Course Schedule

This is the schedule of topics we will cover this semester.  The readings (as PDFs and as links to consult) are organized by week below and in the class Zotero Library.  The schedule of topics is:

WeekDayDateTopic
Wednesday1/29/2025No classes scheduled- Happy Lunar New Year!
Week 1Wednesday2/5/2025Introduction
Wednesday2/12/2025No class- Lincoln’s Birthday!
Week 2Wednesday2/19/2025What is/are Digital Humanities? What is/are Politics?
Week 3Wednesday2/26/2025DH Project Review Lightning Talk
Week 4AWednesday3/5/2025Race, Ethnicity, and Politics (US)
Week 4BThursday3/6/2025Gender & Sexuality Politics (Today is a Wednesday Schedule)
Week 5Wednesday3/12/2025Indigenous & Decolonial Politics
Week 6Wednesday3/19/2025US Politics
Week 7Wednesday3/26/2025Conflict, Atrocities, and What Comes After
Week 8Wednesday4/2/2025Politics, Borders, and People in Motion
Week 9Wednesday4/9/2025 Project Consultations
Wednesday4/16/2025No class- Spring Break!
Week 10Wednesday4/23/2025Human Rights
Week 11Wednesday4/30/2025Topic TBD by Class
Week 12Wednesday5/7/2025Topic TBD by Class
Week 13Wednesday5/14/2025Final Class: Show & Share Final Projects
Wednesday5/21/2025Final date to submit all work

The Politics of Change: Digital Humanities

Hepworth, K., & Church, C. (2019). Racism in the Machine: Visualization Ethics in Digital Humanities Projects. Digital Humanities Quarterly, 012(4).

Bluhm, W. T., Hermann, M. G., Murphy, W. F., Nelson, J. S., Pye, L. W., & Committee, A. N. L. (1985). Political Science and the Humanities: A Report of the American Political Science Association. PS, 18(2), 247–259.

Chow, Jennifer. Comparing the Humanities and Social Sciences in the Digital Age

Posner, M. (2016). What’s Next: The Radical, Unrealized Potential of Digital Humanities |. In Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016. University of Minnesota Press.

Dienstag, J. F. (2016). On Political Theory, the Humanities, and the Social Sciences. Perspectives on Politics, 14(4), 1083–1089.

Zaagsma, G. (2023). Digital History and the Politics of Digitization. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 38(2), 830–851.

Fiormonte, D. (2017). Digital Humanities and the Geopolitics of Knowledge. Digital Studies/Le Champ Numérique, 7(1), 5.

Greenspan, B. The Scandal of Digital Humanities. In Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019 (2019th ed.).

Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities. (2016, May 1). Los Angeles Review of Books.

Ramsay, S. (2023). The Politics of Tools. DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly, 17(2).

Rodriguez-Ortega, N. (2022). Digital Social Sciences and Digital Humanities of the South Materials for a Critical Discussion. In D. Fiormonte, S. Chaudhuri, & P. Ricuarte (Eds.), Global Debates in the Digital Humanities. University of Minnesota Press.

Shirazi, R. (2016, May 5). ROUND-UP: Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities (and Responses). Dh+lib.

Projects & Resources

Further Reading:

Liu, A., Droge, A., Kleinman, S., Thomas, L., Baciu, D. C., & Douglass, J. (2022). What Everyone Says: Public Perceptions of the Humanities in the Media. Daedalus, 151(3), 19–39.

Malazita, J. (2023). Critique is the Steam: Reorienting Critical Digital Humanities across Disciplines. Debates in the Digital Humanities.

  • Before class, submit your Project Comparison Paper to our Class Library
  • Present your Comparison Lightning Talk during class

Baeza Ventura, G., Cotera, M. E., García Merchant, L., Gauthereau, L., & Villarroel, C. (2023). A U.S. Latinx Digital Humanities Manifesto. In M. K. Gold & L. F. Klein (Eds.), Debates in the Digital Humanities 2023. University of Minnesota Press.

Yan-Gonzalez, Vivian. “Bridging Thought and Action: History, the Digital Humanities, and Building the Foundations of Asian/American Political Thought.” Theory & Event 27, no. 4 (October 2024): 616–40. https://doi.org/10.1353/tae.2024.a938811.

Frazier, N., Hyman, C., & Green, H. N. (2023). Black Is Not the Absence of Light: Restoring Black Visibility and Liberation to Digital Humanities. In M. K. Gold & L. F. Klein (Eds.), Debates in the Digital Humanities 2023. University of Minnesota Press.

