In developing the digital humanities efforts on campus, Lafayette’s Digital Scholarship Services has been extending its focus from faculty driven projects to also include student research through our DH in the Classroom initiative and our DH Summer Scholars Program, an intensive internship where students worked on digital projects of their own design.
This presentation includes three students who have created projects under these two models.
Jethro Israel: The story of David Kinney and Washington Watts, two slaves turned Lafayette College Alumni during an era of slavery in America, is an overwhelmingly dynamic story that highlights the intersection of societal statutes and individual actions. The trials and tribulations of the two brothers present us with a story filled with individual agency during a period of time when most blacks in our country were not considered as individuals. Their letters combined with a historical backdrop produces a project bigger than just the two people at its core. As a digital project this story illuminates family ties for those who voyaged to Liberia with the American Colonization Society.
Ian Morse: Current press freedom indices conflate myriad problems and measures into single values. When searching for solutions to press freedom violations, believing that all countries suffer from similar afflictions is counterproductive. I approached this project in search of solution-oriented measures that could suggest which political, legal, economic, and social factors had the most influence on press freedom. The crux of my project has thus focused on establishing a method of measuring how we can use digital humanities to see how newspapers react to external events and evaluate how press freedom affects the ‘quality’ of journalism.
Feevan Megersa: With nearly 3000 years of history to date, the communal custom of sharing stories in Ethiopia, in the form of folktales, has been practiced since its founding and has contributed to the preservation of traditional values throughout generations. A comprehensive study of Ethiopian folktales conducted by Elizabeth Laird, in collaboration with the Ethiopian ministry of education and British council in Ethiopia, collected over 300 folktales spanning all of the country’s 13 designated regions. My project attempts to map out reoccurring themes in the folktales documented by Laird as well as highlighting the moral behind each folktale.
While faculty projects are still at the core of the DSS mission, including students in this work is crucial to developing a sustainable model of engagement across campus.
For three summers teams of undergraduates from the College of Wooster have been at work on Wooster Digital History (www.woosterhistory.org), a project that has grown from curated exhibits to more mature collections, mapping exercises, and web-based town tours. The project began as an exploration conceived by Dr. Gregory Shaya, Department of History, and has since been guided by a handful of Wooster History faculty and Dr. Jon Breitenbucher, director of Educational Technology. The project has grown, however, from an exercise occupied in large part by the building of technical infrastructures and community relationships to a platform through which students may conceive and explore their own research questions related to the history of the town of Wooster.
This presentation, introduced and briefly contextualized by Dr. Katie Holt, prof. of History at the College of Wooster, focuses on the work done by four students. These students represent the evolution of the project and suggest the ways in which incremental and guided work might grow into relative low barrier-to-entry ways for students to build digital exhibits around their own Wooster-related research interests. Brittany Previte and Anna Claspy, members of the 2014 team, will talk about these details of summer two. Brandon Bell and Colleen Gilfether will talk about these details of summer three.
Though sound is at the center of music historical research, the sounds of the past remain elusive to scholars and students. Traditional media through which scholarship works – including books and lectures – offer at best a remote, second-hand experience of the concerts, personalities, and issues of a given time and place. In the few cases where new media have been developed to capture musical experiences (notably recordings and videos), they have primarily encouraged passive consumption. With support from St. Olaf College’s Collaborative Undergraduate Research and Inquiry initiative as well as a Mellon Foundation-funded “Digital Humanities on the Hill” grant, we are working to answer a vexing question: How can we represent – even recreate – the sound world of the past?
Interactive digital maps provide an engaging, accessible supplement to conventional music history scholarship. Drawing on historical newspapers, travel guides, and physical and digital archival sources, our team of undergraduates and faculty created a series of maps that open visual, sonic, and contextual exploration to a wide audience. Students and scholars can relive a concert or walk in the footsteps of a famous figure. Moreover, the digitized primary sources that informed our map are immediately available via hyperlink and embedded images.
In our interactive presentation, we model some of the ways in which building and playing with musical maps can make archival research less intimidating for students from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds and levels of expertise. We share insights from our experience working as an interdisciplinary team (including music, French, art history, and English majors) as well as with librarians, information technologists, and computer scientists. Finally, we invite others to adapt our methods and resources to their own disciplinary pursuits.
Tempo of the Times looks to connect social shifts with fundamental changes in musical compositions. Powered by the Echo Nest, this project uses macroeconomic metrics and musical metrics that vary in sophistication in an attempt understand how artist’s work change with respect to the societal climate. Strong correlations relating economic and musical trends were found between the years 1950 and 2011. In addition to these correlations, autoregressive models were used to predict the future of musical indicators. Through tempoofthtimes.com, visitors can view and download the datasets, use the interactive graphics to better understand the data, and explore the correlations and predictive models. Through the data available publicly and advanced statistical methods- Tempo of the Times connects society to its music.
