Recently a student approached me with extensive feedback on my course Doing Digital History of last year. The short summary was that he liked me as a teacher, that he liked the structure of the course, but that he disagreed with the learning objectives of the course. We eventually had a discussion about what teaching digital humanities (DH) should be about, and the up- and downsides of different approaches. In the end, his disagreements went down to three assumptions I made that lie at the core of my course. As many universities are developing courses in digital history or digital humanities, I thought it would be interesting to lay out my assumptions and his objections as a student. If you have any feedback on my assumptions, please put them in the comments!
Teaching
A Republic of Emails: What are the contents?
In a previous blogpost, I introduced the project A Republic of Emails, where we created a dataset of the 30k Hillary Clinton Emails by scraping Wikileaks. Now that we have the data, we can start exploring with what I like to call the W-questions: What is the collection about? Where do described events take place? When did these events occur? Who are the actors involved? In this second blogpost, we will look at what the emails from the Hillary Clinton corpus are about. I will describe how we prepared the data to analyse a) the raw text, b) normalised text, and c) entities in the text (named entity recognition). Finally, we will look at a small subset of the emails using Voyant Tools. For all the steps I will point to the respective scripts on our GitHub so you can reproduce the project.
Continue reading “A Republic of Emails: What are the contents?”
Introducing: A Republic of Emails
This year I will teach for the second time the Doing Digital History course for the History master at the University of Luxembourg. Just like last year, students will ask several W-questions. What is the collection about? Where do described events take place? When did these events occur? Who are the actors involved? In contrast with last year, where we had different collections per week, this year students will work with a single collection to experiment with throughout the course. In a series of blogposts I will describe the collection that the students will be exploring and the methods/tools that will be used to conduct close and distant reading. If you have feedback to further improve our ideas, please comment. If you wish to reproduce the project for your own courses, the blogposts should allow just that. As a reference to the historical Republic of Letters, I like to call this project A Republic of Emails.