5. Digital Tune Up

Here you explore your particular interests in digital history, learning some of the skills you will need.

To be completed within weeks 5 and 6, Oct 11 - Oct 24.
Note that the Fall Reading Week is scheduled from October 25 to the 29th.

The Task#

I want you to complete the tutorials that are relevant to your interest, and which make sense for you to explore. The point is to give you the tools with which you will craft your own digital history project in the last third of the course.

The Details#

When you completed the cyoa syllabus exploration, you were presented with many possible tutorial options; no doubt this was a bit overwhelming.

Now that you’ve had an opportunity to experience a bit more of the contexts of doing digital work, I invite you to revisit that list and think hard about which tutorials you would like to complete. I am available to help you with this: aim for around 6 tutorials that make sense for you

Because I do want you to know that you do not have to do this on your own, I would like you to post in the relevant channel in Discord your revisited list. Help each other out. You will keep a log file in a github repository.

Log Files#

As you do these tutorials, I want you to keep track of what you do by creating a private repository on your github account. Add me as a user to any private repos you want me to see. (Here’s a reminder of how to do that, at step 8.)

You will keep a log file for each tutorial. This is an open document on your machine that you dump any error messages, any memos-to-self, any observations. Write this in markdown, save it as log-file-for-tutorial-on-xxxx.md. Put this into your repo, along with any screenshots you need or ancillary files you create. See the FAQ on What A Log File Should Contain.

The point of the log file is that this begins to form the paradata of your work. It also is a gift to Future You, who will return to this work at somepoint in the future wondering ‘how the hang did I do …’. The gold standard here is that there is enough detail about your process in your log that someone else (cough me) could pick up where you left off. (This is also part of doing ‘reproducible’ research).

Feel free to make observations in your log file about how the choices you make as you do this work might intersect historiographically.

Log Your Work#

Please provide the link(s) to your repositories by entering the information on this google form.

Things will break#

And that’s ok. Sometimes, digital work depends on a sequence of smaller packages of code (it’s all a bit like lego blocks). If something changes with one of those packages, this can cause other parts to break. Sometimes the tools we use are updated, which changes the precise sequence of how one might work with them. Links die; individual computers have their idiosyncracies. The key to surviving this is to accept that this will happen and so it’s ok to talk about it with the rest of us. Who knows, we might have solutions!