Hicks-Alcaraz, M. (2022). Piloting the Counter-Memorias Digital Testimonio Project: Blackness in U.S. Latinx and Latin American Racial Politics. The International Journal of Information, Diversity, & Inclusion (IJIDI), 6(4), Article 4.

Ng, Reuben. “Anti-Asian Sentiments During the COVID-19 Pandemic Across 20 Countries: Analysis of a 12-Billion-Word News Media Database.” Journal of Medical Internet Research 23, no. 12 (2021): e28305–e28305.

Taylor, Toniesha L. Signifying Shade as We #RaceTogether Drinking Our #NewStarbucksDrink “White Privilege Americana Extra Whip” in Risam, R., & Baker Josephs, K. (Eds.). (2021). The Digital Black Atlantic. University of Minnesota Press.

Santana, N., Espinal, E., & Rodriguez, A. (2022). Transnational Dominican Activism: Documenting Grassroots Social Movements through ESENDOM. The International Journal of Information, Diversity, & Inclusion (IJIDI), 6(4), Article 4.

Wolock, Lia. “South Asian American Digital Archive.” Journal of American History 108, no. 1 (June 1, 2021): 120–24.

Projects & Resources

Further Reading

McMillan Cottom, Tressie. 2020. “Where Platform Capitalism and Racial Capitalism Meet: The Sociology of Race and Racism in the Digital Society.” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 6 (4): 441–49.

Caswell, Michelle. Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work. 1st ed. Routledge, 2021.

Bordalejo, B., & Risam, R. (Eds.). (2019). Intersectionality in Digital Humanities. Arc Humanities Press.

Gallon, K. (2016). Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities. In M. K. Gold & L. F. Klein (Eds.), Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016. University of Minnesota Press.

Goldberg, David Theo, and Patrik Svensson. “Toward a Transnational Asian/American Digital Humanities: A #transformDH Invitation.” In Between Humanities and the Digital. MIT Press, 2015.

Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. NYU Press.

Smucker, Janneken. Access and Empowerment: Rediscovering Moments in the Lives of African American Migrant Women in Risam, R., & Baker Josephs, K. (Eds.). (2021). The Digital Black Atlantic. University of Minnesota Press.

Facilitator’s Addition: Smith & Rustagi (2021). “Why Good Algorithms Go Sexist: Why and How to Advance AI Gender Equity” 

Barnett, F., Blas, Z., Cardenas, M., Gaboury, J., Johnson, J. M., & Rhee, M. (2016). QueerOS: A User’s Manual. In M. K. Gold & L. F. Klein (Eds.), Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016. University of Minnesota Press.

Bailey, Moya Z. “All the Digital Humanists Are White, All the Nerds Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave.” Journal of Digital Humanities 1, no. 1 (2011).

Chang, K. K. (2023). The Queer Gap in Cultural Analytics. In M. K. Gold & L. F. Klein (Eds.), Debates in the Digital Humanities 2023. University of Minnesota Press.

Gao, Jin, Julianne Nyhan, Oliver Duke-Williams, and Simon Mahony. “Gender Influences in Digital Humanities Co-Authorship Networks.” Journal of Documentation 78, no. 7 (December 19, 2022): 327–50.

made optional by prerogative of facilitator, but try to skim the introduction if you can: Jewett, B. (2022). Cosponsorship Networks in the U.S. Congress: Measuring the Success of Female Legislators

Nieves, Angel David. Digital Queer Witnessing Testimony, Contested Virtual Heritage, and the Apartheid Archive in Soweto, Johannesburg in Risam, R., & Baker Josephs, K. (Eds.). (2021). The Digital Black Atlantic. University of Minnesota Press.

Sutherland, T., Cifor, M., Cowan, Rault, & Garcia, P. (2023). The Feminist Data Manifest-NO: An Introduction and Four Reflections. In M. K. Gold & L. F. Klein (Eds.), Debates in the Digital Humanities 2023. University of Minnesota Press.

Projects & Resources

Further Reading

Bordalejo, B., & Risam, R. (Eds.). (2019). Intersectionality in Digital Humanities. Arc Humanities Press.

D’Ignazio, Catherine. Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action. The MIT Press, 2024.

Losh, E., & Wernimont, J. (Eds.). (2018). Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and Digital Humanities. University of Minnesota Press.

Cocq, Coppélie. 2022. “Revisiting the Digital Humanities through the Lens of Indigenous Studies—or How to Question the Cultural Blindness of Our Technologies and Practices.” Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 73 (2): 333–44.

Robert dhurwain McLellan. “OEGlobal24 Welcome to Country & Keynote: Reclaiming Data, Reclaiming Culture: Indigenous Self-Determination in Digital Research Infrastructure.” November 12, 2024.

