As students increasingly draw upon digital content as a primary source of information, how might they be taught to be both discriminating consumers as well as producers of online information? Doing history rather than teaching history is not a new approach, but the “doing” part of researching, writing, and publishing now includes drawing upon and creating digitized resources. In this NITLE Shared Academics seminar, NITLE subject-area specialist Michelle Moravec, Aaron Cowan, assistant professor of history at Slippery Rock University, and Kathryn Tomasek, associate professor of history at Wheaton College, provided concrete examples from their own work, and examined the opportunities and challenges of integrating digital humanities into the undergraduate curriculum. These are Dr. Kathryn Tomasek's slides.
4. High-Impact Practices
Project LEAP: Liberal Education and America’s Promise
American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U)
https://www.aacu.org/leap/
15. History 302
Junior Colloquium
Methods course for History majors
Intended to be taken the semester prior to taking
capstone course—Senior Seminar
Students in Senior Seminar are expected to write a
research paper of at least twenty pages, not
including front and back matter
The paper must be based on original research in
primary sources.
Assignment meant to model the process of
research and writing
16. Day Book
Daily accounting of
transactions that reflect the
many business activities of
Laban Morey Wheaton
between 1828 and 1859
Payments
Rents
Land, equipment
Taxes
Postage
Labor
Purchases
Food
Fabrics and sewing supplies
Lumber and building supplies
17.
18.
19.
20. Long Term Collaborations
Building a database that can be used in future assignments
Files available for use in other courses on campus.
Computer Science
Diaries and accounts can be coded for analysis in US
History courses.
Eventually, files will be available for use on other
campuses.
We built a website for the Wheaton College Digital History
Project in 2010.
TAPAS Project has created a tool that will publish XML
files; it has just launched
These projects feed my own research about
women, work, and economy in the nineteenth-century
United States.
22. Transcription and markup, as part of scaffolded
assignments in which students engage deeply
with archival materials and write about the
stories they uncover, offer one model for the
effective use of digital tools in teaching the
practice of history to undergraduates.
Over the past seven years, undergraduates at Wheaton College in Massachusetts have participated in transcribing and marking up primary sources from the Wheaton College Archives and Special Collections (WCASC). The work I have done with them and a team of colleagues in Library and Information Services (LIS) has shaped the development of the Wheaton College Digital History Project (WCDHP), in which collaborations that include a faculty member, the College Archivist and Special Collections Curator, the Technology Liaison for Humanities, and undergraduates have been contributing to the digitization of a hidden collection. The project focuses on documents related to the founding and early years of Wheaton Female Seminary, an institution for the higher education of women that was founded in 1834, and became a college in 1911. The school was founded by the Wheaton family, and documents authored by Eliza Baylies Wheaton and her husband Laban Morey Wheaton are particularly abundant and instructive.
In fact at the time we began our work, most digitization projects that used TEI employed either graduate students or professional staff to transcribe and markup texts. Things have changed a lot over the past nine years. I understand that yesterday’s speakers were Northwestern undergraduates who have been working with Martin Mueller, who is a longtime member of the TEI community. In our case, LIS staff members and I collaborated in adding a TEI module to an introductory-level U.S. Women’s History course in Fall 2004. Students learned about the economic uncertainties in the lives of unmarried white women by transcribing and marking up the journal of Maria E. Wood, the daughter of a Baptist minister from Maine. During the period covered in the journal, Wood wrote about events in her life in Upper Alton, Illinois, about her father’s illness, about the family’s move back to New England, and about her life in the year following her father’s death. In a scaffolded assignment, each student was assigned a set of pages from the journal to transcribe, and then groups of students marked up the entire journal using themes from the course: family, work, religion, and death and mourning. Students responded to the assignment quite positively, noting that it was the first time they had ever had the opportunity to work with original sources. They expressed a sense of having gotten to know Wood and having understood the past better than they ever had before. We wrote up and published our experience, and I’ll be happy to share a copy (the journal is behind a pay wall).
Coincidentally, our encounters with TEI happened in the same year that our College Archivist and Curator of Special Collections received word of pocket diaries that had been kept by Eliza Baylies Wheaton and were available for purchase. She had long known of the existence of such diaries, but none had been preserved in the Wheaton Family Collection. Our recent success with the Maria E. Wood journal, combined with the presence on campus of students with experience using XML/TEI gave us the opportunity to propose the creation of digital editions of the diaries and a travel journal from 1862. (to paper)
In spring 2009, our project took a new turn
As students in the research methods course for History majors began to transcribe and mark up pages from the daybook
That Laban Morey Wheaton kept between 1828 and 1859. This book records financial transactions that reflect some of the range of Wheaton’s business interests during those thirty years, including agricultural pursuits and rentals for land and houses as well as tax collections, fees for legal services, and the operation of a general store in Norton, Massachusetts.
Students transcribed page spreads from the day book in courses I taught in spring 2009 and spring 2010. Here you see a detail. Handout—scaffolded assignment.