Z604/Z672 Comic Books and Their Readers

Digital and Empirical Methods for Studying Readership and Fandom
Spring 2024

12:40 - 15:15 Wednesday, Sycamore Hall (SY) 103

Instructor: Associate Professor John A. Walsh, jawalsh@indiana.edu.
Office Hours: Schedule at https://fantastical.app/jawalsh-r1Wz/office-hours.

Associate Instructor: Alex Wingate, alewinga@iu.edu
Office Hours: Thursdays, 1:30pm-2:45pm, and by appointment (click Zoom link in Alex’s profile)

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Week 9: Data sets and information visualization

Summary

This week we will explore the topic of data, data sets (especially those related to comics), and data papers

Weekly Learning Objectives

• articulate and explain fundamental concepts of data, particularly from a humanities point of view.
• think critically about data and its construction and aggregation into datasets
• explore and evaluate datasets
• clean and transform data

Define and identify the following terms

• data
• datasets
• structured data
• unstructured data
• data paper

Before class: Readings, resources, and tasks

Read

• Owens, T. (2011). Defining Data for Humanists: Text, Artifact, Information or Evidence? Journal of Digital Humanities. Journal of Digital Humanities, 1(1). https://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-1/defining-data-for-humanists-by-trevor-owens/
• Schöch, C. (2013). Big? Smart? Clean? Messy? Data in the Humanities. Journal of Digital Humanities, 2(3), 2–13. (See Canvas)
• Sosulski, K. (2019). The Data. In Data visualization made simple: Insights into becoming visual (pp. 72–96). Routledge. https://doi-org.proxyiub.uits.iu.edu/10.4324/9781315146096
• Swinburne data paper draft (See Canvas)
• Shroff, L. (2023). Datasets as Imagination. Reboot. https://joinreboot.org/p/artist-datasets

  Download

• OpenRefine
• NVivo; you will have to make an account with QSR

In class

• Discussion
• Presentation of NVivo, regular expressions (regex), and OpenRefine
  • NVivo walk through
  • Regex walk through
  • OpenRefine demo and Programming Historian OpenRefine Tutorial
• Choice of 2 of 3 labs; labs due to Canvas Week 9 Lab assignment
  • NVivo Lab
  • Regex Lab
  • OpenRefine Lab