Aiyegbusi, Babalola Titilola. “Decolonizing Digital Humanities: Africa in Perspective.” In ” Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and the Digital Humanities, edited by Elizabeth Losh and Jacqueline Wernimont.

Lee Brown, M., Whaanga, H., & Lewis, J. E. (2023). Relation-Oriented AI: Why Indigenous Protocols Matter for the Digital Humanities. In M. K. Gold & L. F. Klein (Eds.), Debates in the Digital Humanities 2023. University of Minnesota Press.

Leterme, C. (2022). Africa’s Digitalization From the Ecological Dilemma to the Decolonization of the Imaginary. In D. Fiormonte, S. Chaudhuri, & P. Ricuarte (Eds.), Global Debates in the Digital Humanities. University of Minnesota Press.

Roy, D., & Menon, N. (2022). No “Making,” Not Now: Decolonizing Digital Humanities in South Asia. In D. Fiormonte, S. Chaudhuri, & P. Ricuarte (Eds.), Global Debates in the Digital Humanities. University of Minnesota Press.

Walter, M., & Suina, M. (2019). Indigenous data, indigenous methodologies and indigenous data sovereignty. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 22(3), 233–243.

Bryan, Joe. “Where Would We Be without Them? Knowledge, Space and Power in Indigenous Politics.” Futures 41, no. 1 (February 2009): 24–32.

Projects & Resources

Further Reading

Leibensperger, K. (2021). Decolonization Within Latinx Digital Humanities [M.A., Kutztown University of Pennsylvania].

Gurumurthy, A., & Bharthur, D. (2022). Messy Empowerment: Mapping Digital Encounters in the Margins. In D. Fiormonte, S. Chaudhuri, & P. Ricuarte (Eds.), Global Debates in the Digital Humanities. University of Minnesota Press. Dhwanigalu – Learning Dialogues with Adolescent Girls at the Margins

Huizar-Hernandez, A., Corsa, A., García, A. E., Rivero, C. L., & Ávila, A. (2022). Contingent Colonialities: Mapping La relación de Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. The International Journal of Information, Diversity, & Inclusion (IJIDI), 6(4), Article 4.

Pascoe, B. (2020). Mapping Meaning: Learnings from indigenous mapping technology for Australia’s digital humanities mapping infrastructure. DH2020.

Clark, M. D. (2019). White folks’ work: Digital allyship praxis in the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Social Movement Studies, 18(5), 519–534.

Freelon, D., McIlwain, C., & Clark, M. (2018). Quantifying the power and consequences of social media protest. New Media & Society, 20(3), 990–1011.

Freelon, D., McIlwain, C. D., & Clark, M. (2016). Beyond the Hashtags: #Ferguson, #Blacklivesmatter, and the Online Struggle for Offline Justice (SSRN Scholarly Paper 2747066).

Gold, M. K., Klein, L. F., Earheart, A. E., & Taylor, T. L. (Eds.). (2016). Pedagogies of Race: Digital Humanities in the Age of Ferguson. In Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016. University of Minnesota Press.

Guo, J., & Liu, S. (2022). From #BlackLivesMatter to #StopAsianHate: Examining Network Agenda-Setting Effects of Hashtag Activism on Twitter. Social Media + Society, 8(4).

Shahin, S., Nakahara, J., & Sánchez, M. (2024). Black Lives Matter goes global: Connective action meets cultural hybridity in Brazil, India, and Japan. New Media & Society, 26(1), 216–235.

Projects

Added by Facilitator’s Prerogative: Baker, Erik. “One Elite, Two Elites, Red Elite, Blue Elite,” The Baffler, February 26, 2025. 

Added by Facilitator’s Prerogative: Currier, Cora et al. “Our Condolences, Afghanistan,” The Intercept and the accompanying article

Dennis, B. (2016). Scientists are frantically copying U.S. climate data, fearing it might vanish under Trump. Washington Post.

Jacobs, Jennifer, Alexander Tin, and Kathryn Watson. Agencies Asked to Scrub Federal Government Websites to Remove Diversity-Related Content. CBS News, January 31, 2025.

Jingnan & Lawrence. Here are all the ways people are disappearing from government websites


Federal data is disappearing. Meet the teams working to rescue it and learn how you can help.

Krishnamurthy, Rashmi, and Yukika Awazu. Liberating Data for Public Value: The Case of Data.Gov. International Journal of Information Management 36, no. 4 (August 2016): 668–72.

(optional by Facilitator’s Prerogative) Wang, V., & Shepherd, D. (2020). Exploring the extent of openness of open government data – A critique of open government datasets in the UK. Government Information Quarterly, 37(1).

