LING 505D:
ENGL 620:
POLI 803:
RESEARCH METHODS IN DIGITAL HUMANITIES
COMPUTER METHODS FOR HUMANISTIC PROBLEMS
RESEARCH METHODS IN POLITICAL SCIENCE
SUMMER II 2014 (SESSION J)
Open for USC faculty and for Program of Study credit to graduate students in:
ANTH, ENGL, GEOG, LING, POLI
Class time/place:
July 7 to August 6, 2014
Monday – Thursday
10:30 a.m. – 12:45 p.m.
Gambrell 150
Instructor:
E-mail:
Office:
Office Phone:
Stanley Dubinsky
dubinsky@sc.edu
HUO 217
777-2208
Visiting scholar:
E-mail:
Office hours:
William D. Davies
william-davies@uiowa.edu
Tuesday/Thursday 1 – 3 p.m.
Description:
Research programs of many scholars in the humanities and social sciences involve documentation of
culture. This includes folk lore, religion, history, music, language, etc. Important information often resides
in public and personal narratives and in musical or theatrical performance. Preserving and providing open
access to scholars and interest individuals is a critical aspect of documentation. In the current environment,
Internet access to digital material is a primary component of this work. This research methods course for
graduate students and faculty is built around the contributions of Provost’s Visiting Scholar, Professor
William D. Davies (University of Iowa), who will share his experience creating the Madurese Digital Folk
Tale Archive http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/madurese/.
Outcomes:
Students will learn how to…
 Evaluate the research potential of an idea, and how to turn that into a concrete project.
 Find and manage resources (both persons and information) for their project.
 Find and use the right tools (e.g. software, etc.) for their digital project.
 Anticipate and deal with potential logistic, conceptual, and technical problems that may present
challenges to their research objectives.
 Frame a hypothetical or actual project idea for grant applications.
 Look at grant opportunities and be able to discern which ones are appropriate for their own
research. Discover and acquire alternative resources for project development as well aside from
large grants.
Requirements/Grading (enrollment restricted to graduate students/postdocs/faculty):
Discussion questions and comments (participation)
20%
Critique of materials presented
20%
Project synopsis (including justifications and articulation of data domain)
20%
Sample data collection, hypothetical markup, and justifications
20%
A multi-year research plan for development of a project
(inclusive of data collection and acquisition of research skills)
20%
Selected sources and readings:
a. Read relevant sections of the grammar book for the interplay of digital archiving and research
Davies, William D. 2010. A Grammar of Madurese. Berlin. De Gruyter Mouton.
Chapter 3: Reduplication
Chapter 6: Clause types
Chapter 10: Modifications to clause structure
Chapter 15: Speech levels
Chapter 16: Texts
b. Examine and critique successful and unsuccessful grant applications
Examination of grant applications to Department of Education, NEH, private foundations (e.g.
Toyota Foundation), scholarly societies (e.g. American Philosophical Society), and the Fulbright
Program, as well as University of Iowa internal grant programs.
c. Look at and critique website, DVDs, print materials from project (early on)
Madurese Storyteller Videos: http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/madurese/ video and texts
DVDs: 15 Carèta ra’yat Madhurâ/15 Madurese folk tales/15 Cerita rakyat Madura. Volumes 1
& 2. video and texts
Sasra, Moh Hasan, William D. Davies, Surachman Dimyati & Adrian Pawitra. 2013. Carèta
Ra’yat Madhurâ. Jakarta: Dian Rakyat. Volumes 1-4.
d. Additional readings to be provided by faculty contributing presentations, and by the CDH.

A reading assignment will be given on the day before each class. And most topics will involve a
morning lecture and an afternoon hands-on activity. The following is illustrative:
Day 0:
Day 1:
HW: two articles on text/TEI
Morning TEI lecture
Afternoon Practice on TEI text
Grading scale (graduate):
A
B+
B
C+
C
D+
D
F
= 92.0-100.0
= 88.0-91.9
= 82.0-87.9
= 78.0-81.9
= 72.0-77.9
= 68.0-71.9
= 62.0-67.9
< 62
= excellent, extraordinary, exceptional, exemplary
= very good, admirable, praiseworthy
= good, acceptable, commendable
= adequate, passable (but not graduate level)
= marginal
= unsatisfactory
Schedule of Chapters and Topics
Date
4/29
Presenter(s)
Stanley Dubinsky, Colin
Wilder, CDH staff
Topic(s) and description(s)
Course preview
This two hour session during reading day of Spring semester will provide
prospective student and faculty participants with an overview of the
course (to be offered in Summer II), an overview of various sorts of
projects carried on by scholars affiliated with the CDH, and
dissemination of materials and sources that will help participants prepare
for the July course.
7/7
7/7
7/8
William Davies
http://clas.uiowa.edu/linguisti
cs/people/william-d-davies
Madurese Project overview
Jennifer Tyburczy
http://cswgs.rice.edu/tyburczy
/
Performance and preservation
William Davies
Project goals and data structure
The Madurese folk tale project and its linguistic and cultural significance
a. The content included in the project,
b. Background on the Madurese people and their culture,
c. The significance of the project linguistically and culturally.
Examples of the need for Digital Humanities scholarship:
 Endangered Languages and Language preservation
 Discussion of other reasons for digitization of linguistic data
 Extending the domain from language to other data classes
 The role of digital archiving in research and the role of research
in digital archiving
Why Digitize? What’s lost and what’s gained when adapting the “live” to
digital format? The perils and pleasures of preservation.
The role of project goals in determining project structure:
 What kinds of linguistic information can be preserved and shared
digitally
 The importance of building the right data structures, and using
the right categories, before digitization
 Extending the linguistic paradigm to other data classes.
