Four Lessons Learned Doing Digital History w/ Undergrads

@professmoravecwww.michellemoravec.com

project for todaywww.rdigitalh.org

class syllabus

co teacher Maggie Hobson-Bakerstudents Niki Brogen, Michele Ithan, Molly Rowe,

Emily Siegel, Gabriela StamlerRosemont College Archives, Melanie McBride, Delories Richardi

CHNM is FABULOUSbut what if you don’t have 45 people to do#digitalhistory with?

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?

#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.

#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

What’s up with the peacock?

#3 Let the project evolve or watch it die

#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

• 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 didn’t work with OCR

“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”