Young, M. M. (2020). Implementation of Digital-Era Governance: The Case of Open Data in U.S. Cities. Public Administration Review, 80(2), 305–315.

Projects & Resources

Doškář, J. (2023). The foreign-policy content of selected State of the Union addresses: A discourse analysis [Masaryk University].

Lupia, A., Soroka, S., & Beatty, A. (2020). What does Congress want from the National Science Foundation? A content analysis of remarks from 1995 to 2018. Science Advances, 6(33).

Peoples, Clayton D., and James E. Sutton. “Congressional Bribery as State-Corporate Crime: A Social Network Analysis.” Crime, Law and Social Change 64, no. 2–3 (October 2015): 103–25.

Wang, Y. (2020). Understanding congressional coalitions: A discourse network analysis of congressional hearings for the Every Student Succeeds Act. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 28, 119.

Brier, S., & Brown, J. (2011). The September 11 Digital Archive. Radical History Review, 2011(111), 101–109.

September 11 Digital Archive

Fiorella, G., Godart, C., & Waters, N. (2021). Digital Integrity: Exploring Digital Evidence Vulnerabilities and Mitigation Strategies for Open Source Researchers. Journal of International Criminal Justice, 19(1), 147–161.

Ochi, Megumi, and Håvard Dagenborg. 2025. “Online War-Crime Archives: A Call for a Universal Guideline.” SSRN Scholarly Paper.

Hoskins, Andrew. “Media and Compassion after Digital War: Why Digital Media Haven’t Transformed Responses to Human Suffering in Contemporary Conflict.” International Review of the Red Cross 102, no. 913 (April 2020): 117–43.

Gavrilova, S. (2022). Digital Humanities and Memory Wars in Contemporary Russia. In D. Fiormonte, S. Chaudhuri, & P. Ricuarte (Eds.), Global Debates in the Digital Humanities. University of Minnesota Press.

Grayson, H., & Rukesha, P. (2017). Digital Archives in a Changing Rwanda. African Research & Documentation, 131, 15–23.

Koenig, A. (2022). From ‘Capture to Courtroom.’ Journal of International Criminal Justice, 20(4), 829–842.

Projects & Resources

Further Reading:

Mwambari, D. (2021). Agaciro , vernacular memory, and the politics of memory in post-genocide Rwanda. African Affairs, 120(481), 611–628.

Malinova, O. (2021). Politics of Memory and Nationalism. Nationalities Papers, 49(6), 997–1007.

France opens its archives on Rwandan genocide to the public. (2021, April 7).

Talabi, F. O., Aiyesimoju, A. B., Lamidi, I. K., Bello, S. A., Okunade, J. K., Ugwuoke, C. J., & Gever, V. C. (2022). The use of social media storytelling for help-seeking and help-receiving among Nigerian refugees of the Ukraine–Russia war. Telematics and Informatics, 71, 101836.

 Risam, Roopika. (2019). “Mobilizing the humanities, or how the torn apart/separados team built a digital humanities project in one week with no money.”

Allen, W. L. (2023). The conventions and politics of migration data visualizations. New Media & Society, 25(6), 1313–1334.

Syed, Moin, Jillian Fish, Jill Hicks, Ummul-Kiram Kathawalla, and Erika Lee. “Somali Migration to the United States: Understanding Adaptation through Digital Stories.” Cultural Diversity & Ethnic Minority Psychology 28, no. 3 (July 1, 2022): 361–69.

Caglar Gencosman, B., & İnkaya, T. (2021). Characterization of Syrian refugees with work permit applications in Turkey: A data mining based methodology. Expert Systems with Applications, 180, 114846.

Álvarez, M. E., & Fernández Quintanilla, S. (2022). Borderlands Archives Cartography: Bridging Personal, Political, and Geographical Borderlands. In D. Fiormonte, S. Chaudhuri, & P. Ricuarte (Eds.), Global Debates in the Digital Humanities. University of Minnesota Press.

Grant, Philip, Ratan Sebastian, Marc Allassonnière-Tang, and Sara Cosemans. “Topic Modelling on Archive Documents from the 1970s: Global Policies on Refugees.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 36, no. 4 (October 30, 2021): 886–904.

Schauwecker, L. (2022) Sight and Sound: Counter-mapping the U.S.-Mexico Border Crisis. DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly 16, no. 3.

Projects & Resources

Further Reading

Lê Espiritu Gandhi, E., & Nguyen, V. (Eds.). (2023). The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives (1st ed.). Routledge.

