HIST 207A. Research Seminar in Digital History
Spring 2025
Prof. Juan Cobo, jcobo@ucsb.edu
Updated 2025-04-01
Classes: HSSB 4020, Wednesdays, 1-4 pm.
Office hours: GIRV 2313, Tuesdays, 11-1 pm; or by making an appointment.
Overview
This is a two-quarter research seminar that will introduce you to some of the basics of digital history — the use of digital media to pursue historical work, whether in research, analysis, or dissemination. Its purpose is to equip you with some of the skills, tools, and knowledge necessary to pursue work of this kind, serving as a practical complement to existing courses on historical methodology, historiography, and writing. We will be learning by experimenting, making, and doing.
The focus of this course is threefold. One is to develop better digital habits: learning to use technology more mindfully, sustainably, and ethically in the work we already do as historians every day. The second is learning and experimenting with new tools and methods that enable us to do new things, whether by empowering us to what we could not do before, or by doing what we already do more efficiently and freeing our time and attention to focus on something more. The third is to produce a digital project comparable in scope and depth to a journal article or dissertation chapter. For this we will work on dividing the task of researching, planning, and producing this project into smaller objectives, and develop routines to progress through them.
How this quarter will work
This course is divided into two parts:
-
Weeks 2-7 are devoted to finding our feet, learning new tools, and becoming familiar with the habits and patterns of work in the digital humanities. For this, we will complete a group project, building a digital archive from start to finish — from digitisation and description all the way through to digital publication of a public-facing exhibition. Along the way, you will also begin to think about digital projects in your field, and to imagine a project of your own.
-
Weeks 8-10 are devoted to building on these lessons to conceptualise a project of your own. During these weeks we will not meet (there may be one optional session on more advanced digital mapping) and the focus will be on one-to-one meetings with me and on troubleshooting, as you develop a prospectus for your proposed project, and a simple proof of concept or prototype. Those students who continue on to the second half of the course (207B) will expand this into a polished digital project later.
Over these ten weeks will also read a book and a few chapters and essays pertaining to digital history and digital humanities more broadly, and we will explore and assess a number of different public-facing digital projects. The purpose of this is partly to provide you with context and a theoretical framework, but mostly to allow us to learn by example. We will be unpicking these pieces and projects and thinking about how they are put together, how they deploy and analyse evidence, and what works well and what is less effective.
While I am certain that many of the tools and resources we will consider in this course will be useful and relevant to your projects, I also expect that some will not be. How useful a tool is depends entirely on whether it serves the specific needs of your project, and the purpose of this course is to provide you with a broad introduction to what is available so that you may determine whether something will make a contribution to your work or not. Equally, this process may also encourage you to rethink some of your questions or to take your research in new directions.
Schedule of classes, topics, activities, and readings
Readings and preparatory work for class meetings are listed by the sessions by which they are due. Formal assignments are lised with dates.
