The purpose of each assignment is to offer you an opportunity to see how history can be done in different, multi-sensory, multi-disciplinary, and purposeful ways. Technology opens up new doors that historians have (for the most part) either ignored or tepidly stepped through.
In lieu of textbooks, participants are required to purchase a domain and an account with Reclaim Hosting to host a personal, professional website. Here, you will write regular blog posts, display your visualization project(s), and install your Omeka site.
For examples of historians’ and DH scholars’ personal websites, check out those by Goodall, Keller, Heppler, Gibbs, Robertson, Mullen, Posner, and Moore.
Reclaim Hosting has some support pages for CPanel, Domain of One’s Own, and Domain Management, and even some WordPress support. If you go to WordPress, you will find a support page as well as documentation and forum portals.
Engagement
Your engagement matters. It helps to build a shared learning community. Engagement includes regular attendance, but also the quality of contributions you offer to the class conversation. So, engagement implies doing the work (reading, taking notes, completing assignments) so you can offer something of value to the class discussions and activities.
Weekly Readings
There are 9 weeks of readings. You will write and publish a blog post for five (5) of these weeks, synthesizing the readings by looking for common themes across the selections and highlighting some specific takeaways. These are due by Monday at 11:59pm.
For three (3) of the weeks you choose not to blog, you will be part of a team of in-class recorders who will publish the main takeaways from our conversations during class by the end of our weekly Tuesday evening session. You will have one week off from all duties.
• For a list of weekly readings, access this Google Doc.
[Please note that readings are subject to change at any time, so check the Google Doc on a weekly basis.]
Projects
This semester you will embark on a singular research project with several work products to submit and present. The purpose of each assignment is to offer you an opportunity to see how history can be done in different, multi-sensory, multi-disciplinary, and purposeful ways. Technology opens up new doors that historians have (for the most part) either ignored or tepidly stepped through.
Each assignment (although, to a less extent the blog task) is not necessarily planned to demonstrate your technical competence. Instead, each one is designed to expose you to a variety of ways that historians are using technology to make their research accessible to a wide number of people. Thus, growing pains, struggles, frustrations, and (hopefully) elation are intrinsic to digital history projects. In each project you should consider: audience; alternatives tools (and why you did not use them); detailed descriptions of the project itself; ideas for increasing the project’s visibility (outreach and publicity); academic literature on both the subject matter (historical topic) and methodology (digital humanities, SoTL).
(1) Collecting and Archiving the Past
In this project, we will survey the wide variety of digital tools that allow historians to organize their research and produce innovative scholarship. Although the preferred tool we will use is Omeka, participants may opt to collect and curate their research collection using alternative platforms. This project involves key elements – research, collecting, writing – in order to produce an online exhibit or collection.
The goal is to tell the story of X using Omeka’s Exhibit Builder feature. The number of items will vary; however, you will provide viewers with details, historical background, and historical context (why it matters) for each individual entry with metadata that adheres to Dublin Core. Collections are recommended to group your research items, but the focus is on the narrativity of your exhibits.
Note: Try to establish a broad research topic for this semester, and then think about specific strands for this assignment, as well as the Visualization Project and Conference Poster Session.
(2) Visualization Product
This research-based assignment is fun, challenging, and open-ended. Your goal is to share your research as if you were writing a standard graduate-level paper, but primarily through images with as little text as possible (text ok for highly informative captions and image citations are ok).
Examples include (but are not limited to) a curated photo essay; a data-heavy visualization product (graphs-maps-trees-charts); geo-mapping; data charts or displays (i.e. Tableau, Timeline JS, ClioApp, Google Map); annotated historical images (i.e. ThingLink); photo collages that capture several areas of your research topic (Adobe Spark offers an easy way to do this); visual layouts-illustrations via cartoon strips or annotated storyboards; a multi-media poster with hyperlinked videos, .mp3 audio clips, images, links to external sites (i.e. Prezi, Glogster).
(3) Conference Poster
One part of scholarly communication that continues to grow in popularity is the conference poster. The culmination of our class is going to be our own version of a conference poster session, which will be open to the public during one of our class meetings in the month of April. The guiding question for each presentation is: “How do new media tools enhance, or limit, our understanding of (your semester research topic)?”
For further guidance on conference posters, see our selected course readings on this topic.
Due Dates
Go the course Google calendar for all relevant dates.
