William Thomas – Page 2 – William G. Thomas III

August 22, 2014

Fall 2014 Graduate Interdisciplinary Readings Seminar in Digital Humanities

Next week we begin classes at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and I’m looking forward to teaching the Graduate Interdisciplinary Readings Seminar in Digital Humanities again. This course is the foundational readings seminar in the Graduate Certificate program in Digital Humanities. For more on the program’s structure and requirements, go to the Graduate Certificate home page.

You can download or view the current syllabus for my course here. I’d welcome any comments and suggestions either on this blog or through Twitter (@wgthomas3).

July 9, 2014

Reading list for graduate seminar in digital humanities (Fall 2014)

It’s time to work on syllabi for Fall courses, order books, and prepare readings. With the DH2014 Conference in full swing I am thinking about assignments for my graduate seminar: “Interdisciplinary Readings Seminar in Digital Humanities.” This course is the foundation seminar for our Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities at the University of Nebraska. My colleague Steve Ramsay taught the course last fall, and I taught the course in 2012.

Based in part on the Multi-Lingualism and Multi-Culturalism Committee at DH2014, I have required an essay assignment that asks students to engage through social media with one or more scholars or working groups outside of the U.S. and publishing in a language other than English. I’ll have more to post on the particulars of that assignment soon. In the meantime the course will include the following readings (all are tentative, of course, until the syllabus is finalized and I will post my syllabus for comments and suggestions soon):

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1918)

Ayers, Edward L. “The Pasts and Futures of Digital History,” Virginia Center for Digital History, (http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/PastsFutures.html)

——–. “Does Digital Scholarship Have a Future?” EDUCAUSE review, August 2013.

Borgman, Christine. “The Digital Future is Now: A Call to Action for the Humanities,” Digital Humanities Quarterly (2009).

Bush, Vannevar. “As We May Think,” Atlantic Monthly (July 1945).

Natalia Cecire, “When Digital Humanities Was in Vogue,” Journal of Digital Humanities, 2011

Ethington, Philip J. “Los Angeles and the Problem of Urban Historical Knowledege,” American Historical Review (2000).

Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Penguin, 1984.

Habermas, Jurgen. “Science and Technology as ‘Ideology’,” in Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970).

Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” Socialist Review (1985).

Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays. New York: Garland Publishing, 1977

Koh, Adeline and Roopika Risam, #DHPoco: Postcolonial Digital Humanities, Comics.

Latour, Bruno. An Inquiry in the Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Harvard University Press, 2014.

Lanier, Jaron. “Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism,” Edge (May 2006).

——–. You are Not a Gadget: a manifesto. New York: Vintage, 2010.

Licklider, J.C.R. “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics (March 1960).

Lunenfeld et al. “The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0” (UCLA, 2009).

Mahoney, Timothy R. “Gilded Age Plains City: Spatial Narratives,” Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (2009).
(http://gildedage.unl.edu/narrative/topics.php?q=theory)

Manovich, Lev. Software Takes Command. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.

McPherson, Tressie. “‘Who the Fuck Do You Think You Are?’ Academic Engagement, Microcelebrity and Digital Sociology from the Far Left of the Matrix of Domination,” (2012)

Michel, Jean-Baptiste et al. “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books,” Science Vol. 331 (14 January 2011).

McCarty, Willard. “Humanities Computing,” Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science (2003).

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1964.

Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History. Verso, 2007.

Murray, Janet. Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011.

Ramsay, Stephen. “Toward an Algorithmic Criticism,” Literary and Linguistic Computing 18.2 (2003): 167-174.

Staley, David. “Historical Visualizations,” in Journal of the Association for History and Computing Vol. 3 No. 3 (November 2000)

Thomas, William G. III, and Edward L. Ayers, “The Differences Slavery Made: Two Communities in the American Civil War,” American Historical Review, December 2003.(http://www2.vcdh.virginia.edu/AHR/)

Turing, A. M. “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind 49 (1950).

