A version of the syllabus in pdf format is available here

HIST3814O|DIGH3814O Summer 2022 Department of History, Carleton University

This is a methods course about learning to use the huge variety of digitized historical resources available in the world, including some perhaps unconventional sources such as social media. You will learn some of the habits of doing born-digital work, including the doing of digital history as an outward facing public history.

You will read, explore, and discuss the class materials via various online tools (speaking of which, there is a tool called Hypothes.is embedded into this website- highlight a word on this page and see what happens. If you’d like to use hypothesis for your own reading online, to annotate what you find, here’s some guidance).

We do not use Carleton’s learning management system in this course. We work on the open web instead. Successful completion of this class involves doing a series of tutorials designed to push you out of your comfort zone, AND to be a collegial and generous scholar engaging with, and helping your peers to achieve success. What is challenging for one student will not necessarily be challenging for another, and I expect you to push yourself and pull others along as you go. Thus open and honest reporting of what works and what hasn’t worked, is a meaningful aspect of this course. You don’t need to be techy to succeed, but you do need to be willing to embrace when things go ‘wrong’.

In my experience, trying to complete this course in a compressed time frame is extremely difficult. Stay on task, complete things by the due dates. I prioritize responding to recent work.

This course aims to change how you think about, and think with, digitized resources and digital tools. I am not trying to turn you into a coder. Rather, I am trying to turn you into a historian who is thoughtful and reflective about the ways digital tools transform what it is we know about the past and how we come to know it.