Syllabus – Data Visualization in the Humanities

Week One – 1/16-1/18

Tuesday

Introduction to course, expectations
WordPress setup
What is data visualization? What is it not?
Discuss tufte graphical integrity
Visit http://viz.wtf/ — Select two visualizations to discuss on Thursday
For Thursday, read Elijah Meeks, Digital Humanities as Thunderdome

Thursday

What is Data Viz for/in Digital Humanities?
Examples of Data Viz from students and Faull (moravianlives.org and readysetfitapp.org)
Discuss Meeks

Homework

Weekend Reading: Stefan Sinclair et al, Information Visualization for Humanities Scholars
Read Faull, Text Analysis and Visualization
Practice blog post–quick write up of two examples of bad data viz and two screenshots. File under category “practice”

Week Two — 1/23-1/25

Tuesday

Discussion of Reading: Sinclair
Examination of Digital Humanities Sample Book
Student work in DH
Digital Scholarship Summer Research Fellow info
Read Meirelles, Chapter 1, Hierarchical Knowledge Structures
optional, Lima Chapter 1

Thursday

Discussion of Lima, Chapter 1 and Meirelles, Chapter 1
The ethics of dataviz–the question of human experience
Holocaust Geographies Collaborative—-when mapping becomes more than spatial.
- http://www.ushmm.org/learn/mapping-initiatives/geographies-of-the-holocaust/
The aesthetics of dataviz-Windmap—-http://hint.fm/wind/
A Typology of Data Viz: Examination of knowledge structures presented as trees; graphs; clouds

Homework

Assignment 1: due Tuesday 8am on the website
Read Lima, Lima Chapter 2 and Meirelles Chapter 2

Week Three — 1/30-2/1

Tuesday

Networks. Discuss the readings
Introduction to Voyant–text visualization
What do networks in text mean?

For Thursday, read Meirelles, Chapter 6.

Thursday

Lab: Voyant 2.0; set up
(You can use the online version or create your own more stable instance on your computer)
## Voyant Server ##Voyant Server is a web application launcher for Voyant Tools – it makes it easy to run a stand-alone instance of Voyant Tools on your local machine, which has several potential advantages (performance, security, privacy, reliability, etc.) compared to the [hosted version](http://voyant-tools.org).## Installation ##See the [latest release](https://github.com/sgsinclair/VoyantServer/releases/latest) and download the VoyantServer zip file. Unzip the file (be sure to actually extract the contents into a real directory) and double-click on the VoyantServer.jar file (on Macs you may need to Ctrl-click on the VoyantServer.jar, select open and confirm the opening – this is because of security precautions in OS X).Once you open VoyantServer.jar a controller application will appear (that allows you stop stop the server, see error messages, change settings, etc.) and a new browser will also appear with Voyant Tools. That’s it!## License ##
Voyant Server is released under the same license as JettyDesktop, the GNU General Public License v3.0 (see license-GPL3.txt in this directory).
- (Stefan Sinclair’s Workshop Instructions)
- Google Drive –sample .txt files for analysis
Voyant Lab, cont.
Creating raw text files
Metadata/data/interpretation

Homework

Discussions and Reading for Tuesday:
- Tanya Clement, “Text, Analysis, Data Mining, and Visualizations in Literary Scholarship”
Over the weekend, work on preparing your corpus and start reading through the Instructions for Jigsaw. Download the software, if you can.

Week Four — 2/6-2/8

Tuesday

Platforms for Data Viz: the problem with intention
- Discussion of Tanya Clement

The origins of the algorithm–what happens when the data viz designer comes from a quantitative background and not qualitative? (security, business, science, statistics, geo-physical)

Thursday

Jigsaw lab
Lab: learning Jigsaw

Homework

Assignment 2. Due Tuesday 8am.

Week 5 — 2/13-2/15

Tuesday

The Syntax of DataViz: How do we code and decode networks?
Discuss Lima
Mapping the Republic of Letters

Thursday

Homework

Read Drucker 2016
Explore these projects

Week Six — 2/20/-2/22

Tuesday

Palladio visualization of relationship network between place of baptism and name of baptized Indians (from archival data)
Discussion of Drucker
Use pre-prepared structured data (Cushman Collection from M. Posner) or your own data to explore Palladio.
- Import your tabular data to Palladio. Check to see what the corrections to your data are in the “data” tab.
- Go to “graph” view and visualize the relationship between two dimensions of your data. Download a screenshot when you are ready.
- Add a “facet” to your visualization. This feature allows you to “drill down” into the data and produce multiple graphs based on changing facets. Download multiple screenshots of your different graphs.
- Add a “timespan” to your graph. How does the graph change as the timespan changes? Download screenshots.
For Thursday, read Scott Weingart on networks

Thursday

Compare with Google Fusion Tables

Homework

Assignment 3: Visualize a set of literary/cultural relations
For Tuesday, read Meirelles, Chapter 3 “Temporal Schemes”

Week Seven –2/27-3/1

Tuesday

Discuss and examine Meirelles, Chapter 3
Timeline JS and Timemapper
Read Rosenberg/Grafton, Chapter 1 Cartographies of Time

Thursday

Gallery visit

Homework

Read Meirelles, Chapter 4 Spatial Studies

Week 8 3/6-3/8

Tuesday

Student presentations of examples of time schemas in projects. Choose an example from either Meirelles or Grafton/Rosenberg of a visualization of a time schema. Then compare this to your own timeline creation with your data.

Thursday