 Hands on use of the website and DVDs, critiquing positives and
negatives
7/9
Wilder and CDH staff
Overview of data structures
An introduction to different classes of data structures, types of metadata
and mark-up languages, and ways of hosting different kinds of materials.
Class will include some hands-on experience, with some simple XML
and TEI.
7/10
Michael Gavin
http://artsandsciences.sc.edu/e
ngl/people/pages/gavin.html
Literature and digital humanities
7/14
Wilder and CDH staff
Use of TEI and XSLT in textual editing
Presentations showing diversity of use of TEI and XSLT as example of
current standard of digital textual editing projects
7/14
Wilder and CDH staff
Building a project website
Survey of ways to build a project website, from simple out of the box
options to using Drupal or writing your own HTML.
7/15
7/16
Joseph November
http://artsandsciences.sc.edu/h
ist/Faculty/novemberj.html
William Davies
History of computing
A brief survey of the history of information technology in the global
context.
Reading: Stephenson, Neal. 1999. In the beginning, there was the
command line. http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html
Conceiving and building your project I
Brainstorming about possible projects and development of ideas
7/17
Paul Reed
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/
paul-reed/10/5b9/a64
http://artsandsciences.sc.edu/li
ng/node/149
Other language and linguistics digital projects
Lauren Colomb
Working with COCA and COHA
7/21
John Knox
Topic Modeling Working
Group
Text analysis and topic modeling
7/22
Heidi Rae Cooley
http://artsandsciences.sc.edu/a
rt/directory/mart/cooley
Critical interactives for historical, curatorial, and image-based
applications
Paul Reed and Michael Montgomery’s Appalachian English project.
Ghosts of the Horseshoe: http://calliope.tcl.sc.edu/
Duncan Buell
https://www.cse.sc.edu/buell
7/23
Mark Cooper
http://artsandsciences.sc.edu/e
ngl/people/pages/cooper.html
Heather Heckman
http://library.sc.edu/mirc/peop
le.php
Greg Wilsbacher
http://guides.library.sc.edu/pr
ofile.php?uid=8930
Readings:
Murray. 2001. A cultural approach to interaction design
Bogost. 2004. Procedural rhetoric.
Moving image case studies
• Metadata for time-based, audiovisual media
• New archives in the digital realm
• Vicissitudes of digital surrogates for material media
• Tools for sequence analysis
Reading:
Zimmerman, Patricia. 2007. The home movie movement: Excavations,
artifacts, minings. In Karen I. Ishizuka & Patricia Zimmermann (Eds.),
Mining the home movie: Excavations in histories and memories, 1-15.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
7/24
Diansheng Guo
http://artsandsciences.sc.edu/
Lynn Shirley / Kevin
Remington
http://artsandsciences.sc.edu/g
eog/people/shirley.html
http://artsandsciences.sc.edu/g
eog/people/staff.html
geog/people/guo.html
Geographical Information Systems (GIS), spatial analysis, and
mapping
7/28
Kevin Brock
http://www.brockoleur.com/
Software and code studies
7/29
William Davies, Stanley
Dubinsky, Colin Wilder
Classic research project design
Presentation and comparison of software methods including ArcGIS, DH
Press, KML files, Neatline.
Interdisciplinary DH projects, even though part of the Humanities, are
often advertised as and evaluated more like science or social science
projects. It is therefore useful to present to humanists an overview of
social science research project conception and design. This will help
students to think flexibly both inside and outside of this box.
7/30
William Davies
Conceiving and building your project II
Students will at this point have chosen their topics, begun to plan and
specific possible data acquisition, methods of data management or
curation and analytic methods possibly to be employed. This will be a
second quasi-brainstorming session to trade ideas, critique and tweak the
developing project plans. NB it will be the second session of the day,
following [Classic research project design and should complement the
latter session nicely].
7/31
William Davies
Thinking about tasks, functions and roles on a Digital Humanities
project (the project team, even if it’s a team of one)
a. the process of putting together the project team
b. selecting team members or personnel to record and the subject matter
 What kinds of personnel are needed for what kinds of projects?
 Identifying the characteristics needed for subjects for particular
projects
 The roles of the researcher, subjects, and outside experts in
selecting subject matter?
8/4
William Davies and CDH
staff
Recording & preparing the data
Hardware and software
a. recording equipment, selecting recording venues, challenges of
recording
b. video editing software selection, demonstration and hands-on use
c. subtitling software demonstration and hands-on use




Positives/negatives: On-site data collection and recording vs. offsite/distance collection
Preparing for off-site collection, recording, preservation
What must be done on-site.
What can be done later.
Hardware/software in the USC context. Audio and video resources.
8/5
William Davies
Project funding
 Balancing the needs of distinct audiences: researchers,
communities who are the source of the data, the general public
 Matching the audience goals of the project to the distinct goals of
different funding agencies
 Articulating to readers of your proposal the benefits of using
digital/computational methods in a given project
 And other ways of thinking about money and resources, e.g. if
you have to buy something yourself because you cannot get
institutional support for your project, calculating how long it will
take to save up and pay for it. Or doing the labor yourself instead
of trying to get money to hire someone. Etc.
8/5
Davies, Dubinsky, Wilder and
a representative from the USC
Office of Research & Grant
Development (ORGD)
Grant management (SAM)
Large grants, small grants and periods of scholarly work
Exam day
Class presentations of project plans
8/6
In this session, a round table will present different perspectives on how
project funding can be pursued. . We will discuss building an arc of
project development from small to large, the ecosystem of humanities and
social science grants public and private, how to think about this issue
from both a faculty and a graduate student point of view, apparent trends
in funding and other relevant topics.