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Elena Razlogova Introduction to History and New Media Sample Syllabus Note: This syllabus is modeled upon Roy Rosenzweig's syllabus "Clio Wired: An Introduction to History and New Media" Description In the past decade, new digital media and technologies have begun to transform the discipline of history. This course offers an introduction to the changes that these new media and technologies are bringing to how we research, write, present, and teach the past. Students will examine theoretical literature on hypertext and new media and study closely the state of historical work--by scholars, teachers, archivists, museum curators, and popular historians--on the World Wide Web. These critical and theoretical readings will provide the basis for the hands-on section of the course in which students will develop proposals for an online history project. Requirements and Grades There are four main requirements for this course: 1. Active Participation in discussions, both online and in class. 2. A Web Journal in which you will record your reactions to readings and carry out other assignments. 3. A Web Review Essay, in which you will access the coverage of a particular historical topic in digital forms. 4. A Digital History Project Proposal: You will make a proposal for a digital history project and develop a home page for it. These major requirements will make up your final grade with the different items roughly weighed as follows: participation (15%); web journal (20%); review essay (30%); project proposal (35%). There will be an online component to class participation. This component is meant to extend discussion beyond our meeting times, to encourage debates on your projects, and to define this seminar as a workshop and a group experience. Everyone is strongly encouraged to post reflections on the class discussions, readings, and projects to our class email list as well as to actively maintain their web journal. As a general guideline, you should initiate online discussion at least twice and respond to topics raised by others at least twice. Readings Janet Horowitz Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (New York: Free Press, 1997). Robin Williams and John Tollett, The Non-Designer's Web Book: An Easy Guide to Creating, Designing, and Posting Your Own Web Site , 2nd ed. (Berkeley, Calif.: Peachpit Press, 2000). Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World (New York: Random House, 2001). Additional reading will be available online and linked from the online syllabus, but a few items will be provided in xerox. Software Dreamweaver MX 2004 Photoshop Elements Internet file transfer program (free, programs include WS-FTP, Secure Shell, Fetch, or Fugu) Syllabus Week 1: Introduction, Requirements, Themes Week 2: Introduction to Dreamweaver and FTP Meet in the Computer Lab. Prepare: Bring your password to your web hosting account, Dreamweaver MX 2004, a free Internet file transfer program (WS-FTP, Secure Shell, Fetch, or Fugu) Read: Williams and Tollett, chapters 1-4. Reference: Dreamweaver Tutorial: http://www.macromedia.com/support/dreamweaver/tutorial_index.html Intro to HTML: http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/96/53/index0a.html?tw=authoring HTML Teaching Tool: http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/teachingtool/index.html HTML Cheatsheet: http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/reference/html_cheatsheet/index.html Derek M. Powazek, The Basic, Basic Table: http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/96/47/index3a.html?tw=authoring Mulder Stylesheets Tutorial: http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/authoring/stylesheets/tutorials/tutorial1.html Week 3: Web Site Design and Infrastructure Read: Williams and Tollett, chapters 5-15. Dan Cohen, draft chapters for Making Online History (these
are best read online because of the hyperlinks): Paula Petrik, "Top Ten Mistakes in Academic Web Design," History Computer Review (May 2000) http://chnm.gmu.edu/assets/historyessays/topten.html Michael O'Malley, "Building Effective Course Sites: Some Thoughts on Design for Academic Work," Inventio (Spring 2000) http://chnm.gmu.edu/assets/historyessays/building.html Jacob Nielsen, Alertboxes: Larry Gales, "Web Page Design Inspired by Edward Tufte" http://staff.washington.edu/larryg/Classes/Rinflux/zz-influx.html Write and Post on your website: Links to two history websites, one that you regard as well designed or structured and one you regard as poorly designed or structured. Write at least one paragraph on why you have chosen them. Week 4: Varieties of Digital History Read: Edward A. Ayers, "The Pasts and Futures of Digital History" (1999) http://www.iath.virginia.edu/vcdh/PastsFutures.html Vernon Takeshita, "Tangled Webs: The Limits of Historical Analysis on the Internet" http://www.dartmouth.edu/~history/newsletter/spring01/web.html Phil Agre, "Designing Genres for New Media: Social, Economic, and Political Contexts" http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/genre.html Visit and Evaluate: (try to look at everything; if not possible, spend at least an hour on each site) The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War http://valley.vcdh.virginia.edu George Catlin and His Indian Gallery (virtual exhibit and Catlin Classroom) http://americanart.si.edu/collections/exhibits/catlin/index.html Brainerd, Kansas: Time, Place, and Memory on the Web http://www.rootinaround.com/brainerd/ Do History http://www.dohistory.org Write and Post: An evaluation (500 words) of one of these four sites, using the Journal of American History evaluation guidelines at http://chnm.gmu.edu/jah and, where relevant, drawing on some of the week's reading. Note especially the questions in the key areas of content, form, and audience/use. Write and Post: Proposal for Web Review essay. Week 5: Historical Narrative and Digital Culture Read: Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck George Landow, "Hypertextual Derrida, Poststructural