We had our first class of AL 340 Digital Humanities Seminar today. It is was from 9:10AM to 12 PM.

I arrived early today, and saw this fabulous sunrise:

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Later, in our windowless classroom, we reviewed the guidelines and syllabus of the class. The syllabus is still in progress—I am trying to confirm an external speaker— so much of the second half of the course is not listed yet but will uploaded shortly.

This semester we will focus on doing analysis and manipulation across different media, including images, video, text, sound (!), and objects.

I adapted the Code of Conduct of Software Carpentry into the syllabus as a code of conduct for the class. The students had no amendments, and we agreed to abide by them.

We introduced ourselves today. Many of the students are part of the Digital Humanities Minor. We also have one graduate student, who was sick today, who is enrolled in AL890, which fulfills the Digital Humanities Method Seminar of the Digital Humanities Graduate Specialization. She will be doing additional work in addition to the undergraduate class requirements.

We also introduced Etherpad, which is collaborative notetaking software. The etherpad for Day One is here.

We setup Twitter and Github accounts, and students also installed Tweetdeck to manage their Tweets. Everyone was quite adept, and there were no issues there. A number of students created #al340 lists to follow the class. Our other MSU-wide DH hashtag is: #msudh.

We also installed Github for Windows on the computers that are in our lab and on students’ windows laptops, as we want to be able to use the Github Shell so that the command line will be the same as in Windows. One student had the Unix commands installed on his Windows shell. I am trying to figure out where those are, as it will make teaching the Command Line much easier.

I am also working on setting up a server for the class. That should be ready by next week.

All in all, it was a good first class, and I’m looking forward to working with a great group of students!