Category Archives: Participant Posts

Posts by the participants, aggregated from their sites.

by

Digital Pedagogy

.entry-header

I was very energized by today’s session and have lots of ideas for my Digital History/Humanities course, as well as for making my other courses digital inflected. I think right now I need to try to keep myself from trying to do too much this fall–need to start with small steps! I have a clearer idea now of what I can do with my DHH course, and how to accomplish it. I am going to develop a pre-course skills assessment survey like Jeff McClurken’s, and get it off to the students so that I can get that information before classes begin. I also plan to identify some sources students can use for building digital projects; I have a few in mind already.

I do want to have my capstone students do their final papers on Word Press, but I may have them do a sort of hybrid with the paper and links, images on Word Press but also printed as a more “traditional” research paper–kinda how the JAH and other print journals do digital scholarship. Have to think on that a bit and see what my students think.

.entry-content

Source: Digital Pedagogy

by

Digital history? Moi?

Digital history? Moi?

Here at “Doing Digital History” in lovely Arlington, Virginia we’re currently working on ways to design and justify our respective digital history projects and courses at our home institutions. I’m fortunate enough that I won’t have to justify mine, but I’ve been working out the syllabus for a digital, experiential learning archives-based course for the last week and a half (before I start teaching it exactly two weeks from today).  If you want to see what it looks like at the moment, then click here.


About Jonathan Rees

Professor of History, Colorado State University – Pueblo.

.entry-content clearfix

Category(s): Digital Humanities

.entry-utility

Source: Digital history? Moi?

by

Voila!–Syllabus and Online Survey Creation and Dessimination

Now that we are in the eighth day of the workshop, a number of ideas have begun to gel and produce fruit.

The two that emerged today during workshop during discussions were a draft of my syllabus for an online graduate history course that I am teaching this fall tentatively titled “Learning and Doing African American History in the Digital Age:  Cutting-Edge Theories, Tools, and Approaches,” and an online survey that I will launch to learn more about the manner and degree to which scholars of history and public history engage digital tools, technology, and methods in professional communication, teaching, and research.  I hope to use the data collected to help identify individual, departmental, and institutional areas for professional growth and development.

I am going to ask my now wonderfully-informed DH workshop colleagues to evaluate the survey offer suggestions for improvement before I forward the survey for posting via Survey Monkey.   I hope to launch the survey next week, and I will give participants a two-week window to respond.

Both projects are integrally related to my ongoing research on the Lillian Horace Papers.

Full speed ahead!

 

 

 

Source: Voila!–Syllabus and Online Survey Creation and Dessimination

by

Now You Hear It: Music & History

I greatly appreciate the time we were granted in DH to consider or rethink how we use music in our history courses.  In my early days as a French and ESL teacher, I created songs to help my students absorb various concepts.  My favorite “Love Revised” carried my 10th and 11th graders through a jazzy lesson in composition writing that I still enjoy singing for fun when no one is in earshot:  “Baby, Dot my “i’s”/cross my “t’s”/make a polished paper out of me/You see I have had enough of fragmented love…”  And the rendition goes on….

When I entered the college classroom as a French teacher, I continued to compose little songs to help my students remember various types of grammatical configurations.  And I was more than eager to use my creative skills once again to help me remember under pressure the numbers of sharps and flats found in various key signatures.

As I was trying to establish myself as a historian, I shied away from performance in the class room, and chose to include prerecorded performances that meshed well with a given historical theme or period.   Music as social protest was more suitable to my needs at the time.  With the advent of You Tube and a boost of confidence gained from a jazz history course I took on campus, I began including on my syllabi links to various songs with clear historical import: Billie Holiday’s haunting rendition of “Strange Fruit,” James Brown, “Say It Loud: I’m Black and I’m Proud,” Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman,” and others.

My past and ongoing appreciate for music and music literature notwithstanding,  I greatly appreciate our discussion of music and digital history because it challenged me to imagine other meaningful ways to engage music in my history classes.

 

Source: Now You Hear It: Music & History

by

Now, You See It: Visualizing History

Our detailed discussions about visualizing history have been among the most beneficial to me in my intermittent ten-year quest to find digital tools to map the missionary impulse of African American Pentecostal Charismatics in the Southwest.

As I had encountered maps in textbooks throughout my educational career, I was surprised by the opaque answers I would get each time I asked about creating maps to enhance my project.

As I poured through property records from one county to the next, it became clear almost immediately that the data collected would be best understood on a graph or map as opposed to described in a traditional narrative.  I was assured that mapping programs existed but also that they were complicated and expensive.

