Schedule Fall 2018

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:
Write discussion board exploration post:

Critical Approaches to Reading The Tempest: Authority, Race, Gender

Week Three

Mon., Sept. 17:
Read:
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:
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):
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):
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:
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:
Thurs., Oct. 18:
Read:
  • Frankenstein, Norton Critical edition [Volume III]
  • Optional: Katie Rawson and Trevor Muñoz, “Against Cleaning

Week Eight

Mon., Oct. 22:
Read:
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:
In-Class Practicum:
  • Basic text analysis with R
In-Class Practicum:

Week Nine

Mon., Oct. 29:
Read:
Explore (no post required): 
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:
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:
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:
Explore (no post required):

Week Twelve

Mon., Nov. 19:
Read and explore:
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:
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
Tue., December 11 , 8am–10am, Snell 003:
Informal archival presentations
Thurs., December 13 (by midnight):
Archive projects due