HIST 410
Topics in Digital History
Catalog Entry
HIST 410
Topics in Digital History
Three hours lecture: (3)
Detailed study of digital methods applied to topics or periods of history. A new course syllabus is available each time the course is offered. This course may be taken more than once for credit with a different topic.
Detailed Description of Content of Course
Students will collaboratively learn both the historical content necessary to interpret digital history projects and how to research, write, and communicate history using digital tools. Students will explore how historians use these tools to ask historical questions, investigate large collections of primary sources, turn written sources into historical data, create maps, build network illustrations, mine and analyze text, and visualize data.
Consideration is also given to methods for historical research in the digital age and ethical concerns regarding data, agency, and power inequities created in the collection and creation of historical data.
In this topics course, the instructor will select one theme within the field of Digital History to focus on in greater detail than allowed in HIST 210: The Digital Past, which serves as an overview and introduction to Digital History. For example, a course could focus on "historical data." This course would include the creation of historical data sets and then instruction in data manipulation, visualization, ordering and structure of data sets, and a variety of tools and programs used to work on historical data sets including Excel, Breve, and R. This will be combined with theoretical readings on data and historical research.
Detailed Description of Conduct of Course
Students can expect to learn both historical content and applicable skills in analyzing historical data. To this purpose, this class will be conducted in a hybrid seminar format which includes both lecture and discussion of the assigned readings each week. One class per week is normally reserved for in-class tutorials and workshops using digital tools.
This topics class will be an advanced study of digital methods, and thus will involve more hands-on collaborative work with digital programs and tools. This will include in-class work as well as take-home exercises and assignments.
Student Learning Outcomes
Assessment Measures
Knowledge and understanding of the material covered in this course will be measured using an array of assessment tools that may include, among other things, class attendance and participation, written examinations, formal writing assignments of various types, informal writing assignments, and classroom discussion responses.
Other Course Information
Bibliograhy of readings relevant to the course:
Jennifer Guiliano, A Primer for Teaching Digital History: Ten Design Principles (Duke University Press, 2022).
Andrej Zwitter, “Big Data Ethics,” Big Data & Society (July-September 2014): 1-6.
Ian Milligan, “Illusionary Order: Online Databases, Optical Character Recognition, and Canadian History, 1997-2010,” Canadian Historical Review 94, no. 4 (December 2013): 540-569.
Hadley Wickham, “Tidy Data”
Christof Schöch, “Big? Smart? Clean? Messy? Data in the Humanities” Journal of Digital Humanities (2013)
Sharon Leon, “The Peril and Promise of Historians as Data Creators: Perspective, Structure, and the Problem of Representation,” Journal of Slavery & Data Preservation (2023), 1-17.
Richard White, “What is Spatial History?”
Using Voyant, Text Analysis meets Historical Research
Amanda Gailey, “Some Big Problems with Big Data,” American Periodicals (2016), 22-24.
Anne Sarah Rubin, “Slave Streets, Free Streets Visualizing the Landscape of Early Baltimore,” Current Research in Digital History (2021)
Review and Approval
June 12, 2025
February 26, 2026