INTRODUCTION
What is digital humanities?
Digital humanities is the complex intersection of humanities practice with technology.
Digital humanities activities include:
- scanning and digitizing
- database development
- mapping
- software development
- programming
- all kinds of collaboration
- publishing
- text mining
. . .and more.
How I use digital humanities in my courses
I engage my students with the digital humanities in most of my courses. You can check out the website for my Digital History course to see some student responses to the subject, as well as the latest assignments. Because the course changes each time I teach it, I’ll archive the syllabus and assignments here:
- Syllabus: docx, pdf
- Interview a Digital Humanist: docx (and pdf list of some digital humanists), pdf (includes list of digital humanists)
- Research Project Plan: docx, pdf
- Big data/GIS grant proposal: docx, pdf
- Boise Wiki article: docx, pdf
- Professional digital identity (grad students only): docx, pdf
- Augmented reality tour: docx, pdf
I have worked with my students to build the Boise Wiki, an easy-to-edit resource on Boise past and present, and Crafting Idaho, a digital exhibit on Idaho women’s amateur arts and crafts. Last year, my students undertook research on Boise’s Central Rim neighborhood and created a (WordPress) website about its history. I am in the process of building Stories of Idaho, a site showcasing a series of digital exhibits that invite visitors to remix exhibition images and content as they share their own experiences with the exhibition topics.
TOOLS
Easy-to-use digital platforms for student research, writing, and collaboration
Wikispaces: completely free for educational use. If students are doing group work, a wiki is a great way to allow them to collaborate and share their work with the rest of the class. Best of all, you can see which students contributed what content, who made revisions, and when students worked on their wiki pages. (Tip: So that you can keep track of individual students’ work, be sure to remind students to log in under their individual accounts instead of huddling around a single computer with only one student logged in.) You can also monitor individual students’ engagement with your class’s wiki in real time.
It is free (and easy!) to set up and experiment with your own Wikispaces site, but if you want to see how a site works without creating one, you can go to https://wikispaces.com/join/QJC9PRR and play around with that wiki using the code QJC9PRR. (The code expires August 5, so join now.)
WordPress.com: free to use, and you don’t have to worry about paying for hosting space for your students’ work. However, WordPress.com does include video ads following each blog post. Blogs are great when you want students to claim individual authorship and have a discussion (in the comments) about other students’ work.
You are welcome to modify these WordPress.com instructions (.docx) I created for a colleague’s course. Simply substitute your own information for the red text.
WordPress.org (AKA “self-hosted WordPress”): Free to use, this is a more robust version of WordPress than offered at WordPress.com. To use this version, you’ll need to buy a domain name (a URL) and a hosting account. (Don’t be intimidated; that’s an easier process than it seems; this article walks you through how to install WordPress once you have set up a Bluehost account and purchased a domain name.) You can host sites for all your classes and projects for a flat fee of $6.95/month at BlueHost.com, and your first domain name is free when you open an account. Bluehost makes it very, very easy to install WordPress; it only takes a few clicks. Other trusted and typically affordable hosting companies: Dreamhost and Hostgator–as well as a highly rated newcomer that specializes in educational hosting, Reclaim Hosting.
You are welcome to modify these self-hosted WordPress instructions (.docx) I created for my students. Simply substitute your own information for the red text.
Both WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress allow sites to be made private. Consider allowing your students to blog publicly under pseudonyms or just first names. I have found students tend to polish their writing more when they are publishing to the wider web rather than a private course site, and public interaction can be valuable. (You can adjust the settings so that you must approve all public comments before they appear on the site for students to see.)
RESOURCES
Some noteworthy digital history projects
These are examples of the kind of exciting work on the past that faculty and students can accomplish with sufficient funding and technological infrastructure. They also may prove useful in your work with students.
Check out Melville’s Marginalia, Dr. Steven Olsen-Smith’s project chronicling Herman Melville’s annotations in the books he read.
Download an extended version of Dr. Darryl Butt’s PowerPoint presentation from the July 29, 2015 workshop for high school teachers at Boise State: pptx, pdf
Stanford’s Spatial History Project uses multimedia to highlight patterns and relationships that analog scholarship may have difficulty uncovering or visualizing.
