Wednesday, January 1, 2014

Party of 1, Doing Digital History with Undergrads

[or from Tweet to lesson Plan and back again]

For AHA Session 190
Saturday, January 4, 2014: 2:30 PM-4:30 PM Thurgood Marshall Ballroom East (Marriott Wardman Park)
Chair: Sharon M. Leon, George Mason University
Panel: Tona Hangen, Worcester State University
Thomas Harbison, Baruch College, City University of New York
Jeffrey W. McClurken, University of Mary Washington
Michelle Moravec, Rosemont College
Luke Waltzer, Baruch College, City University of New York (withdrew due to family emergency)

In the fall of 2012 I blogged about doing digital history work at an extremely small liberal arts college.

Sometimes in the twitterverse I find myself becoming depressed about my inability at a very small liberal arts college to implement some of the very cool digital history ideas I run across. Working off the definition of digital history from Princeton Digital History lab, historians make connections, find patterns, and make comparisons, which is precisely what I tell students I teach them to do, I decided to seek ways to begin stealth-ing digital history into my courses with the goal of assembling a sort of shadow digital history curriculum that would port across my courses. 
That didn't happen.  Instead, I began wedging DH into as many course crevices as possible. I did a very small collaborative google map in my first year seminar and students in women's history course live tweeted as historical figures.

That semester I was so lucky to have Michael Cuomo as a student in an upper division special topics course History in the City.  After he graduated that year, he ended up going on to graduate work in instructional technology. During the semester, he functioned as the class project manager.   He identified timeline JS as the program we should work with and my students produced a timeline of events at Philadelphia public history sites. For the final students turned a collaborative google doc that into a website about narratives of Prohibition.

 Last summer, while on vacation, I began pondering how to stealth more DH into courses.




At first I thought to do this as an alternative primary source assignment in my online U.S. Survey course, but none of the students took me up on that option.  I think that the number of non-majors in the course and the online aspect discouraged students from taking on the more adventurous digital option.

I ended up moving a modified version over to my very small upper division elective the history of childbirth which is what I’m going to talk about today in conjunction with two of the questions posed by our panel.

  • What are the complications of introducing digital methods and approaches into topics courses? 
  • How do teachers with little institutional support work digital skills into their teaching? 
Working in a topics course, the students are generally at least late sophomores more likely juniors or seniors and the material is meatier. Plus the class size is smaller, which is key, because I work with the most minimal infrastructure ever, students who may not have regular access to either computers or wifi basically no teaching technology.  I  found 1 librarian and a colleague and we “are” the digital huamnities at my college (and the librarian just left!).   All of this is to say that building anything huge is out of the question and anything that I can’t teach students isn’t going to happen.

Three lessons for doing small digital history with undergrads
  1.  Start very small 
  2.  Do it yourself first 
  3.  Be prepared to hand hold 
The history of childbirth course revolves around introducing students to how we talk about history. We started with historiography created jointly over the course of the semester. I also started them on a Wikipedia editing project about Mary Coley. We created wordles to explore and compare first hand accounts of childbirth.

 I also wanted to to introduce the students to some of the controlled vocabularies we use to talk history. I started by teaching the students Boolean logic, which got them into the mode of thinking about binary operations, and prepared them for work with Dublin Core.

We then moved into working with Wikipedia, which students resisted like no one’s business. Honestly considering how they all rely on Wikipedia so much I thought they’d be delighted. We worked first in google docs, then moved into the wiki interface. The gui for references made that MUCH easier.

I though we would then move into Omeka do a small exhibit, but I gave them the option to use Pinterest instead because I like the reach of pinterest, third largest social media site, with a significant female user based (about 70-80%) and large k-12 educator population. I agreed on pinterest provided they still learned how to dublin core metadata.  Ashley Lierman conducted not one but TWO sessions with the students, before and after their initial attempts.

Students did pretty well with particularly considering how cludgy pinterest is (really NO way to order pins?) They curated boards using images associated with men moving into labor and delivery rooms to illustrate historical shifts they learned about in the reading.



After we completed the readings for the semester, we designed a final that required students to create a digital storytelling board in pinterest.  Students used questions based on the course readings to analyze popular culture representations of childbirth in reality tv shows and on youtube.

1. pick 5 screen captured images from a childbirth reality show
2. turn in paper with 500 words analyzing each image in terms of the "Ps" laid out in our reading (place, power, privilege, participation, peacefulness) and selected at least one quote from the readings to accompany each image
3. create a board ideally annotating the image using the quote (limited by the 500 character maximum on pinterest)






Things I plan to do next go around include drawing greater comparisons between wikipedia and pinterest including gendered platforms,  image v text based, information v consumption.

I would also like to find a way to work in some aspect of producing history using digital tools, as opposed to presenting history digitally.  We started down that path with the wordle assignment, but didn't continue.

Finally, I needed to cover copyright in more detail.    Many GLAM institutions are on Pinterest and Getty Images has cut a deal with them, but still students need to be more aware of copyright infringement.

Pinterest just opened it up its API and added mapping functions which I think may create even more interesting pedagogical options.


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