Teaching and doing digital history.

Minor Field Readings: Digital History

June 9, 2013 By Leave a Comment

This is my reading list for my minor in digital history, which included a separate course on Digital Pedagogy and Advanced Programming for Historians. I’ve included some of the readings from the Digital Pedagogy class here. The full list is available at our Zotero Group. Our advanced programming course was primarily a praxis; there were no readings beyond help documentation.

History Theory

Alun Munslow, Deconstructing History (1997).
Elizabeth A. Clark, History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn (2004).
Edward Carr, What Is History? (1961).
Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text (1978).
Jörn Rüsen, “Rhetoric and Aesthetics of History: Leopold von Ranke,” History and Theory, Vol. 29, No. 2 (May, 1990), pp. 190-204.
Adrian Jones, “Word and Deed: Why a Post-Poststructural History Is Needed, and How It Might Look,” The Historical Journal, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Jun., 2000), pp. 517-541.
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (1980).

Narrative

Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (2000).
Espen J. Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (1997).
Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (1998).
Hayden White, “The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory,” History and Theory
Vol. 23, No. 1 (Feb., 1984), pp. 1-33.
Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” Critical Inquiry Vol. 7, No. 1, On Narrative (Autumn, 1980), pp. 5-27.
Alan Liu, “When Was Linearity?: The Meaning of Graphics in the Digital Age,” University of California, Santa Barbara, August 2008 (version 1.0).

Text

George P. Landow, Hyper/Text/Theory (1994).
Jerome J. McGann, Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web (2004).
Michael Witmore, “Text: A Massively Addressable Object,” Published on Wine Dark Sea December 31, 2010.
Ian Small and Marcus Walsh, The Theory and Practice of Text-Editing: Essays in Honour of James T. Boulton (1992).

New Media

Lauren Rabinovitz and Abraham Geil, Memory Bytes: History, Technology, and Digital Culture (2004).
Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage (2005).
Marshall McLuhan and Lewis H. Lapham, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1994).
Lev Manovich, “Database as a Genre of New Media,” AI & Society
Daniel V. Pitti, “Encoded Archival Description: An Introduction and Overview,” D-Lib Magazine, Vol. 5, No. 11 (November 1999).
Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort, The New Media Reader (2003).

Visual History

David J. Staley, Computers, Visualization, and History: How New Technology Will Transform Our Understanding of the Past (2002).
David J. Staley, “Sequential Art and Historical Narrative: A Visual History of Germany,” (September 2002).
Alex W. White, The Elements of Graphic Design (2011).
Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (1994).

Mapping

Ian N. Gregory and Paul S. Ell, Historical GIS: Technologies, Methodologies, and Scholarship (2008).
Bodenhamer, Corrigan and Harris, The Spatial Humanities: GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship (2010).

Networks

Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2008).
Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (2009).
Cass R. Sunstein, Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge (2008).
Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (2007).

Access

Gary Hall, Digitize This Book!: The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now (2008).
Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity (2005).
John Willinsky, The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship (2009).

Adoption

Christine L. Borgman, Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet (2010).
Steve Weber, The Success of Open Source (2005).
William G. Thomas, III, “Writing A Digital History Journal Article from Scratch: An Account,” University of Nebraska—Lincoln (December 2007).

Copyright

David K. Levine, Against Intellectual Monopoly (2010).
Lawrence Lessig, Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace, Version 2.0 (2006).
Siva Vaidhyanathan, Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity (2003).
5 Ways The Google Book Settlement Will Change The Future of Reading
Google Books, Fair Uses, and “Copyright” as Misnomer
Mguel Helft, “Judge Rejects Google’s Deal to Digitize Books,” New York Times, March 22, 2011.

