
Week Ten
Sun., Nov. 4 (by midnight):
Emails about project plans due
Mon., Nov. 5:
Read:
- Optional: Ted Underwood, “The Gender Balance of Fiction, 1800–2007” and explore the interactive visualization
In-Class Practicum:
- Workshopping research questions
Thurs., Nov. 8:
Read:
- Lauren Klein, “The Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemings” (on Blackboard in the Course Materials folder)
In-Class Practicum:
- Text analysis with R (2): work on text analysis projects
Fri., Nov. 9 (by midnight):
Revised emails about project plans due
Constructing digital diversity
Week Eleven
Mon., Nov. 12:
NO CLASS
PART III: Archives and Arguments: Build Your Own Database
Thurs., Nov. 15:
Read:
- Julia Flanders, “Curation”
Explore (no post required):
Week Twelve
Mon., Nov. 19:
Read and explore:
- Digital Anthology of Early Modern English Drama (introduction here)
In-Class Practicum:
- Introduction to CERES Toolkit/scoping an archive project
Weds., Nov. 21 (by midnight):
Text analysis projects due
Thurs., Nov. 22:
NO CLASS
Week Thirteen
Mon., Nov. 26:
Read:
- Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, “Translatio Studii and the Poetics of the Digital Archive: Early American Literature, Caribbean Assemblages, and Freedom Dreams” (in Course Materials on Blackboard)
In-Class Practicum:
- CERES Toolkit; creating metadata and textual tagging
Explore (no post required):
Weds., Nov. 28 (by midnight):
Archive proposals due by email
Thurs., Nov. 29:
Read:
- Optional: Jacqueline Wernimont: “Whence Feminism? Assessing Feminist Interventions in Digital Literary Archives”
In-Class Practicum:
- Building an archive with CERES: work on assignments
Week Fourteen
Mon., Dec. 3:
Explore (no post required):
In-Class Practicum
- Linking, exploration, and discovery in web archives: work on archive projects