Syllabus

In the year of your birth, the World Wide Web was an obscure technical work-in-progress buried in the depths of a vast research institute. Today, it permeates almost every aspect of our lives, including every stage in the production of knowledge. You have been living through a fundamental transformation of knowledge; and yet the modes of communication you’ve learned and explored at University (the essay, the article, the scholarly monograph) belong to the world that came before. There are good reasons for this. The standards of our discipline were formed carefully over hundreds of years, in a determined quest to uncover and communicate truths about the past to our colleagues and the wider world. Even so, historians need to explore the digital media of our present and future. The books and other writings of old will not disappear, but they will be supplemented and to some extent supplanted by the new media of the web and its successors. In this class, we will explore those new media as tools for the transmission of historical knowledge, culminating in an intensive group project in which you will build a historical website in close collaboration with a community partner. The community partnership is a key element of “Hacking History”, and a source of many of its pleasures and challenges.

Along the way, we will learn about the history of digital media, and their place in the development of the public sphere; and we will also study the history and politics of “engaged” and “public” scholarship. We will also spend a substantial amount of time acquiring the technical skills needed for a project like this, e.g., the fundamentals of HTML and Javascript, as well as just enough PHP to work with the WordPress Content Management System. No prior technical knowledge is required for this, but you will need to be willing to challenge yourself to learn a few tricks and principles of web programming. The payoff for that effort is huge: a chance to contribute in a meaningful way to historical discourse beyond the walls of the University, and to explore the frontiers of historical communication in the process.

In 2017-17, we have a very small class size, so we will likely have only one class project; we’ll work together as a class to find something that interests everyone. For the present, I have structured the middle portion of the first semester around a tentative topic – the history of water in Toronto.

The class has 4 kinds of assignments:

• 16 Blog Postings (6 in semester 1, 12 in semester 2, 20%)
• 5 “Short Technical Assignments” (STA’s, first semester, 15%)
• One Written Paper (7-9 pp, Jan 10, 10%)
• The Final Project (website, ongoing but due April 4, 45%)

with the balance of 10% for on- and off-line participation, which includes comments on other students’ blog posts, contributions to online resources, and discussion.

Blog Postings are thoughtful pieces, 400 words or so in length, posted to the course blog by noon the day before class meets (so, noon each Monday). You will be expected to read your colleagues’ postings and respond to them, both online (using the blog’s comment function) and in class. In the first semester, these postings will primarily be responses to the weekly readings, and are required every two weeks. In the second semester, they will instead generally take the form of weekly (not bi-weekly) progress reports in which you discuss your final projects and your interactions with partnering organizations, or of short written pieces from your project site (see below). See the assignment page for more details.

Short Technical Assignments (STA’s) are designed to give you the technical skills you will need for your website development work in the second semester. Approximately every 2 weeks in the first semester, you will complete a short on or off-line assignment for a pass-fail grade. The lab assignments will cover basic web skills and other technical topics, which will always have been covered in the third ’lab’ hour of class.

The Paper is due shortly after the beginning of the second semester. Approximately 7-9 pages long, its format is that of a standard course paper: a well-researched thesis, supported by evidence garnered from primary and secondary sources. Students are expected to write on topics related to their Final Projects (see below).

The Final Project is a major collaborative effort to build a historical website in service to an organization outside the University. In previous years, students have worked in groups of 3-4, collaboratively building a substantive site which balances scholarly merit with the interests of the sponsoring organization and accessibility to the general public. The plan for this year is in flux and may depend on class size, but I tentatively foresee a single class project in collaboration with a new initiative in the Black Creek region of Toronto (which includes Pioneer Village).

See the Project Guidelines for more detailed discussion & marking breakdown, though that document does not yet reflect this year’s direction..

• Cohen & Rosenzweig, Digital History (http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/)
• D. Brown, Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning (http://communicatingdesign.com/)

A sizable collection of links is also stored in a Zotero database, having been merged with the course bibliography.

• Designing digital Projects
• Immersive History (games & Simulations)
• Refining your project goals
• Social Media in a community website (Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, etc)
• Data Capture and Metadata
• How Databases Work
• The Digital Divide: Design Implications
• Copyright Issues
• Accessibility
• WordPress Content Types
• New HTML5 tags (canvas, audio/video, microformats)
• Video on the Web: HTML5 & dynamic events
• Semantic Web Technologies
• Audio Post-Processing
• Website look and Feel