Teaching Digital

Sample, Mark. “A Better Blogging Assignment.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. ProfHacker, July 3, 2012.
Eisenberg, Ellen. “Looking for Zalman: Making Historical Scholarship Visible to Undergraduates.” The History Teacher no. May 2005 (n.d.): 325–40.
Hunter, Leslie Gene. “The Future of Teaching History Research Methods Classes in the Electronic Age.” Journal of the Association for History and Computing (June 1998).
Lampert, Lynn. “Where Will They Find History? The Challenges of Information Literacy Instruction.”
Ramsay, Stephen. “The Hermeneutics of Screwing Around: What You Can Do with a Million Books,” [pdf] April 17, 2010.
Ayers, Edward L., The Pasts and Futures of Digital History.
Samuel S. Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002)
Stephane Levesque, Thinking Historically. Educating Students for the 21st Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009)
Mills Kelly, Teaching History in the Digital Age
William H. Dutton and Brian D. Loader, Digital Academe: New Media in Higher Education and Learning (2002).
Jackie Marsh, Popular Culture, New Media and Digital Literacy in Early Childhood (2005).
James, et al., Young People, Ethics, and the New Digital Media: A Synthesis from the GoodPlay Project (2009).
Lee, Dolittle, Hicks, “Social Studies and History Teachers’ Uses of Non-Digital and Digital Historical Resources,” Social Studies Research and Practice Volume 1, Number 3, (Winter 2006).
Coventry et al., “Ways of Seeing: Evidence and Learning in the History Classroom,” The Journal of American History (2006) 92(4): 1371-1402.

 

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Putting Theory in Action in the Classroom

May 2, 2013 By Leave a Comment

 

Women on Trial: Exploring the History of American Women Through Criminal Trials

F
or my final project for Dr. Kelly’s Teaching History in the Digital Age course, I created a 200-300 level course women’s history in America, which incorporates three major theoretical contributions from the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning:

  1. “Uncoverage” and using consistency and patterns in assignments by Lendol Calder,
  2. Historical thinking by Sam Wineburg, and
  3. Kelly’s own thoughts on teaching using digital technology.

The Topic

Using the periodization put forth by Linda Kerber, et al, in their textbook Women’s America: Refocusing the Past,  I divided the history of America into four major sections for this course:1

  • 1600-1820: Early America –> The Salem Witch Trials
  • 1820-1880: The Many Frontiers of Industrializing America –> The Trial of Laura D. Fair
  • 1880-1945: Creating the State in an Industrialized Nation –> The Trial and Execution of Virginia Christian
  • 1945-2010: Struggles Against Injustice –> The Trial of Cheryl Crane

Within each major section, I chose one sensational trial involving at least one woman. The goal is to then “read out” context and content from each of these trials to explore changes in roles of women and anxieties about those changes. I hope to examine women’s public and private experiences in American society, and explore the social and cultural anxieties of American life by using various primary and secondary source materials about the trials and the surrounding topics.

My logic was to begin the course with a very well-documented set of trials–the Salem Witch Trials–to help students understand the bounds of trial evidence and the possibilities for good scholarly writing. Each subsequent trial is considerably less well-documented. So by the time we get to Cheryl Crane, students must use their new skills to help them make sense of the scarce resources that are actually available. Moreover, my hope is that they will have learned how to judge online resources as scholarly or not. (The Crane case is notoriously and comfortably enmeshed in the realm of Hollywood Reporter, People Magazine, and TruTV.)

The Underlying Theories

I was drawn to Lendol Calder’s writings on “Uncoverage,” specifically his argument that in order to teach more, you need to teach less content. By choosing only four trials, I was forced to make hard choices about the content to cover from each. The brutal reality is that I could teach an entire course on any one of these trials. In order to cover them all, I made hard choices about which anxieties or beliefs to cover from each. For example, while I cover lynching and Progressive Era anti-lynching campaigns in the Virginia Christian case, I do not adequately cover the National Association of Colored Women or their involvement in (unsuccessfully) getting Christian’s sentence commuted. However, my hope is that by covering less, I’m asking my students to think more and practice doing the work of an actual historian.

Calder structures his course with repetition of activities and a clear pattern of assignments to help provide a solid framework for his students. I believe this to be incredibly powerful for the students, so I adapted it to fit my course content. You’ll see that the main content of my course covers four modules, each lasting three weeks. The first week in each is devoted to analyzing evidence. I begin with evidence to help unsettle students in the notion that they will not start with the complete picture of the “facts” of the case–that is something they will have to earn by reading and uncovering it as they go. The second week provides some context so that they can understand the issues raised by the evidence. The third week covers the scholarship on the topics we covered in the first two weeks.

Sam Wineburg has written extensively on the skills that constitute Historical Thinking. Both he and Calder specifically mention six skills that make up historical thinking, and I would argue good critical thinking in general: questioning, connecting, sourcing, making inferences, considering alternate perspectives, and recognizing limits to one’s knowledge. My overarching goal with the course is to teach these skills while teaching students to understand specific elements of women’s history in America.

