Digital Archive

(4 Credits)

How do digital technologies impact efforts to archive human experience and culture? How do they change how we access that archive? In the age of ubiquitous smart devices, when we are all curators of digital content, what constitutes the digital archive? This course explores the implications of digital archive creation tools and practices for historical memory and understanding. Students will conduct reviews of digital archives and online repositories and will be invited to assess the role of digitization in the construction of history and memory. Focusing on the curatorial and technical decisions underlying digitization processes and the ways in which these decisions determine what is discoverable, accessible, and searchable, students will be introduced to relevant terms and concepts, such as metadata creation, machine-readable data, open access, the digital divide, algorithmic bias, the possibilities and the ethics of crowdsourcing, distant reading, etc. Offering a gentle introduction to computer-readable corpus creation and text analytics, the course takes a Humanities approach to interrogating digital tools and platforms we encounter on a daily basis.