In the 2013 spring semester, the Albert Gore Research Center at Middle Tennessee State University uploaded material to Historypin, a crowdsource platform for historical materials. Instead of populating the center’s profile with collection highlights selected by staff, the students of Dr. Mary Hoffschwelle’s Tennessee History Honors course created collections and a campus tour. Dr. Hoffschwelle’s desire to engage her undergraduate students in history, as well as to have them understand and work with primary sources, equally matched University Archivist Donna Baker’s desire to promote and make collections more accessible. This led to a continuation of the project in subsequent Tennessee History Honors courses. For three semesters, a team combined of Dr. Hoffschwelle, Ms. Baker, and graduate assistants have helped undergraduates create “collections” on various subjects, from Albert Gore, Sr. to campus history to Tennessee Walking Horses, utilizing only the Center’s holdings. The project has changed in that time, evolving in scope and expanding in creativity of collection themes. It has also demonstrated a greater need for information literacy instruction for some students, not to mention the need to address transliteracy challenges. So while this presentation is on the process behind and successes of this collaboration, it must also address questions of assessment, challenges regarding information literacy skills, navigating technology skills, and how to weigh the benefits of labor-intensive projects. It is a presentation about lessons learned, small successes, and thinking more broadly on the use and purpose of archival holdings.
The Queer Studies program at Denison University has a history that includes: inception in 2000, a close call with dissolution in 2009, and the current re-emergence with many highly engaged students and faculty contributing to the thriving program.
In 2014, a grant was awarded to create a digital environment for the Queer Studies program, establishing a repository for institutional documents, class projects, faculty work, and other materials relating to the historical and contemporary LGBTQ climate at Denison. The project began by collecting interviews with faculty who had been involved in the development of the Queer Studies concentration. These interviews have proven to be an important structural element in thinking about the online presence. They give a contextual framework to the institutional materials and act as an organic timeline, by describing actual events and attitudes from a personal point of view.
Thus far the project has included the collection of interviews by founding Queer Studies faculty and students conducted by faculty member; materials digitized by the Queer Studies Student Fellow; development, interface and design of the site overseen by lead librarian. The ways in which these various strands have informed each other, and also changed throughout this process have been surprising. The interactions between the elements of technology and history will be reflected upon by all three members of the team, as well as how each portion of the project has organically informed the other in the creation of the final product.
The Haverford College Digital Scholarship Fellows program launched in the fall of 2014, and is set to enter year two in the fall of 2015. The program is a collaboration of Haverford Libraries Digital Scholarship, the Office of Academic Resources, the Center for Career and Professional Advising, and the Writing Center. Up to eight fellows fellows are selected each year from the sophomore and junior classes who participate in a strictly voluntary co-curricular program. The main goals of the program are for students to develop skills in the use of technology for researching and exploring scholarly questions, and to collaboratively plan, develop and build a digital scholarship project over the course of the year. This is done through a combination of lessons, self-guided workshops, and lab time. Fellows emerge from the program with a toolkit for doing digital scholarship as they approach senior thesis work, a more critical approach to digital media, and a better understanding of the affordances and drawbacks of digital modes of communication. The 2014-15 Fellows took an active role in designing and planning the Monument Lab, a public project exploring history, culture, and public memory in the city of Philadelphia. This short paper will reflect on the experiences and lessons learned from the 2014-15 program, and talk about the first months of the 2015-16 DS Fellowship.
Swarthmore Projects for Educational Exploration and Development (SPEED) is an initiative jointly administered by Swarthmore Libraries and Information Technology Services. Loosely based on the agile development model, SPEED provides dedicated staff and student intern support for accepted proposals during an eight-week summer period in order to design and build digital resources that extend pedagogical possibilities and promote undergraduate research.
The program is inherently collaborative. In addition to pooling the resources and skills of librarians and academic technologists, SPEED has worked alongside faculty from across campus, Engineering to Russian, Linguistics to Music. Beyond the gamut of administrative and academic partners, the program works with students from a range of majors and provides substantial scholarly and professional development.
SPEED projects actively push beyond the limited time and space afforded to the traditional classroom to put student and faculty research in conversation with broader publics. Examples like a web-app for generating Navajo verbs, a digital book for the hearing-impaired, 3D modeling of ancient Roman topography and a visualization of Latino Immigration in the USA allow associated courses to engage broader audiences, both those intended and sometimes ones we had not imagined.
Through outlining our processes, touching on issues that have emerged during particular projects and sketching out some of what we have learned, we will present the possibilities and perils of such a model for exploring just what public scholarship can look like in a liberal arts context.
The Holy Cross Manuscripts, Inscriptions, and Documents (MID) Club encourages undergraduates to pursue original research, in collaboration with faculty members, in codicology, epigraphy, paleography, and various languages. Our research, focused on faithfully recording every scribal mark on various antique primary sources, is made possible by the availability of openly-licensed photographs. We make our digital diplomatic editions public on the internet so that any interested party can view and analyze our work. Students of different years, majors, and experience levels create these editions. This work encourages a familiarity with the technologies appropriate for editing texts digitally and those necessary for carrying out systematic analyses of observed patterns across large portions of text.