Lastly, the course has a heavy digital element. As I was creating the course, I bounced between two extremes in using digital tools; I either expected  the students to just know how to create history with digital technology or I turned the course into a digital methods class. Thus, I tried to strike a balance by asking students to do both digital and analog assignments, while giving them the option to do a digital or multi-media project for the final, if they are so inclined. The bulk of the work in the course is dedicated to finding and/or using online primary sources. In fact, I’m proud to report that ALL of the primary source materials used in this class are available online. Mills Kelly argues that the future of teaching history lies in the “making, marking, mining, and mashing” that students do online already. I tried to provide some structure to help students make sense of online documents while also teaching them how to discern good from bad information online. For example, two of the assignments deal specifically with Wikipedia entries on the trials. In one, I ask students to evaluate the entry based on the information covered in the course and in another, I ask students how they’d edit an entry.

Then again, I could do an entire course on Wikipedia and editing entries. Another time, another course perhaps.

  1. Gerda Lerner suggested the writing of women’s history can be arranged in these four stages of development, each stage more complex and sophisticated than the last [↩]
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Scholarly Site Review: US History Scene

March 6, 2013 By Leave a Comment

This post is part of an assignment for GMU’s History course, Teaching History in the Digital Age. Last week, I reviewed two sites produced by RRCHNM.

_____________________________

This week, Dr. Kelly asked us to review a digital project outside the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. For this assignment, I chose US History Scene, a new site (copyright 2013) touting free digital resources “hand selected by historians” geared toward educators, students, and history enthusiasts. This gorgeous and modern site (which has a pronounced blog feel) is produced by US History Scene, a multimedia and education publishing company.

The site successfully incorporates content curated by a variety of historians from major universities in the US (not all contributors include full bios). Functionally, the site presents a collection of authoritative and scholarly essays spanning a multitude of 17th to 20th century topics in American history. Some of these essays make clear historical arguments, most read as written lectures, which incorporate both primary source materials (images, mostly) and secondary literature (historiography and video lectures by historians and authors).  The more well-rounded essays include links to other resources, such as teaching aids for educators and historical questions on topic for further study.

It’s a new site, so there are sections with very little content. It looks as if they plan to create a more robust “study guides” section, which as of this review houses information about how to pass an AP test. Additionally, they’ve curated a variety of reading lists on topics in US history and included links to online lectures by prominent historians at major universities. For example, they include Lynn Hunt’s Western Civ lectures from UCLA.

From a pedagogical perspective, while this site offers robust topical material, it functions largely as a secondary source for students. Primary sources may be linked from individual articles, but as they are presented in essay format, students are not given the opportunity to question, evaluate, or analyze these materials for themselves. Wrapped as they are in another’s historical argument, the primary sources are presented as already-interpreted for the reader. Additionally, video content, most of which is embedded from YouTube, is not presented in a way that would allow students to question potential motives or biases of the creator. As is true of all embedded content from YouTube, students have to click off the site to see who uploaded the video or its origin. In either case, the interpretation is done and the content is being presented to students in a factual way, students are not overtly being asked to “think historically” about the content presented to them.

Helpful content for educators is present for some topics, but they have to dig for it. The prominent position of “About Us” and “Contact Us” in the primary navigation bar would be better suited for special collections of resources for educators. The primary mode of organization for all the content on the site is around the topical areas. Educators must come to the site and look up a topic first, then hope some teaching aids are included as part of the essay. Given the high quality of the scholarship here, some articles on how students learn or process historical information would be welcome additions. (At the very least curated content on that topic from elsewhere would be helpful for teachers.)

Fundamentally, US History Scene is a valuable resource. Complex issues are presented as such and more than one point of view is often told. Still, because students have no flexibility to choose how they explore these complex issues, nor are they asked to source, corroborate, or contextualize these topics on their own, the site should be considered as an alternative secondary source. US History Scene is a very new site and it remains to be seen how it will evolve, especially as a resource for educators. Given the quality of the content that exists there, I do hope they add more opportunities for students to practice historical thinking on their own, and give teachers the resources to help them do so.

 

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Historical Resources Online and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

February 27, 2013 By 1 Comment

As part of an assignment for Dr. Kelly’s History 689: Teaching History in the Digital Age, we were asked to evaluate two digital projects. I looked at two projects devoted to teaching history with online primary source material developed and published by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at my home institution of George Mason University. Exploring U.S. History tackles niche topics for a specific class and Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French functions as a portal or collection of primary source materials. These two sites, while existing on two ends of the spectrum on digital scholarship, do suffer from similar issues, namely in that they only partially address helping students ask good questions of history.

