MALS and Digital Humanities GC students may attend these classes on a space-available basis: interested students must contact Prof. Arienne Dwyer to confirm space availability and scheduling: adwyer@gc.cuny.edu.

Course site: https://dhmethods13.commons.gc.cuny.edu/course/syllabus/

Course Description
This is a hands-on course, which is the second semester of a two course core sequence in Digital Humanities. Its practice generally entails four main stages: data capture, annotation, exploration and analysis, and dissemination. Workshops surveying the tools, methods, and standards entailed in these stages are a regular part of the weekly class. In addition to training in these skills, the course will explore the profound cultural changes that the practice of digital humanities instantiates and reflects. First, the tools and data we choose shape the research questions we ask. Second, the digital humanities generally aim to create community resources, going beyond the work of the individual. Students will be assessed on their applying this new approach to scholarship and information to a project of their choice. The course has no prerequisites, and welcomes students from all humanities, social-science, and allied disciplines.

11 February (Prof. Arienne Dwyer)

• Methods: Data capture
  • Issues: Born digital vs. analog; formats & conversion
  • Some data types
  • *Data cleaning (incl. *RegEx)
  • Metadata: keeping track of data

Readings: Digitization and metadata: http://toolingup.stanford.edu/?page_id=123
Deegan and Tanner, Conversion of primary sources (Ch 32 of http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/ )

Software: Make sure your laptop has a text editor (e.g. Notepad, TextEdit), and get familiar with it. Simple data cleaning: Dragging MS-word through TextEdit or Notepad: http://www2.le.ac.uk/webcentre/plone/build/other/cleaning
More powerful data cleaning: Text wrangler http://vis.stanford.edu/wrangler/