Within the multi-institutional Homer Multitext project, we are creating diplomatic editions of various Greek manuscripts of the Iliad. Recently, our analysis of the Iliad’s oldest complete manuscript, the tenth-century Venetus A, resulted in our finding a correlation in the scholia, or footnotes, between text reuse and references to Alexandrian Homeric scholars.
The Homer Multitext project has inspired similar research within the club. One such endeavor focuses on three Latin manuscripts of St. Jerome’s Chronicle. Through our analyses, we have seen intentional variations between the documents that demonstrate the role of the scribe as a chronologist, rather than a simple copyist.
By producing our editions, we seek to increase the accessibility of these texts while also analyzing them to better understand the tradition of each unique work.
In Winter 2015, McMaster University’s Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship offered an inaugural introduction to digital humanities course for undergraduates. Based entirely within the University Library, the course used library resources and was led by an instructional team of six library staff members with varying areas of expertise. The purpose of the course was to introduce students to important topics and methods in DH through individual and group work that built around the central theme of the First World War. An explicit goal of this course was to give students experience developing narratives from disparate information and data sources from both the Library’s special collections and external sources. In addition, course content and activities emphasized the importance of logistics, communication, and collaboration as professional skills that are useful to larger DH projects and their involvement beyond the university.
Many facets of the course worked well, but we encountered some noteworthy challenges. These included:
As a ‘work-in-progress’ presentation, we will discuss these challenges–which all reflect our core desire to achieve symmetry between integrating library resources, subject specific information, and specific tool-based competencies–and invite participants to help us identify ways to achieve better balance.
Digital humanities courses often sit at the top of departmental course offerings, focussed on advanced majors or graduate students. In 2014 I reoriented my survey world history two course around digital humanities projects using resources that are free to students. This fall I am reorienting my world history one course in a similar fashion. My experience with these two introductory survey courses, along with my recent NEH Summer Institute on DH in Community Colleges, yields insight into best practices for teaching DH to undergraduates of all levels. Specifically, designing a course for students of diverse backgrounds and preparations requires attention to logistics, learning outcomes, the cognitive science of learning, and an equity-centered andragogy that textbook-centered courses do not.
Since Fall 2014, students enrolled in three undergraduate museum studies courses at Rochester Institute of Technology have collaborated on multiple museum studies/public history projects that have been designed to improve digital and multi-modal literacies. In each learning environment, students have participated in experiences extending beyond the classroom that have varied in scope from narrow to broad and from structured to amorphous. In some instances, students have contributed to already-existing endeavors (serving as #volunpeers for the Smithsonian Transcription Center or as user testers for Yellr and Mukurtu 2.0). In other cases, the students teamed up with university and/or community partners, including the National Susan B. Anthony Museum & House and the Seneca Park Zoo, in order to problem-solve and satisfy a particular need. In terms of skills and literacies, students have transcribed and catalogued, engaged in social media and crowdsourcing, developed content for an app, and constructed a website ancillary to an onsite exhibition curated by RIT faculty.
Depending upon the project needs and the requisite workflow, students have collaborated in small groups and as a larger team to yield singular solutions. Such collaborative, facilitated engagement opportunities are informed by, and equally inform, transdisciplinary research, engaged scholarship on the part of the students and the faculty, and collaborative methods in the classroom and beyond. Such projects constitute public scholarship through their dissemination beyond the academy and through measurable impact.
This presentation will briefly describe six projects before turning to evaluation and assessment.
The Carlisle Indian Industrial School (1879-1918), the first government-run off-reservation boarding school in the U.S., is a major site of memory for many Native peoples, as well as a source of research and study for descendants, students, and scholars in the U.S. and abroad. The Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center (http://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu), supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, represents a collaborative effort to aid the research and teaching process by bringing together online a variety of resources that are physically preserved in various locations around the country. Through this project, we seek to increase knowledge and understanding of the school and its complex legacy, while also facilitating efforts to tell the stories of the thousands of students who were sent there. Begun in 2013, the project includes more than 100,000 pages of documentation from the U.S. National Archives, and has already been used by a wide variety of audiences.
Through this interactive presentation we will demonstrate the current website tools and capabilities, we will discuss the implementation of interactive tools/crowdsourcing for users to share their own material, and we will talk about some of the logistical challenges of this large collaborative undertaking. We will also address the important roles of our undergraduate interns in this effort and talk about how the project has already been used for individual research and in the classroom. Finally, we will discuss some of the unique challenges of digitizing and presenting complex and emotionally charged historical material online.