Exploring U.S. History, last updated in 2004, presents modules designed to supplement George Mason University’s History 120 course. The stated goals are to reinforce textbook readings and built IT proficiency, which is defined as learning to build and maintain webpages, completing online assignments, performing online research and using technology in historical analysis.

Given its 2004 production date, the site is presented with a very simple, yet clear design that stands the test of time. The site offers clear instructions and navigation buttons. Nice visual cues and use of breadcrumbs help with wayfinding, which allows students or readers to drop in on any page and understand how to click around. (This is important given that the majority of traffic to a website enters through a page other than the home page.)

The available topics are diverse and plentiful and offer students a broad view that the work of historians is more than just reading texts. Still the assignments presented ask students to answer questions instead of ask them. The assignments do help lead the student through what we could consider “good” historical questions, but the site does not help connect the dots between the primary material and asking historical questions of that material.1

Detailed instructions  as to how to explore these objects, which range from material culture to photographs to texts, may be  prescriptive  depending on the particular topic or source in question. Sadly one of the more sophisticated assignments–analyzing artifacts in the Barnum museum in situ–offers no such instructional layer. With respect to the specific goals of the site, much like the steps to “reading” source materials, a sophisticated historian can see how the assignments and exercises map back to the original goals, but it is doubtful an undergraduate will. Additionally, there are no conclusions to any of the assignments. As a supplemental site for a physical course, once can assume the discussion will take place in class, but as an online resource, this lack prevents non-students from exploring. With a little work, this site could be scaled for use beyond that specific classroom.

On the other end of the spectrum, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution provides a collection of online primary source documents. It is the older of the two sites with a copyright at 2001. It is unclear when it was last updated.

The site functions as an actual portal for an impressive array of source material including topical essays, primary sources ranging from images and paintings to  texts, songs, and maps. Due to its early creation date, the site does not benefit from directed navigation options. Browsing, exploring and searching are encouraged, yet there is no inherent difference between these three functions. A a student arriving on site without a research plan would be hard pressed to know where to begin2. One of the most useful essays, “How to Read Images” is buried at the bottom of the Explore tab. Offering a more obvious link to this essay–and providing similar instructions to help scholars “read” the other primary source types–would be one way to solve this problem.

The essays located under the Explore tab make use of the early benefits of hypertext. The supplemental primary source materials that are presented with each essay are listed in the left margin (not in context in the main body) for interested students to explore. However, the essays themselves read as chapters from a general text book and are still presented as insurmountable chunks of text without the reprieve of images to break the flow and rest the eyes. Wayfinding in these essays is complicated by the fact that each supplemental source pops as a new window (cutting edge technology in 2001) complete with new navigation buttons.

The Browse tab presents a truly non-directed browse functionality; the sources are in alphabetical order and offer no other categorization beyond the primary source type.  The primary text materials on the site are presented with a short introductory paragraph and translated to English. As Jeri mentioned in her review, this prevents students from actually seeing the original document in full context or reading it in its native French. Nuance lost in translation is lost forever and the ability to read texts in their native language is a crucial part of historical thinking. While admittedly a barrier for most undergraduate students, the importance of seeing a text in its original form (and language) allows them to “read” the document on a more sophisticated level. While the site does provide context for the text in question, an image of the original would be a helpful addition.

Knowledge of modern research on site usability, readability, and navigation undermine the truly impressive collection of artifacts on the French Revolution. The overarching challenge with this site as a teaching tool is the lack of a framework to help guide students in their historical thinking. The site itself presupposes the reader is asking sophisticated questions and in this respect functions only as a search portal for finding relevant material.

Regardless of their respective goals–admittedly one site was created to ask specific questions of history and the other functions only as a warehouse–these sites would benefit from more open-ended questions and better instructions on how to “read” sources. Despite their age, with these additions, these sites would remain relevant to helping students learn to think historically.

  1. See Wineburg, “On the Reading of Historical Texts: Notes on the Breach Between School and Academy,” Am Educ Res J September 21, 1991 vol. 28 no. 3 495-519. [↩]
  2. For the challenges with search, see Beyond Google: How Students Conduct Academic Research [↩]
Filed Under: Digital & Pedagogy, Readings