Collaborative Notes for Session (add your own thoughts!)
In this workshop, we will discuss strategies for running programs that focus on the effective incorporation of digital tools and projects in the classroom. Rather than a tool- or method-based approach, the focus is on the development of assignments from learning objectives through assessment. We will discuss the importance of thoughtful pedagogy and how this model provides a sustainable way to grow interest in digital methods and tools across your campus.Collaborative Notes for Session (add your own thoughts!)
Challenges and Solutions for CHF's Linked Data Digital Collection (Michelle DiMeo)
The Chemical Heritage Foundation is building a digital collection that will allow users to search across our Museum, Library, Archival and Oral History Collections, each currently held in separate databases with diverse metadata standards. Part of this cross-collection initiative is to clean metadata and use external vocabulary authorities for standardization and interoperability, making it possible for users to connect similar but distinct parts of our collections. CHF is building this digital collection using the open source platform Hydra, but some components necessary to a successful linked data implementation, such as using a triplestore, do not come as part of the default Hydra stack. This talk will highlight challenges we faced in trying to do linked data as a small, diverse cultural heritage institution and how we've been working to overcome them.
Digitizing Student Activism (Lauren White)
“This is Why We Fight” is an interactive timeline of student-led social justice movements at Gettysburg College. Using Scalar and TimelineJS, this project documents an integral part of college history, and also attests to the merit of those students who fight for their own rights or support those with less privilege than themselves. Images from Gettysburg College’s Special Collections and College Archives and clippings from the student newspaper, The Gettysburgian, are used to bring the narrative to life. The project began in the summer of 2016 as a part of Musselman Library’s Digital Scholarship Summer Fellowship.
‘Hello Coed!’ A 1950s History of Gettysburg College Women (Keira Koch)
As a Digital Scholarship Summer Fellow with Gettysburg College’s Musselman Library, I was able to present a story of the past by using digital tools to create a narrative of women at Gettysburg during the 1950s. Historical narratives are often told through the lens of white men. My Scalar project, “‘Hello Coed!’ A 1950s History of Gettysburg College Women,” seeks to break this trend and add the narratives and voices of women to the record of history.
Your Friend and Classmate: Following the West Point Class of June 1861 Through the American Civil War (Julia Wall)
My project, “Your Friend and Classmate: Following the West Point Class of June 1861 Through the American Civil War” is an interactive database that follows the lives and journeys of the cadets of the West Point class of June 1861 throughout the Civil War. The purpose of my project, which I began as a Digital Scholarship Summer Fellow at Musselman Library, is to tell the stories of these soldiers, both Union and Confederate. My research expands upon existing scholarship on the June class, which included distinguished members such as Patrick O’Rorke, Alonzo Cushing, and George Custer.
Is a Digital Archaeology Workbook a DH Project? (Robert Sieczkiewicz, Scott Cox)
While DH journals and conferences review teaching tools used by historians and classicists, the pedagogical apparatus of archaeology are discussed in separate realms. This demo aims to create an intersection of those circles. It will discuss the development of a digital excavation workbook for use by students in Introduction to Archaeology (ANTH110) at Susquehanna University as a DH project. The final class project was a hypothetical re-excavation of a well-known archaeological site. Students were charged with imagining the site prior to its excavation, proposing an excavation plan, and describing their findings in a digital site report. Student feedback revealed that the tasks of learning to use new software and designing a site from scratch inhibited students from fully realizing the pedagogical goals of the assignment. The digital excavation workbook facilitates easy web page creation, allowing students to focus on the objective of the exercise rather than the tools.
Mapping the Medieval Woman (Jeannine Kiefer)
"Mapping the Medieval Woman" is a project focused on illuminating in the public consciousness knowledge of the contributions by women to cultural production and consumption in the Middle Ages. Collaborators are Tracy Chapman Hamilton, (independent scholar), Therese Martin (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas in Madrid) and Mariah Proctor-Tiffany (California State University in Long Beach). This project will produce a free online tool, a series of interpretive essays and a symposium that will highlight the complexity of women’s relationship to spaces and material culture. This presentation will focus on one small part of this ambitious project—the complex digital archive we are building in ARTstor's SharedShelf with the support of the University of Richmond Libraries. The database will allow researchers to record not only sites of commissions, but also to trace how women moved objects in space and time in the process of building their identities and legacies for their families. The rich data will also be published to ARTstor's Open API so it can be harvested using a python script into a final web-based public database hosted on Github.
Spatializing Ssylka: Experiencing Exile in Imperial Russia (Mark Moll)
The experience of migration and exile, the dislocation of space, were crucial components of the Russian revolutionary tradition. Revolutionaries viewed exile as a pilgrimage to burnish their revolutionary bona fides through suffering for the cause. The success of the October Revolution provided the first opportunity to openly celebrate these martyrs in print. No expense was spared in documenting, organizing and publishing their experiences. Among the most extensive such work was undertaken by the All-Union Society of Hard Laborers and Exile-Settlers, who published a mix of biographies, histories and hagiographies in 116 issues of the journal Katorga i Ssylka [Hard Labor and Exile] between 1921 and 1935. Among their last publications was a nearly 900-page biographical dictionary of the society’s members. This project, still in its infancy, will use Historical GIS to examine the diachronic flow of people within familiar historical narratives of exile as well as reveal underlying trends and unexpected contingencies through the use of interactive data visualizations.
Inspiration, Community, and a Discerning Eye for Data Visualization (Jake Riley)
This talk will focus on the the body of work generated by the weekly #makeovermonday data visualization challenges of 2016. Each week, Tableau Zen Master Andy Kriebel selects a visualization as the base for a makeover challenge. Through his blog and an active Twittersphere, Andy's call to join him in this exercise has brought together hundreds of data visualization artists to reinterpret the data sets and push the limits of the tools we use to tell stories with data. My project, the #motherviz, showcases the 3,300 dashboards built by this active Twitter community in 2016 and serves to showcase this body of work while providing fodder for inspiration and community building.
Collaborative Notes for Session (add your own thoughts!)
For several reasons, at our school, we have prioritized developing new projects as static sites, which has forced us to address the obvious shortcoming of such technologies: working with multiple contributors. In this workshp we will explore a stack geared towards collaboration. Our current model, based on github, prose.io and Jekyll, allows us to get student and faculty involvement with minimal technical barrier. On a practical level, this stack is easily reproducible since relatively few resources are required.
Participants will leave the workshop knowing how to setup the stack, collaborate and have a site ready for deployment through github-pages with a specific URL.
Collaborative Notes for Session (add your own thoughts!)
I Want to Be Believed: Content and Structure as Value Propositions in Ufology Websites (S. E. Hackney)