In this work-in-progress session, Susquehanna University faculty, students and staff will explore how a new campus-wide Omeka program transformed a Pennsylvania history course. The faculty member will discuss the origins of the project as an exercise to change students’ perception of local history as a quaint and pleasant pursuit lacking a critical edge by highlighting the role of violence in threatening or supporting imperial power relations. He will also explore the implications of changing the course’s final project from an offline exhibit presented to a hypothetical public to an online exhibition that students present to community members. The students will discuss how their research and interpretive skills are shaped by encountering community members who live in the spaces they are researching and sharing their work online. The University’s instructional technologist and digital scholarship librarian will discuss creating a sustainable digital exhibition program that includes effective Omeka training and support.
Team members will seek attendees’ thoughts and ideas on next steps for the project, such as incorporating community feedback into the repository and making connections with heritage tourism. If there is time and interest, the team and audience will also discuss collaboration with area high school students working on National History Day projects.
History Harvest (http://historyharvest.unl.edu) is a collaborative, team-oriented, student-centered and community-based project that contributes to the democratization and accessibility of American history by collecting and sharing the experiences and artifacts of everyday people and local historical institutions in an open web archive. Working with local history organizations, undergraduate students conduct each harvest with the support of graduate students and professors. During the harvest, community members are invited to share their letters, photographs, objects, and stories, and participate in a conversation about the significance and meaning of their materials. Each artifact is digitally captured and then shared in a web-based archive for future use and study. The History Harvest project aims to raise visibility and public conversation about history and its meaning, as well as provide a new foundation of publicly available material for historical study, K-12 instruction, and lifelong learning.
The History Harvest also provides students a unique and often transformative hands-on experience with historical work. As a digital initiative, the project takes advantage of innovative new technologies to engage students in building history, reflecting on historical change, collaborating to create interpretive accounts of the materials they collect and sharing what they find with others.
This presentation focuses on the History Harvest as a pedagogical process that utilizes student interaction with the public to engage with larger historical concepts.
How did Dayton come to be the third most segregated city in the United States? "Coloring the Gem City" is the title of an Antioch College History Senior Thesis undertaken by Eric Rhodes ’16. The project examines the creation of racial segregation in Dayton from roughly 1930 through 2015. The focus will be on the role of the nexus of federal, state, and local housing policy and suburbanization. It also touches on the intellectual history of urban planning in Dayton, Ohio and the social sciences’ treatment of urbanity throughout the 20th century.
As a component of his preliminary research, Eric is conducting interviews with national and area scholars, as well as people whose lives have been affected by segregation in Dayton. He’s also doing GIS analysis of racial demographics in Dayton in order to visually illustrate the contours of segregation during the past 85 years. The end result will be a public resource which community members can consult for information on the subject.
Ab Urbe Ef icta: Reconstructing Livy’s RomeThe works of the Roman historian Livy describe monuments that stood intact, monuments lost, and monuments forever altered by Rome’s changing political landscape. Using modern mapping and visualization technology, I have designed and implemented a website that allows users to visualize these monumentspresent and absentthat Livy described and historicized.
The website utilizes digital mapping resources allowing users to compare how a monument might have looked in Livy’s era to how it looks today. Incorporating images taken during my recent period of study in Rome, users can visualize how Livy populated new areas of the city over the development of his histories. It also incorporates selections of Livy’s own text in order to encourage users to consider how written narrative, visualization, and geography intersect.
As a Classics major, I came to the project with considerable knowledge about Livy, a good deal of support from the Classics department, but minimal programming skills. In order to bolster these skills, I interned for Reed’s Software Design Studio, a pilot project designed to bring unlikely people into software development. In addition to the mentors from Portland’s tech industry, I was able to collaborate with Reed faculty outside the Classics department, instructional technologists, and librarians. The site was developed with a level of abstraction that will make the project perfect for reuse, both at Reed and at other institutions. And, because the project is open source and available on Github, other institutions are free to use and modify my codewith support from my teamfor their own applications.
Solution Based Press Freedom Project
Current press freedom indices conflate myriad problems and measures into single values. When searching for solutions to press freedom violations, believing that all countries suffer from similar afflictions is counterproductive. I approached this project in search of solution-oriented measures that could suggest which political, legal, economic, and social factors had the most influence on press freedom. However, many advocacy efforts neglect how the quality of journalism actually changes as a result of press freedom violations.
The crux of my project has thus focused on establishing a method of measuring how we can use digital humanities to see how newspapers react to external events. How does press freedom affect the ‘quality’ of journalism? I began with a familiar Turkish, English-language newspaper and 1065 articles from its ‘National’ section surrounding the Gezi Park Protests in 2013. I gathered results predominantly from online tools, including AntConc and Voyant tools.
Keyness and Cluster results indicate that there is indeed a noticeable change in the presentation of news in this case. They indicate that more research, including delving deeper into individual cases and examining more cases, is necessary. I hypothesize that the language found in these newspapers will over several cases become more inflammatory by various measures after their freedom to report is violated. Because a methodology for such a text analysis on newspapers is to my knowledge uncharted, these results present only many more questions from which to launch research, as many digital humanities projects do.