Salah, Albert Ali, Alex Pentland, Bruno Lepri, and Emmanuel Letouzé, eds. Guide to Mobile Data Analytics in Refugee Scenarios: The “Data for Refugees Challenge” Study. Springer International Publishing, 2019.

  • No Wednesday class this week
  • Schedule an individual consultation with Dr. Brandle to discuss your final project
  • Bring project idea(s)/plans

Bowsher, J. (2023). The digital writing of human rights narratives: Failure, recognition, and the unruly inscriptions of database infrastructures. The Sociological Review, 71(3), 561–580.

Dao, A. (2023). Resisting the inevitable: Human rights and the data society. London Review of International Law, 11(2), 315–348.

Emerson, J., Satterthwaite, M. L., & Pandey, A. V. (2018). The Challenging Power of Data Visualization for Human Rights Advocacy. In M. K. Land & J. D. Aronson (Eds.), New Technologies for Human Rights Law and Practice (1st ed., pp. 162–187). Cambridge University Press.

Latonero, M. (2018). Big Data Analytics and Human Rights: Privacy Considerations in Context. In M. K. Land & J. D. Aronson (Eds.), New Technologies for Human Rights Law and Practice (1st ed., pp. 149–161). Cambridge University Press.

Malinova, O. (2021). Politics of Memory and Nationalism. Nationalities Papers, 49(6), 997–1007.

Murray, D., McDermott, Y., & Koenig, K. A. (2022). Mapping the Use of Open Source Research in UN Human Rights Investigations. Journal of Human Rights Practice, 14(2), 554–581.

Projects & Resources

Further Reading

Daniell, R. (2020). The Afterlives of Government Documents: Information Labor, Archival Power, and the Visibility of U.S. Human Rights Violations in the “War on Terror” (you likely won’t have time to read this this week, but it’s incredibly interesting)

Human Rights Indicators: A Guide to Measurement and Implementation. (2013). United Nations.

Quemy, A., Wrembel, R., Łopuszyńska, N., Papadakis, G., & Delgado, A. D. (2023). A large reproducible benchmark on text classification for the legal domain based on the ECHR-OD repository. Information Systems, 119, 102258. (very interesting paper! Please check it out over the summer)

Please bring a song that relates (in some way) to politics, music, and digital humanities.

Campbell, Mark. “16. Humanizing the Archive: The Potential of Hip-Hop Archives in the Digital Humanities.” In Future Horizons: Canadian Digital Humanities, edited by Paul Barrett and Sarah Rachelle Roger. Canadian Literature Collection. Ottawa, Ontario: University of Ottawa Press, 2023. 

Dahiya, Lavanya. “From Tube Top to Dupatta, Which Feminism Is Mine?” Digital Studies / Le Champ Numérique, no. Special DSCN Collection #9 (March 27, 2024).

Sadler, Olivia. “Defiant Amplification or Decontextualized Commercialization? Protest Music, TikTok, and Social Movements.” Social Media + Society 8, no. 2 (April 1, 2022).

Street, John. “‘Fight the Power’: The Politics of Music and the Music of Politics.” Government and Opposition 38, no. 1 (2003): 113–30.

Vandagriff, Rachel S. “Talking about a Revolution: Protest Music and Popular Culture, from Selma, Alabama, to Ferguson, Missouri.” Lied Und Populäre Kultur / Song and Popular Culture 60/61 (2015): 333–50.

Projects & Resources

Further Reading & Projects

Brown University Digitized Sheet Music Projects: African American Sheet Music, World War I Sheet Music, Yiddish Sheet Music

Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music

Armstead, Charlie. “Exploring the Reception of Foreign Language Music in the English-Speaking World with the Use of Digital Humanities Techniques.” MA Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2023.

Boubia, Amina. “Music, Politics and ‘Organic Artists’ during the Arab Spring: Contention vs. Status Quo in Tunisia and Morocco.” Middle East Journal of Culture & Communication 12, no. 1 (January 1, 2019): 88–108.

Gooding, Erik D., Max Yamane, and Bret Salter. “‘People Have Courage!’: Protest Music and Indigenous Movements.” Comparative American Studies 18, no. 3 (September 1, 2021): 380–96.

Morán-Reyes, Ariel Antonio. “Political Economy of Music in the Digital Age.” The International Review of Information Ethics 33, no. 1 (April 1, 2024).

Way, Lyndon. “Analysing Music Videos : Protest Against Politicians in Musical Sounds, the Representation of Place and Metaphors.” In Analysing Politics and Protest in Digital Popular Culture: A Multimodal Introduction

  • Show and Share of Final Projects
  • Email Brandle any work you’d like added to the Hall of Fame page
  • Submit revised final projects by May 21!