HIST 207B Syllabus

HIST 207B. Research Seminar in Digital History

Fall 2025

Prof. Juan Cobo, jcobo@ucsb.edu

Updated 2025-09-30

Classes: HSSB 4041, Tuesdays, 10 am - 12:50 pm.

Office hours: Phelps 3212, Mondays, 10 am -12 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

Last quarter’s focus was on acquiring skills, experimenting with new methods, and imagining your own digital projects. This quarter will be devoted to bringing these visions into reality.

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.

Assignments and assessment

Your grade at the end of this course will be a reflection of the work you put into your project this quarter and the last, and your participation in the group project last quarter. While the end result will be important, remember I am more interested in process — and the lessons learned along the way — than in outcomes. 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. Your final project

You set the expectations, timeline, and deliverables (in consultation with me), and we all help hold each other accountable. I’m excited to see what you do.

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.