For more information visit https://thatcriticalspace.wordpress.com
Stories of the Susquehanna Documentary SeriesThe Stories of the Susquehanna Documentary Series is a public history project in which Bucknell University students discover and unfold the stories of Susquehanna River Valley communities in a 26-minute documentary film. The first documentary in the series, “Utopian Dreams,” will be broadcast by public television station, WVIA. The students involved in this project work full-fledged in all aspects of the production process, including researching local history, pre-planning, and making final edits on Final Cut Pro X.
Presented by Laura Lujan, a student documentary advisor who has been participating in this exploration for two years, this talk will focus on the range of technical, social, and organizational skills acquired from this project. Lujan will discuss her experience and the time she has spent on the creation of “Utopian Dreams” to demonstrate the multi-modal process of filmmaking and the steep learning curve required to enter this vast industry. This project is beneficial not only for the students who created it but also for the community; they have worked together in order to showcase the narratives that surrounded the Susquehanna River.
The Korean War Memory Tour: More Than Just A Public History Road Trip
The Korean War Memory Tour is a digital-hybrid project that I started in May of 2015 in preparation for a dissertation research trip. The centerpiece of the project is a WordPress blog that I’ve used to share my findings state-by-state on public memory of the so-called ‘forgotten war’ focusing on monuments, museum exhibits, and memorial infrastructure (including highways and bridges), but also covering topics such the oft-ignored Korean anti-war movement in early 1950s America and recent media depictions such as Mad Menor Oliver Stone’s Untold History. In addition, I’ve created two related digital elements: a Facebook page (now with over one-hundred followers ranging from public history colleagues to friends with family members who fought in Korea) that I’ve used to publicize updates on my project as well as news articles about Korean War memory, and a Kickstarter campaign (which failed though I later raised over $500 from friends and family) meant to moderate costs while generating greater interest among crowd-funders who are, in a sense, directly invested in the project. Moreover, my research itself depends upon contributions by anonymous partners who provide invaluable aid to my project without ever realizing it, through their posting about local Korean War monuments on crowdsourced websites including ‘Waymarking’ and the ‘Historical Marker Database’. Moving forward, I’m planning to use Flickr to make my future research more easily accessible. Finally, the blog has also helped me launch a collaborative public history venture (involving scholars, veterans, and politicians), the “South Jersey Korea Vets Project”.
This presentation offers perspectives from the College of Wooster’s Computer Science and Library faculties on the development of a project that will ultimately result in digital editions of Madeleine de Scudéry’s series of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century _Conversations_. French Professor Laura Burch, after teaching from PDF copies of seventeenth-century books, noted that students had as many difficulties with the printed typography as with the antiquated French. A project developed in which students transcribed, but did not modernize, the text. Working with Emerging Technologies Librarian Stephen Flynn, who will speak for the project, this team produced a TEI-encoded copy of the first volume of _Conversations_, _Conversations Sur Divers Sujets_ (1680). Flynn will discuss the project’s workflow, which included a low-barrier version of XML that made encoding easier for the students while allowing for transformations into TEI once transcriptions were completed.
A partner project arose from this in which CS Professor Sofia Visa guided a research project by CS student Will Rial, both of whom will present on their experiences. Rial used Machine Learning and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technologies to automate the transcription of the first volume of _Conversations_ as a pilot for processing the remaining four volumes. Rial will discuss his optimization of the workflows developed in the Early Modern OCR Project (eMOP), including dictionary creation and post-processing algorithms, and Visa will present on the pedagogical perspective of guiding such a project.
Arising from a small summer curricular innovation grant from Princeton University’s Center for Digital Humanities, the ABCBooks project showcases a successful collaboration between faculty, the Library, and technologists at the University. This digital archive of graphically-rich, historic ABC books culled from the University’s Cotsen Children’s Library serves as an online archive of these often rare and delicate books, but also as a teaching tool in Professor Bill Gleason’s very popular Children’s Literature course. First used in the Spring of 2014 with a collection 25 digitized and transcribed books, the website will again be used this coming Spring, augmented with an additional 29 books. In collaboration with the University’s Center for Digital Humanities, students and graduate teaching assistants in the course are given training and experience in the production of TEI-encoded metadata and transcriptions which in turn are added to the archive. In doing so, it is hoped that students gain some understanding of methods in the digital humanities, data modelling, curation, and the relationships between an encoded representation of a text and its associated search and display interfaces.
In the coming semester, students will additionally be able to semantically tag page images. It is planned that in future iterations of the site, these tags will be used to enrich the TEI-encoded transcriptions and lead to more elaborate search interfaces within the archive and foster in-class discussion concerning the content and historical significance of these often overlooked books.