Visualizing Emancipation showcases “patterns in the collapse of southern slavery, mapping the interactions between federal policies, armies in the field, and the actions of enslaved men and women on countless farms and city blocks. It encourages scholars, students, and the public to examine the wartime end of slavery in place, allowing a rigorously geographic perspective on emancipation in the United States.”
The Digital Dialectic project at the University of New Mexico is “developing software and related curricula to allow for the in-depth examination and analysis of visual humanities content within both immersive digital dome and web-based environments. The project will use as a model Mundos de Mestizaje, a contemporary fresco that highlights Hispanic history and cultural dialog.”
Researchers from the University of Arkansas and Northwestern State University, Louisiana are using high-resolution aerial images, including thermal imaging, to better understand archaeological sites.
The New York Public Library offers the Map Warper, which digitally aligns “historical maps from the NYPL’s collections to match today’s precise maps.”
A variety of useful and innovative tools developed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, including a collections management database and exhibition platform, a citation management tool, and a tool that aggregates the best scholarship online and encourages open-access research and writing.
A combination of deep research into primary sources (especially maps and artwork) and technological savvy created a visual representation of Washington, D.C. circa 1814.
Finding more projects
CenterNet maintains a list of digital humanities projects at the DH Commons. If you want to dive into scholarly writing on digital humanities theory and practice, check out Digital Humanities Quarterly.
Primary source repositories and mapping projects
When students arrive in my college classroom, they often have difficulty interpreting primary sources, be they historical documents, images, audio, or literature. You can provide your students with valuable analytical practice by having them find, interpret, compare/contrast, and make arguments about primary sources. Many of the sources on the sites listed below are in the public domain or are free for educational, non-commercial use, so students can include them in their blog posts and wiki articles. (When in doubt about copyright, always ask for permission.)
The Library of Congress offers a tremendous collection of historical texts, photos, posters, maps, and audio.
Maria Popova offers an overview of seven key digitization projects, including a project that traces the correspondence and travel of key Enlightenment figures to better understand their influence on one another; a site that documents 17th-century London’s crime, poverty, and social policy through 3.35 million records, a documentary archive and transcription project on the Salem witch trials, and an app that puts the New York Public Library’s collection of sources from the 1939-40 World’s Fair on your iPad.
Students can explore the Trans-Atlantic Slave Database, which provides information on more than 35,000 slave voyages.
Students might come to better understand the history of urban growth and migration in the U.S. through the primary sources and interpretive text available via the Newberry Library’s collection of documents from Chicago and the Great Migration (1915-50). Related: the New York Public Library has an entire site devoted to African-American migration.
The University of Richmond has aggregated a number of interrelated sites and digital tools related to the Civil War. You could easily craft an entire unit on Civil War-era culture and politics from these resources.
A coalition of universities has built the Bracero Archive, which offers primary-source documents as well as interpretive essays and ready-to-use class activities.
The Densho Archive is a repository of primary sources on the Japanese-American internment during World War II, including interviews with former internees. I have my students read Farewell to Manzanar and then, in class, find primary sources that support or complicate Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James Houston’s account of Jeanne’s childhood internment.
The Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation, through its Immigrant Voices project, showcases the stories of immigrants. The narratives are based on interviews with immigrants, stories submitted by immigrant families, and primary sources found in the National Archives by AIISF staff. The focus is on immigrants detained at the immigration station in San Francisco Bay, but students will find the stories of all kinds of West Coast immigrants.
But wait—there’s more!
Digital humanists embrace an ethic of sharing, so there are also a number of free e-books on the digital humanities, including Writing History in the Digital Age, Hacking the Academy, Pastplay: Teaching and Learning History with Technology, Teaching History in the Digital Age, Digital Humanities (pdf), and A Companion to Digital Literary Studies.
To learn more about digital platforms available for your students, I recommend Bryan Alexander’s book The New Digital Storytelling; it’s highly accessible, even for technophobes (my undergraduates loved it).
To learn about one collaboration between a university and a public high school, check out the free version of Digital Tools in Urban Schools: Mediating a Remix of Learning.