Syllabus – Data Visualization in DH

Tuesday 8/27/19

Week One –

Introduction to course, expectations
WordPress setup
What is data visualization? What is it not?
Visit http://viz.wtf/ — Select two visualizations to discuss on Thursday
For Thursday, read Michael Friendly, History of DataViz

Thursday 8/29/19

What is Data Literacy? Agnes Jasinska-Data Services Specialist
Persuasive Cartography–the ethics of visualization
Examples of Data Viz from students
Discuss Friendly reading

Homework

Weekend Reading:
- Ch. 1 “Bring Back the Bodies” in Data Feminism
- DuBois, Intro and American Negro in Paris 1900
Practice blog post–
“Based on the readings you have done this week and the discussions on data that we have had in class, write a 250-300 blog post in which you argue for the importance of data literacy. Using two examples (with screenshots) from the websites viz.wtf and Persuasive Cartography discuss the uses and misuses of dataviz.
File under category “practice”. 250-300 words. Due Sunday evening at 11.59pm.

Week Two —

W.E.B. DuBois, *Visualizing Black America*

Tuesday 9/3/19

Discussion of DuBois and Data Feminism
- DuBois, “The Princess Steel” 1905?

Examination of Digital Humanities Sample Book

Student work in DH

Homework: Read Meirelles, Chapter 1, Hierarchical Knowledge Structures, and
Read Lima Chapter 1

Thursday 9/5/19

Discussion of Lima, Chapter 1 and Meirelles, Chapter 1
- A Typology of Data Viz: Examination of knowledge structures presented as trees; graphs; clouds
The ethics of dataviz–the question of human experience
- How to Not Visualize Like a Racist (Data Viz Designing Across Cultures)
Visualizing Slavery projects:
- Spread of US Slavery:
- Slave Voyages database
- Jessica Marie Johnson, “Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads”
- Hepworth & Church (2018). Racism in the Machine: Visualization Ethics in Digital Humanities Projects. Digital Humanities Quarterly.
- How to Write about Slavery. Gabrielle Foreman, et al. “Writing about Slavery/Teaching About Slavery: This Might Help” community-sourced document, accessed 8/19/19, 17.34.

Homework

Assignment 1: due Tuesday 8 am on the website
Read Lima, Lima Chapter 2 and Meirelles Chapter 2
Data for next week
- African Names Database (alternate XLS link)
- US Slavery 1860 (alternate XLS link)
Directions to install Tableau Public

Week Three — 9/10-9/12

Tuesday

Elijah Meeks, Visualizing Survey Results (Word Tree, IBM)

Learning Tableau–Ken Flerlage, Assistant Director of Data Analytics

Thursday

Tableau continued

Homework

Discussions and Reading for Tuesday:
- Tanya Clement, “Text, Analysis, Data Mining, and Visualizations in Literary Scholarship” Questions for discussion
- Safiya Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: Chapter 1, “A Society, Searching”

Week Four — 9/17-9/19

Tuesday

Platforms for Data Viz: the problem with intention

The origins of the algorithm–what happens when the data viz designer/platform comes from a quantitative background and not qualitative?

Discussion of Tanya Clement and Noble

Introduction to Voyant — text visualization

For Thursday

Read Faull, Text Analysis and Visualization

Thursday

Lab: Voyant 2.0; set up
Stefan Sinclair’s Workshop Instructions
- Google Drive –sample .txt files for analysis
- Data Dictionary
- Introduction to Slave Narratives–https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/intro.html
- Slave Narrative Structures
Creating raw text files

Homework

Assignment 2. Due Tuesday 8 am.

Read Meirelles, Chapter 6.

African Names Database–visualizing timeline and node-link diagram of sexgender/nation and filtered by age (under 18)
Rendered by Faull, 9/21/2019

Week 5 — 9/24–9/26

Tuesday

The Syntax of DataViz: How do we code and decode networks?
10 Pillars of Knowledge and the Knowledge Tree
Library Map – Dewey Decimal Classification
Networks. Discuss the readings
Discuss Lima
Mapping the Republic of Letters

Thursday

Homework

Read Drucker 2016
Explore these projects

Week Six — 10/1-10/3

Tuesday

Discussion of Drucker

Use pre-prepared structured data (Cushman Collection from M. Posner) or: African Names database or Trans-Atlantic Slave Voyages (Carrie’s steps for working with this dataset), or Entities extracted from Fulneck Memoirs to explore Palladio.

For Thursday, read Scott Weingart on networks and Meirelles, Chapter 3 “Temporal Schemes”

Thursday

Discuss and examine Meirelles, Chapter 3
- Timelines

Collect contextual research data for your project and create a timeline in:

Timeline.js-https://timeline.knightlab.com/

Helpful links:

https://researchbysubject.bucknell.edu/c.php?g=25582&p=156627

https://www.slavevoyages.org/assessment/estimates

http://www.ushistory.org/more/timeline.htm

https://www.nationalgeographic.org/interactive/slavery-united-states/ (in Timeline.js)

Timeline JS

Read Rosenberg/Grafton, Chapter 1 Cartographies of Time

Homework

Assignment 3: Visualize a set of literary/cultural relations
Due Thursday, October 10, at 10am.
Read Meirelles, Chapter 4 Spatial Studies

Visualizing points of the embarkation and disembarkation of enslaved peoples.
From The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade (16th – 19th Century)

Week Seven –10/8-10/10

Background on Torn Apart (read this before you look at the maps below)

Example projects: “Torn Apart”/Separados” and “Follow the Money”

Incidents in the Life of Harriet Jacobs – mapping against her life narrative

Holocaust Geographies Collaborative —- http://www.ushmm.org/learn/mapping-initiatives/geographies-of-the-holocaust/

Thursday (Faull away)

Discuss Chapter 4 in Meirelles
Examine concepts and Case Studies
Introduce ArcGIS Online

Homework over break, read Segel and Heer, “Narrative Visualization”

Week 9 Thursday 10/17

Discussion of Segel and Heer
New York Times Data Journalism example
Video of Edward Segel “How to tell stories with data”
The importance of narrative in Data Viz–see Edge Maps
Examples of Cultural Heritage and Digital Inquiry
ArcGIS Online StoryMaps Gallery
- Mining Families
- Justice Deferred: The Geography of Japanese American Imprisonment
For Tuesday, watch Manuel Lima – Visual Complexity: 10 years of mapping complex networks from VISUALIZED on Vimeo.

Week 10 10/22-10/24

Tuesday

Intro to ArcGIS Online

Guidelines

Thursday

Guest talk
Associate Professor of North American History and Civilization, Dept. of Anglophone Studies (Université Paris 8), Anne-Claire Faucquez will talk about her work in lower Manhattan to preserve and to honor the memory of the slaves buried there. She will focus on the visual design of the museum at what is now the African Burial Ground National Monument and which has three objectives: to show the history of slavery in New York as it was practised between the 17th and 19th centuries, to tell the story of the cemetery (its location, its use by slaves in the city, how it was forgotten and then rediscovered), and to highlight the battles that took place between New York’s African American community and the city’s authorities over the development of this memorialization project.