Text Encoding with Marie de FranceIn this collaborative presentation, a French professor, a Digital Humanities librarian, and an undergraduate French minor from Washington and Lee University will speak about their experience combining two courses, an advanced French literature course with a one-credit Digital Humanities lab (DH Studio). In the literature course, students studied the medieval French Lais of Marie de France and their literary and historical context; in the DH Studio, students learned the basics of XML and the Text Encoding Initiative. The linked courses shared a final project: a public website serving as a scholarly resource on Marie de France featuring the students’ TEI-encoded texts, Le Rossignol and Chevrefeuille.
Stephen McCormick, Assistant Professor of French, will speak about how he was required to reimagine the traditional literary syllabus to allow for collaborative research between students and for development of the technical skills involved in marking up texts with TEI. Mackenzie Brooks, Assistant Professor and Digital Humanities Librarian, will speak on the pedagogical considerations required to introduce digital humanities and the Text Encoding Initiative to undergraduates. Sarah Schaffer, an undergraduate French minor, will share her experiences as part of the student-led research team. Mackenzie and Stephen will teach these courses again in winter 2016 and, to conclude this presentation, we will share the lessons learned from the previous course and ideas to modify and improve our pedagogical goals.
During the summer of 2015, a group of Lehigh University undergraduate students designed a digital story-telling project that invited community members to narrate stories about the city in which the University is situated. With a specific focus upon countering stereotypes about the South Side of Bethlehem, PA, undergraduate students interviewed multiple community members and small business owners and edited film footage to produce over one hundred short clips that celebrate our local community. Ultimately, students created a youtube channel, called “The Bethlehem Unbound Storytelling Project,” for edited interviews that focus on two different types of community stories. One part of the channel houses residents’ favorite memories of Bethlehem while another section offers interviews with local business owners about the history of their stores and their thoughts about the community. “Using Digital Storytelling to Bridge the Town-Gown Divide” will discuss successful collaboration between faculty, staff, students, and community members during the creation of this project and will address how the medium selected for the project gives voice to marginalized community members thereby countering a trend to overlook the diverse voices of our city. First, we will explore the value of student-driven project design and the import of ensuring that a collaborative project maintains a focus on reciprocity by creating a digital archive that is of use to both the local and University community. Second, we will discuss the specific formal choices made in the creation of our digital stories that give community members ownership of their narratives.
In community video academics engage members of a community using ethnographic research methods and then develop projects jointly that address a community need and also express meaningful aspects of the local community’s culture using the medium of video. A partnership has been developed between Bucknell University and the low-income coal region towns of Mt. Carmel and Shamokin thirty-five miles from campus.
In this talk we report on the film students in SOCI 206, Video Ethnography, created in partnership with the volunteer fire fighters of Shamokin focusing on the Shamokin Fire History Museum. Through local network contacts we learned that the Fire History Museum is a facility close to the hearts of volunteers who make up the six volunteer fire companies in this low-income town of 7200 people. The museum represents the life work of John Smith who had been the fire dispatcher and who convinced the town to convert a public restroom into a museum building where he could carry on the work of assembling photos, paraphernalia, and detailed accounts of fires in Shamokin dating back to the 1890s. But once Smith died, no one has known how to understand or access the materials in the museum. The student film concentrates on John Smith as an individual and the symbolic importance of the museum and its contents. We hope it will serve as the jumping off point for organization of an archival project in which the contents of the museum could be organized and made available to the public.
Over the past few years I have worked closely with instructional technology staff at various institutions to create progressive multi-media final projects that challenge students to think creatively about how and for what purposes they labor to frame, package and share their scholarly research. The development of digital video essay assignments (DVE), in particular, have pushed them to engage with new multi-media technology, refine their research for an alternative method of delivery and reconsider their project goals as they engage a more expanded audience for their work.
In contrast to traditional end-of-the-semester essays, properly executed DVE assignments have pushed my students to 1) become proficient users of the software and hardware involved in creating their final products, 2) think through the steps involved in creating a well-researched, articulately narrated, and professionally designed visual presentation of their topic, and 3) consider how they wish to engage their audience in a dialogue about their research. Indeed, I have found that distilling academic work into coherent and cohesive exchanges for broader publics often requires students to acquire a greater amount of expertise and nuanced understanding of their topic than typically demonstrated by (my) traditional paper assignments. Throughout the project students develop and refine their critical analytical and medial literacy skills.
These DVE projects were developed so that students may share their research with individuals beyond the classroom through campus and community presentations and through social media in an effort to sustain dialogue on the important and pertinent contemporary issues covered.