| Week | Date | Session focus | In-class activity | To do before class | Readings |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 4/2 | Introduction | Presentations and introductions | Questionnaire, 10-15 minute presentation on your work | |
| 2 | 4/9 | Foundations of research data management for historians | Research notes show-and-tell | Prepare show-and-tell | Crymble, Technology and the Historian |
| 3 | 4/16 | Sustainability | Introduction to Markdown and Obsidian | Ango, “File over app”; Baker, “Preserving your research data”; Simpkin, “Getting started with Markdown”; Tennen and Wythoff, “Sustainable authorship in Plain Text”. | |
| 4 | 4/23 | Archives | Introduction to metadata, archival description, digitization, and image management | Begin to prepare a research database of Markdown notes | Quiring, “Fingerprints of British Book History: A Feminist Labor History of EEBO” |
| 5 | 4/30 | Structured data | Spreadsheets and databases | Prepare a short presentation on a digital project in your field. | |
| 6 | 5/7 | Version control | Git and GitHub | Finish transferring your notes and transcriptions into MD | |
| 7 | 5/14 | Git, the command line, and sustainable web publishing | Git revisited, and introduction to Jekyll | Finish preparing the metadata for your postcard collection | If you use a Mac: Milligan and Baker, “Introduction to the Bash Command Line”; if you use a PC: Dawson, “Introduction to the Windows Command Line with PowerShell”; IN CLASS: Visconti, “Building a static website with Jekyll and GitHub Pages” |
| 8 | 5/21 | Sustainable web publishing (2) | Introduction to CollectionBuilder | Publish your personal website; begin to design your digital project prospectus and proof-of-concept | |
| 9 | 5/28 | Your choice of class (“Next steps in digital mapping”) or 1-on-1 meeting with professor | TBD | Publish your postcard exhibition; continue to design your digital project prospectus and proof-of-concept | |
| 10 | 6/4 | Presentations | Prepare to present your plan for a digital project |
Assignments and assessment
You don’t get a grade in this course until the end of 207B, but I’ll broadly be looking at the following four areas:
1. Weekly progress log and documentation
A central part of digital humanities work (and one which we might benefit from applying to our broader work as historians) is documenting what we do. This takes many forms, from putting comments in our code and writing detailed descriptions and instructions for our projects, to writing useful descriptions of our commits (what this means will be clearer later), to taking the time to narrate and document what we have accomplished (and, even more importantly, what we hasn’t worked out as we had hoped and why).
As a result, a recurring assignment in this course is going to be keeping a weekly log of what we have done, what we have learned, what has worked, and what has not. Share it with me (and your group, during the group project phase) in a Google Doc or some other system that makes sense (more on this later).
2. Presentations and participation
You are all experts in your own work and the fields in which it intervenes. A big part of this course is going to be drawing on that expertise and sharing some of that knowledge with the rest of us. Over the course of the next ten weeks we will show each other some of our own research, how we do it, digital projects in our fields, and archives that we work with.
Please come to every session and be prepared to participate and do the work. This means coming to our meetings having done the reading and any preparatory work. If something comes up please don’t suffer in silence. I’m here to help.
3. The group project
This should be a fun collaborative project. Make sure to split the work equitably. I’m excited to see what you do.
4. The prospectus and proof of concept
Don’t worry, this is a lot less complicated that it seems and I will give you plenty of information as we go along. Don’t stress.
Academic Integrity
All work produced for this course must be your own. Copying on a paper, helping another student cheat, or submitting plagiarized work will, under university rules, render the offending student subject to an F grade for the work in question or for the entire course, at the discretion of the instructor, and will also make the student liable for referral to the Office of Judicial Affairs.
According to the UCSB Student Conduct Code (p. 4),
Cheating includes, but is not limited to, looking at another student’s examination, referring to unauthorized notes during an exam, providing answers, having another person take an exam for you, etc. Representing the words, ideas, or concepts of another person without appropriate attribution is plagiarism. Whenever another person’s written work is utilized, whether it be a single phrase or longer, quotation marks must be used and sources cited. Paraphrasing another’s work, i.e., borrowing the ideas or concepts and putting them into one’s ‘own’ words, must also be acknowledged. Although a person’s state of mind and intention will be considered in determining the University response to an act of academic dishonesty, this in no way lessens the responsibility of the student.
For UCSB guidelines about Academic Integrity, see the Student Code of Conduct and the Office of Judicial Affairs website on Academic Integrity.
Accommodations
If you need, or have already established disability-related accommodations, have emergency medical (mental and physical health) information you wish to share with me, or need any other special arrangements, please let me know. You may email me, see me privately after class, or come to my office at your earliest convenience.
- You may contact the Disabled Students Program at 805-893-2668, DSP.Help@sa.ucsb.edu, or visit their website for additional information.
- Counseling and Psychological Services can be reached 24 hours a day at 805-893-4411. You can also visit their website for more information http://caps.sa.ucsb.edu/caps-home.