Turkle, Sherry. “Constructions and Reconstructions of the Self in Virtual Reality,” Mind, Culture, and Activity Vol. 1, No. 3 (Summer 1994).

White, Richard. “What is Spatial History?” (working paper, Spatial History Project, 2010)
(http://www.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/pub.php?id=29)

Unsworth, John. “What is Humanities Computing and What is Not?” (2002)

Zittrain, Jonathan. The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.

selected readings from Debates in the Digital Humanities online and the Blackwell’s Companion to Digital Humanities online

February 9, 2014

Congratulations to Dr. Jared Leighton

Last week, a 2013 graduate of our department, Dr. Jared Leighton was awarded the highest honor in the University of Nebraska–the Folsom Distinguished Dissertation Award. His advisor Professor Patrick D. Jones was on hand the make remarks and present the award to Jared. Jared’s dissertation is truly groundbreaking, and I am honored to have served on his dissertation committee.

His work explored the gay and lesbian activists, black and white, in the African American freedom struggle from the 1950s to the 1970s. For his dissertation, “Freedom Invisible: Gays and Lesbians in the African American Civil Rights Movement,”

Dr. Jared Leighton wins the Folsom Distinguished Dissertation Award, February 2014. University of Nebraska.

Jared conducted dozens of oral histories and submitted Freedom of Information Act requests to declassify F.B.I. files on the subject. The result is a stunning piece of research and a sophisticated and subtle analysis of gay and lesbian activists. Leighton argues that the black freedom struggle provided an important training ground for gay and lesbian activists, and he turns our attention toward a range of complex and intersecting motivations for activism among gays and lesbians, as a result moving beyond the standard interpretation stressing the religious basis for activism. Congratulations Jared!

October 26, 2013

The Promise of the Digital Humanities and the Future of the Liberal Arts

These remarks were presented October 25, 2013 at the Michigan State University Cyberinfrastructure Days conference. I have removed and modified some comments which were relevant to the local context of the conference, and I have removed some of the explanatory footnotes.

“You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?
Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again, after the money’s gone
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was . . . ”
Talking Heads, 1980

Good afternoon. Thank you for inviting me to the Cyberinfrastructure Days at Michigan State. Shelton Waggener’s fascinating keynote this morning hits on some of the same themes I have this afternoon: just as he suggested that IT needs to change its culture in higher education, I suggest that we need a change of practice in the liberal arts; and just as he has suggested that higher education IT should move toward iterative releases, perhaps most controversially, I will suggest that in the humanities especially we need to shift our expectations about the fixity of scholarship, and move to a similar model–continuously releasing our scholarship.

Based on the sessions at Cyberinfrastructure Days, I have been struck by how many of the questions and concerns of scientists match those of humanists. Fred Dyer’s presentation on computational biology emphasized the lack of adequate training for current students in the computational, statistical, and mathematical techniques that will be absolutely necessary for future research. We face a similar problem in the humanities. Dyer also discussed the vast increase in the number and size of digital images for research in the biological sciences, a problem that humanities scholars now face as well. Imaging, he noted, “freezes the phenotype,” and the processing, analyzing, and archiving of digital imaging has presented new challenges and opportunities. While humanities scholars use images differently, we have a similar problem of scale–hundreds of thousands, even millions, of newspaper page images, for example, capture a complex mixture of temporal and locational information, yet we have few ways of freely accessing and analyzing these images. I think this conference has been extremely helpful in exposing many of these commonly shared issues. It’s time for the liberal arts disciplines to come together on common solutions.
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September 10, 2013

My Home, the House of the Dead

This essay appeared in The New York Times Sunday Review, September 8, 2013: “My Home, the House of the Dead.” I am working on another essay about the Confiscation Act and how Clarens and other properties of Fort Williams were sold by the U.S. Treasury department at the end of the Civil War.