Penn State defines engagement as, “…the scholarship of teaching, research, and creative accomplishment, as well as service that involves citizens and the University working in partnership to create and apply knowledge that addresses pressing societal issues and strengthens civic responsibility and democracy through mutually beneficial relationships. In the broadest sense, engaged scholarship is out-of-classroom experiences that complement classroom learning.” (Engaged Scholarship – Penn State Outreach and Online Education. (2013, July 15). Retrieved March 18, 2015, from http://www.outreach.psu.edu/engaged-scholarship/)
This presentation will document the results of an engaged scholarship experience that was a part of the Penn State University online course, “Geographic Information Systems for Transportation (GIS-T): Principles, Data and Applications”. This project was conducted with the support of the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) and the Susquehanna Economic Development Association-Council of Governments (SEDA-COG – a regional Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) that covers a portion of central Pennsylvania). It was designed with the following learning objectives in mind:
A particular challenge of this engaged scholarship project was the fact that the course was online and students were spread out across the country. There were several tools that were utilized to maintain the flow of information and effectively support collaboration from a distance. In particular, participants were able to utilize Yammer, an enterprise social networking tool; online meeting platforms such as Adobe Connect and Zoom; as well as various file and GIS sharing protocols and tools.
The project was a mutually beneficial experience for the students and coordinating agencies. The students were able to obtain real-world experience using GIS-T principles, data, and applications. These valuable experiences added real rigor to their course experience, and helped prepare students for future work experience, while the coordinating agencies found it very valuable to have important analyses and projects completed by students.
Community-Based Research is a collaborative approach to research where academic researchers, community members, and organizations are involved in the development, implementation and dissemination of research. Such projects are often designed to promote positive change in particular areas of the community. Here we report on a two-year old community-based research project through the University of Notre Dame’s Center for Digital Scholarship and Center for Social Concerns. Working with the City of South Bend and the Near-Northwest Neighborhood association, we developed coursework to train students and community members in documenting property conditions and abandoned properties in an economically variable neighborhood of South Bend, Indiana. Technologically, the project uses ESRI ArcGIS Collector with data hosted by both Notre Dame and the City of South Bend. This application allows offline data collection and access while insuring that the data framework aligns with that used by all stakeholders. Despite this, data collection and analysis are not without some difficulties.
The inventory allows the community to access recently-acquired digital data to assist in planning decisions and help develop an increased sense of community ownership. For community partners without easy access to expensive GIS software, we also ensure that all data are available in an online framework. Repeating data collection annually will also provide valuable data on the effectiveness of various projects. Finally, immersing the students in both the community and its residents helps to foster a better tie between historically disparate groups.
Over the digital age, civic movements and technological processes have advanced the use of information in governments and communities. At the end of the 20th century, democratizing data became a movement of information transparency, dedicated to making public data public, with today’s technology now enabling “open data” for many governments.
Unfortunately, there exists today a new “digital divide,” where many smaller municipalities have few digital support systems, continued reliance on paper public records, and limited access to public information for residents. This project and Spring Capstone class pulled together partners across the University of Pittsburgh interested in piloting a demonstration of how students can help to create and implement digital technology use in smaller communities, help to build the capacity for sustainable improvements, and help them move from paper to digital formats. Working with the Homestead and West Homestead boroughs and other partners, undergraduate and graduate students: 1) “Liberated” municipal data from paper to digital formats via scanning and data entry; 2) Developed electronic forms, with residents filling out permits on line rather than with pen and paper as the only option; 3) Created a web management and alert system that automated the rental property/fee notifications for the collection of rental property fees; and 4) Created a 311 mobile phone application available at Apple to submit complaints on five non-emergency, nuisance areas. The students’ work has led to direct advances in digital applications in these communities and can be extended to others. The capstone work will continue Spring 2016.
Small, residential campuses provide an environment for intensive undergraduate-faculty research, albeit usually based on the faculty member’s work with the student undertaking a branch of it. How do we create the scaffolding for students to take ownership of joint scholarship alongside their own academic and professional development? Collaborative by nature, digital scholarship can furnish a structure that enables students to participate more actively—in research, technology, and design.
In July 2015, Hamilton College hosted the Institute for Liberal Arts Digital Scholarship (ILiADS), providing the opportunity for project teams of faculty members, instructional technologists, librarians, administrators, and students. A surprising and encouraging outcome of ILiADS’ flattened hierarchy and egalitarian team structure was that students recognized and seized upon the opportunity of this collaborative space to take ownership of their contribution as a community of “co-researchers.” By carving out time and space to meet as a group, these students organized the Undergraduate Network for Research in the Humanities (UNRH) along with a conference running simultaneously with #BUDSC15.
ILiADS organizers and a UNRH representative will discuss ways in which ILiADS’ structure directly and indirectly contributed to the students’ empowerment during the Institute. Moreover, the panel will discuss the ways in which ILiADS’ flexible and immersive design, along with its emphasis on teaching and learning, reflected a broader liberal arts ethos and led to a communal ownership of the event and a lasting investment in its outcomes—useful to practitioners of digital scholarship at any type of institution of higher education.