Of course, I was happy to learn that our recently hired geographer had ordered a copy of an excellent mapping program.  My goal since that announcement been to relocate all the data collected and now stacked away in boxes, and prepare it for fresh mapping project.

Given the length of my journey to “seeing” particular moments in history, I was delighted to learn about the various mapping programs we might use to enhance our teaching and scholarship.  With those tools and GIS in hand, I can move forward with confidence one coordinate at a time.

Source: Now, You See It: Visualizing History

by

Distant Reading and My Research

Before the institute and today’s session, I thought that I might be able to use text mining to aid me in my research. More specifically, I had intended to use it to examine a cluster of apx. 75 oral histories on riots that took place in Baltimore following Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. These interviews have already been transcribed and are readily accessible at the Baltimiore 68 website. However, after doing the reading and playing with some of the search engines, I am less sure about the usefulness of this technique for my project. To begin, it appears that “distant reading” is best for large bodies of work, and while 75 transcripts, of apx. 15-20 pages each is significant, I’m not sure if the text mining enhances my ability to interpret the “data.” In addition, I’m not sure what the results of some of the mining shows. For example, the word clouds and/or charts generated by voyant either don’t say much or reveal things about the sources that I didn’t already know. This said, I intend to continue to experiment with overview and voyant to see if they reveal some patterns that otherwise are not readily apparent or which I have not seen.

Distant Reading and My Research | My blog.

by

Distant Reading for the Classroom

Unknown  Unknown2

Distant reading will make a world of textual evidence available in new and engaging ways for students of slavery. Looking for words and phrase patterns that reoccur in the existing recored of runaway slave advertisements using data mining techniques will also introduce students to the digital humanities. Slaveholders placed detailed advertisements in colonial era and nineteenth-century newspapers seeking the return of enslaved men and women who chose to run away from bondage. These advertisements offer a window into the world of slavery that can be enhanced using distant reading techniques and methods.

Multiple websites are dedicated to digitizing runaway slave advertisements and can form a base of data for a distant reading project. One such site, the Geography of Slavery in Virginia, pulls together advertisements from Virginia newspapers. Another deals with North Carolina Slave Advertisements from 1751 to 1840.

Distant reading will help to determine common categories and features of slavery.

images3

Source: Distant Reading for the Classroom

by

Text mining

There will be no sizable body of digitized material for the project that I’m thinking about, so not sure at first blush if text mining will come in. I found myself generally less drawn to the web services and software we learned about yesterday, probably because my work has yet to include a large, digitized corpus that could undergo analysis of that kind. Looking forward to continuing to explore those tools, though, and learning more about the ways other scholars have used them!

by

Distant Reading

Today we learned about distant reading.  Well, we’d learned about it before – but today we learned a lot more.  I’ve been thinking about how I use this potentially powerful tool.  In the project I proposed – to follow the movements of Delta sharecroppers – I’m not sure how to employ this technique.  That’s not to say that tomorrow won’t bring some new insight.

But I can see this as useful in some of my other research.  One of the projects mentioned last week was about using deep reading/data mining to examine when “World War I” replaced “the Great War” in newspaper writing.  I write about milk, and I am interested in the ways people have defined and regulated dairy products.  It might be useful to look at things like “certified milk” and “pasteurized milk” and, for that matter, “grade A milk” to see when those phrases entered our lexicon.  Just a thought.  This all really hasn’t had time to settle in yet, and I’m a person who needs to cogitate.

 

Update – decided I was here to work with this stuff, so I did.  Here’s one thing I found:

I knew about the growth of both certified and pasteurized milk circa 1900.  I didn’t realize that (writing about) certified milk dropped off that sharply that much sooner.  Hmm…

Source: Distant Reading

by

Distant Reading and My Research

Before the institute and today’s session, I thought that I might be able to use text mining to aid me in my research. More specifically, I had intended to use it to examine a cluster of apx. 75 oral histories on riots that took place in Baltimore following Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. These interviews have already been transcribed and are readily accessible at the Baltimiore 68 website. However, after doing the reading and playing with some of the search engines, I am less sure about the usefulness of this technique for my project. To begin, it appears that “distant reading” is best for large bodies of work, and while 75 transcripts, of apx. 15-20 pages each is significant, I’m not sure if the text mining enhances my ability to interpret the “data.” In addition, I’m not sure what the results of some of the mining shows. For example, the word clouds and/or charts generated by voyant either don’t say much or reveal things about the sources that I didn’t already know. This said, I intend to continue to experiment with overview and voyant to see if they reveal some patterns that otherwise are not readily apparent or which I have not seen.

Source: Distant Reading and My Research