A colleague of mine (Jeremy Boggs) was scheduled to teach this week long seminar course at Arizona State University. Unfortunately, he had a death in the family and was not able to go. He asked, and ASU consented, to have me teach in his place. I had three days to prepare, so I just used Jeremy’s schedule and material. Below is that schedule and readings, taken from Jeremy’s site. For the end projects, the students were broken into three groups and worked on presenting a web page with material that many of them had worked on from a previous course. The material was still under development, so the awesome WordPress sites they made are not available to the public. I have posted some thoughts about the content as well as the course.
Day 1: Pasts and Futures of Digital Publishing
Discussion
Broad discussion of current issues facing digital publishing. Discuss student project ideas in relation to current issues.
- Ayers, “Pasts and Futures of Digital History”
- Cohen, Open Access Publishing and Scholarly Values
- Articles from Reimagining the University Press issue of Journal of Electronic Publishing.
- Spiro, “20/30 Vision: Scenarios for the Humanities in 2030”
- “Removable Type”, in Online Humanities Scholarship: The Shape of Things to Come.
Practicum
Introduction to HTML, CSS, and basic design/project management – Participants will learn basic syntax and use of HyperText Markup Language (HTML) for structuring documents, and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for presentation on the web.
Day 2: Scholarship in the Digital Age
Discussion
Discuss issues related to digital scholarship, including format, scope, peer review, and access.
- Ayers and Thomas, “The Difference Slavery Made.”
- Thomas, “Writing A Digital History Journal Article from Scratch: An Account.”
- “Making it Count,” Digital Campus, episode 29.
- Fitzpatrick, Planned Obsolescence
- “The Idols of Scholarly Publishing,”, Online Humanities Scholarship: The Shape of Things to Come.
Practicum
Introduction to WordPress – Participants will learn to configure and install WordPress, and use the administrative interface for blogging, creating pages, managing various types of media, changing themes, installing plugins, and managing site-wide settings.
Project Organization – Participants will begin organizing and implementing their projects in WordPress. 5-10 minute pesentation of project ideas.
Day 3: Crowdsouring, Collaboration, and Community
Discussion
Discuss issues related to collaborative authoring and creation in digital publishing, community-building, authorship/ownership, and participation.
- Rosenzweig, “Can History Be Open Source?”
- Spiro, “Collaborative Authorship in the Humanities”
- Spiro, “Examples of Collaborative Digital Humanities Projects”
- Hacking the Academy
- Digital Humanities Now
- Scripto
Practicum
WordPress Plugins and Themes – Participants will learn to find and install WordPress plugins and themes. In particular, we’ll cover plugins particularly useful to digital publishing.
Day 4: “Done”
Discussion
Are digital publishing projects ever “done”? We’ll discuss issues faced with finishing digital projects, including sustainability and maintenance.
- “Sustainability: The Elephant in the Room,” in Online Humanities Scholarship: The Shape of Things to Come.
- Articles from “Special Cluster: Done” in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Spring 2009
Practicum
Status reports on projects. Participants work on projects.
Day 5: Open Lab, project presentations
Open Lab, work on student projects. Tie up loose ends. Open discussion.
Project Presentations; Discussion, “Where to go from here?”