When teachers and instructional designers leverage digital platforms to make undergraduate students write (or visualize) for “the public,” who is the public that students imagine, and to what pedagogical effects? We present a brief case study of how students have used Global Crossroads*, a custom-built media sharing and annotation platform that publishes to a large-scale media installation at the center of campus. We explain how Global Crossroads, in its design and the ways students have chosen to use it, generates a legible public that is both imagined, through how students see themselves in relation to their peers, and enacted, though the intentional sharing and display among peers within and across courses. For this interactive presentation at #BUDSC15 we entreat our colleagues to a collaborative assignment design challenge: What can we, as teachers and instructional designers, do to expand students’ critical reflection on how particular platforms (e.g., wordpress, tumblr, twitter, story maps, etc.) organize communication, authorship, and audience, while also intentionally constituting public audiences for student work?
The Environmental Studies (ENVS) Program at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon has become known for its innovative approach to environmental scholarship. One way of demarcating this innovative approach is that we deliberately complicate environmental issues, helping students learn to ask the hard questions others in the environmental movement may avoid. Another key feature of our ENVS Program both reinforces and serves as a corrective to complication: students learn to situate environmental issues in hybrid geographical contexts to afford quality interdisciplinary research while building some degree of expertise. We are now seeking ways for our students to build greater skills in public engagement, both for the benefit of the communities in which they do research and as an experiential means of deepening their conceptual understandings. Yet we are aware that our students struggle to connect effectively in a world where environmental discourse tends toward the simplistic and decontextualized. Are there better and worse ways for our students to deploy digital tools toward more effective public engagement? Can digital tools help our students better grasp and communicate the value of complicating and situating environmental issues in collaboration with a diverse set of public actors? This presentation briefly summarizes our approach to environmental innovation at Lewis & Clark College, and considers some initial possibilities whereby digital scholarship may help us extend our existing strengths as we more fully explore the realm of public engagement.
In this interactive presentation/discussion, we will discuss our recently-launched pilot project, which is a collaboration between the University of Delaware Library and the Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) Department. The project, led by Discovery Services Librarian Molly Olney-Zide, focuses on strengthening relationships between the Library and STEM disciplines by meeting the needs of those faculty and graduate students rather than limiting itself to those services traditionally provided by the Library. In the earliest stages of this project, we have found that the more common approaches to digital scholarship do not translate especially well to engineering, so based on initial discussions, we are focusing on non-traditional methods such as librarians providing assistance to graduate students as they become familiar with the often-confusing and time-consuming manuscript submission process. That said, working closely with faculty and graduate students, Olney-Zide is working to help the project evolve as new needs and opportunities are discovered. We believe such a nimble approach is required to make “digital scholarship” relevant in STEM research.
In this session, Olney-Zide and Dr. Joshua Zide, Associate Professor of MSE, will offer the perspectives of both a librarian and a faculty member on the project thus far. More essentially, we hope to launch a discussion amongst participants of both the challenges of traditional approaches and also new approaches to collaboratively developing new approaches to engaging STEM graduate student researchers and faculty.
While many digital humanities projects involve collaboration, few have combined the efforts of large research institutions and small liberal arts colleges. With the assistance of the Mellon Foundation, however, the University of Iowa and Grinnell College have established such a partnership, seeking “to weave the digital humanities more deeply and thoughtfully into the curriculum at both institutions while also building cross-institutional bridges to connect Grinnell College and the University of Iowa intellectually and pedagogically […particularly by] learn[ing] what forms of collaboration best serve the humanities.”
Although this project is in its early stages, its successes thus far have been promising. Notably, these two institutions hosted a summer workshop to discuss and debate best teaching practices using digital technologies. Participants benefited from hearing the viewpoints of faculty members at both a research-centered and a teaching-focused institutions and arranged to implement changes into their curriculum based on these discussions.
This presentation, therefore, will trace the effectiveness of the University of Iowa and Grinnell College’s collaboration by collecting and analyzing feedback from institute participants. It will also discuss future plans for the partnership, particularly the additional collaborations that occur throughout the beginning of the fall semester. In doing so, it seeks to propose a model for successful future collaborations between research and teaching institutions of higher education.
“Reading New York” is a collaborative digital research and teaching tool that has already failed twice and sparked a blog about DH failings. Now in its third iteration and on its second title, “Reading New York” has begun to gain momentum all thanks to collaboration within and across institutions. Put simply, “Reading New York” is an augmented text that, when complete, will enable students (college and high school) and the general public to read (with more comprehension) early twentieth-century literature through the help of mapping, images, sound, and film. Moreover, through the collected metadata, this project will serve as a research tool for scholars who are interested in literature, history, visual studies, sound, film, and material culture. During this “work-in-progress” session, we will discuss the early failures of this DH project; show the status of the pilot, which takes F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “May Day” as its sample text; and explain the process by which support was garnered from faculty, students, the library, and colleagues from other institutions. As part of the “work-in-progress” format, we look forward to discussing problems facing this project as it moves ahead into the grant-writing phase. Central concerns include platform flexibility, copyright laws, crowd-sourcing viability, and growing beyond New York. We will also discuss how our inter-institutional collaboration processes currently function, and what we hope this will look like a year from now.