Nelson?"; "The Definition of Hypertext and Its History as a Concept;" and "Predictions" in Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology , amplified and updated version of Chapter One (1996) http://www.scholars.nus.edu.sg/landow/cpace/ht/jhup/contents.html William Cronon, "A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative," Journal of American History 78 (March 1992): 1347-76. Lev Manovich, "What Is New Media" and "The Forms," in The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001). David Staley, Computers, Visualization, and History , introduction and chapter 4. Write and Post: Journal Entry on your reactions to the reading. Week 6: Web Review Presentations Write, Post, Present: Web Review Essay (Note: presentations should be five minutes long with five minutes for discussion) Week 7: Photoshop for Historians Prepare: Bring Photoshop Elements Complete exercise on editing engravings by Paula Petrik http://www.archiva.net/engravings/index.html Week 8: The Possibilities of Digital Scholarship Read: "Forum on Hypertext Scholarship: AQ as Web-Zine: Responses to AQ's Experimental Online Issue,"American Quarterly (June 1999) available online through Project Muse Jerome McGann, with Lisa Samuels, "Deformance and Interpretation," in Radiant Textuality: Literature After the World Wide Web http://www.iath.virginia.edu/~jjm2f/deform.html Choose and closely read two examples of digital scholarship from this list (we'll chose examples a week in advance so different people cover all examples): Will Thomas and Edward Ayers, "The Difference Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities" http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/xml_docs/ahr/article.html Louise Krasniewicz and Michael Blitz, "Dreaming Arnold Schwarzenegger" Thomas Thurston, "Hearsay of the Sun: Photography, Identity, and the Law of Evidence in Nineteenth-Century American Courts" David Westbrook, "From Hogan's Alley to Coconino County: Three Narratives of the Early Comic Strip" (all three at http://chnm.gmu.edu/aq/) Lynn Hunt, and Jack Censer, "Imaging the French Revolution" http://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/imaging/home.html Philip J. Ethington, "Los Angeles and the Problem of Urban Historical Knowledge," American Historical Review (December 2000) http://cwis.usc.edu/dept/LAS/history/historylab/LAPUHK/index.html Write and Post: a web journal entry on whether the two examples you've examined analyze and convey history in new ways made possible by digital media Write and Post: Proposal for your final Digital Project Proposal Week 9: Individual Meetings to Discuss Projects No regular class; individual meetings to discuss project. Week 10: New Media Classroom Read: T. Mills Kelly, "For Better or Worse? The Marriage of Web and the History Classroom," Journal of the American Association for History and Computing 3.2 (August 2000) http://mcel.pacificu.edu/JAHC/JAHCIII2/ARTICLES/kelly/kelly.html Randy Bass and Roy Rosenzweig, "Rewiring the History and Social Studies Classroom: Needs, Frameworks, Dangers, and Proposals," Journal of Education (2000) http://chnm.gmu.edu/assets/historyessays/rewiring.html Visit and Evaluate: Who Killed Willam Robinson? http://web.uvic.ca/history-robinson/ World History Sources http://chnm.gmu.edu/worldhistorysources/ Week 11: Popular History Online Read: Barbara Marie Stafford, Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images , chapters 4, 5, & 6 Steve Dietz, "Telling Stories: Procedural Authorship and Extracting Meaning from Museum Databases" http://www.archimuse.com/mw99/papers/dietz/dietz.html John Vergo, "'Less Clicking, More Watching': Results from the User-Centered Design of a Multi-Institutional Web Site for Art and Culture" (delivered at the MW 2001) http://www.archimuse.com/mw2001/papers/vergo/vergo.html Visit and Evaluate: Devices of Wonder: from the World in a Box to Images on a Screen http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/devices/choice.html HistoryWired: A Few of Our Favorite Things http://historywired.si.edu/index.html The History Channel http://www.historychannel.com National Geographic: Remembering Pearl Harbor http://plasma.nationalgeographic.com/pearlharbor/ Without Sanctuary: Photographs and Postcards of Lynching in America http://www.journale.com/withoutsanctuary/ Write and Post: Journal Entry on how these sites do or do not effectively use new media to convey the past to general audience in ways that reflect current scholarship and challenge its audience Week 12: Collecting and Discussing History Online Read: "Running an Online Historical Community," ECHO Practical Guide http://echo.gmu.edu/guide/4/ Barry Wellman and Milena Guila, "Virtual Communities as Communities: Net Surfers Don't Ride Alone," in Marc Smith and Peter Killock, eds. Communities in Cyberspace (1999). Pew Internet Project, "Online Communities: Networks That Nurture Long-Distance Relationships and Local Tie" (October 2001) http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/toc.asp?Report=47 Visit and Evaluate: ECHO Memory Bank http://echo.gmu.edu/memory/index.html H-Net http://www.h-net.msu.edu/lists/ Write and Post: Report on your visit and interactive experience on an online community. Week 13: Open Access and Public Domain Read: Lessig, The Future of Ideas Umbert Eco, "Authors and Authority" and the archived debate http://www.text-e.org/conf/index.cfm?switchLang=Eng&ConfText_ID=11 Robert Darnton, "The New Age of the Book," New York Review of Books (18 March 2000) http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWarchdisplay.cgi?19990318005F Roy Rosenzweig, "Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era," American Historical Review (June 2003) http://chnm.gmu.edu/assets/historyessays/scarcity.html Visit and Evaluate: The Public Knowledge Project http://pkp.ubc.ca Creative Commons http://creativecommons.org/ Week 14: Presentations of Final Projects Student project proposal presentations. Week 15: Presentations of Final Projects Project presentations continued. Final Projects Due |