The course provides a basic introduction to the application of computation in the research and practice of the humanities, arts, and social sciences. The class offers students entry to work with archival theory and practice; textuality and electronic scholarly communication; data mining, analysis, and visualization; the spatial and temporal “turns;” game studies and digital arts. The course offers hands on experimentation with software platforms available to create scholarly and artistic production and theoretical approaches to digital presentation. Students will complete assignments requiring conceptual, aesthetic, and practical approaches to digital engagement with cultural materials. While no programming knowledge is required, students will design and create an online project using tools and platforms that are considered standard practice in the field, and reflect critically on the utility of digital techniques in their dialogue with the humanities.

The course will examine various contemporary and global issues of digital citizenship and new ethical challenges raised by digital technology. The course will raise questions regarding how digital technology has changed citizenship practices: Who has access to full citizenship, and why? What responsibilities are entailed in digital citizenship? Themes may include the nature and value of digital technology; the relations between digital technologies and knowledge-making/meaning-making; the value of information privacy; the role of digital media in society and human interactions; issues arising from the life-cycle of new digital tools and data repositories; and questions broadly related to questions of accessibility, representation, and sustainability as applied to digital technologies. Topics may also include research ethics, piracy and file sharing, hacktivism, copyright and fair use, end-user license agreements, alternative news media, and participatory culture. Students will take up both broad ethical issues and specific professional codes and policy in diverse domains.

In late 1994, the B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay, the airplane that dropped the first atomic bomb detonated in combat on Hiroshima, Japan, arrived at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. The museum’s staff faced important questions: Would they celebrate the Enola Gay as the weapon that ended the Pacific War? Would they exhibit it as a technological artifact that marked the dawn of nuclear warfare? Would they remind museum visitors that its potent cargo ended the lives of tens of thousands of people? These were difficult professional questions for public historians; they were deeply ethical questions too. Much of the past that public historians interpret is the source of great debate in the present. Since the way history is remembered shapes public policy, community identity, and collective understanding, the ethical stakes for public history are high. This course will examine notable controversies in American public history and develop students’ critical perspectives on them. Students will generate answers to the questions: What are the ethics of doing public history? What happens when public historians remember, but the community wants to forget? When stakeholders (e.g., historic site, community, historians, sponsors) collide, whose stories and whose interests prevail? Who decides? How are those decisions made? Who is allowed to tell history? To whom or to what are public historians responsible?

This course offers an analysis and interpretation of the main themes in the history of the United States over a broad period of time that extends to the modern era. We will look at how issues such as race, class, gender, and the environment have shaped American history, as well as debates over the multiple meanings of that history.

This upper-level course will focus on a specific theme or topic in history, chosen by the instructor, announced in the subtitle, and developed in the syllabus. The topics of this course will vary, but the course number will remain the same, so be sure not to repeat the same topic.

Computers and their networks have fundamentally altered the ways that history is both produced and consumed. Sources in digital formats simultaneously present opportunities and challenges that force us to rethink what is possible in history. Doing history in a digital age forces us to engage with the issues and opportunities raised by such as topics as digitization and preservation, text mining, interactive maps, new historic methodologies and narrative forms, computational programming, and digital storytelling. Digital tools, including blogs, wikis, video sharing sites, and many others, help bring history to new audiences in different ways. In this course, we will investigate the landscape of digital history and tackle the exciting task of understanding and creating history in the digital age.