NITLE Shared Academics: Doing Digital History with Undergraduates
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Four Lessons Learned Doing Digital History w/ Undergrads #powerofsmall @professmoravec www.michellemoravec.com project for today www.rdigitalh.org class syllabus co teacher Maggie Hobson-Baker students Niki Brogen, Michele Ithan, Molly Rowe, Emily Siegel, Gabriela Stamler Rosemont College Archives, Melanie McBride, Delories Richardi
NITLE Shared Academics: Doing Digital History with Undergraduates
As students increasingly draw upon digital content as a primary source of information, how might they be taught to be both discriminating consumers as well as producers of online information? Doing history rather than teaching history is not a new approach, but the “doing” part of researching, writing, and publishing now includes drawing upon and creating digitized resources. In this NITLE Shared Academics seminar, NITLE subject-area specialist Michelle Moravec, Aaron Cowan, assistant professor of history at Slippery Rock University, and Kathryn Tomasek, associate professor of history at Wheaton College, provided concrete examples from their own work, and examined the opportunities and challenges of integrating digital humanities into the undergraduate curriculum. These are Dr. Michelle Moravec's slides.
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1. Four Lessons Learned Doing Digital History w/ Undergrads
#powerofsmall @professmoravec www.michellemoravec.com project for
today www.rdigitalh.org class syllabus co teacher Maggie
Hobson-Baker students Niki Brogen, Michele Ithan, Molly Rowe, Emily
Siegel, Gabriela Stamler Rosemont College Archives, Melanie
McBride, Delories Richardi
2. CHNM is FABULOUS but what if you dont have 45 people to do
#digitalhistory with?
3. what happened when a historian and an artist formed a
2-person digital humanities team ... and left everything about the
class project up to the 5 students and had 3 of the 15 class
sessions canceled due to snow?
4. #1 Have concrete & specific parameters Course Outline: a
significant aspect of this class is the collaborative design of our
project. Therefore we will finalize aspects of this syllabus in
course together. project had to be about the campus chapel and
involve building a Wordpress site Profs had the idea of focusing on
the stained glass windows of the Chapel, which are all female
figures.
5. #2 Turn over control as soon as possible We brainstormed
potential audience & the type of user experience sent the
students off to the chapel on their own to take more images and
propose project
6. Whats up with the peacock?
7. #3 Let the project evolve or watch it die
8. #4 Do not fear the failure The professors scaffolded early
assignments around windows students took pictures in chapel each
student researched hagiography and art historical images of 1 saint
& made page each student researched hagiography and art
historical images of a second saint& made page students made
Pinterest boards of images of a particular saint focusing on
iconography or contemporary images Midterm: Compare and contrast
the portrayal of the chosen Saint in Art History (Google Art). Work
with 3-5 different images from different time periods and
geographical locations. Final Page
9. All students did some minor coding and digital photo
manipulation One student dove deep into Wordpress widgets Three
students did some fairly intensive work in Photoshop with Adobe
Flash. Everything was already digitized so we didnt work with
OCR
10. I think hands on work, especially in archives, for history
majors, is the best way to learn This project provided hands on
experience both intellectually and creatively. I think everyone in
the class preferred this project to writing papers I like this
better than a research paper because we've all created and worked
with materials that are now accessible for public audiences I think
the small size of the class was REALLY important