Okay, so I completely failed at my attempts to blog daily about our DH 101 course. I want to blame the fast pace of the mini-Spring Term that meets daily for 4 weeks, but that would be just an excuse. So, here’s a recap:
Day 4: Visit to the Scholars’ Lab at UVA: this really turned out to be a highlight of the course. The feedback from the students on this experience was very positive. Undergraduates at a liberal arts college don’t often get the chance to interact with graduate students in the humanities. Providing undergrads with the opportunity to engage in conversation on a scholarly topic with students just a few years older can be a stimulating experience. As our students talked about their project I could see that they were really starting to get into the topic.
Day 5: Brandon Walsh and Sarah Sorti from Scholars’ Lab came down to W&L to teach this session on project charters and Web design.
Day 6: I gave the class an overview about how the Web works, i.e., all those things I take for granted that I’ve learned over the last 25 years about the Internet. By the end of class each student had acquired a Web hosting account and personal domain via Reclaim Hosting. For this course the students ended up not using their hosting account or web site but that was due to the nature of their project. However, I think it’s perfectly feasible for students to use their own hosting accounts for course-based projects. I’ll definitely be trying this approach when I teach Digital History in the fall term.
Day 7: My co-teacher Mackenzie Brooks introduced the students to the concept of metadata and cataloging and why that’s important in creating digital projects. She had the students do a great hands-on exercise where they identified key terms for material relating to the students’ project.
Day 8: Jim Ambuske from Scholars’ Lab came down to talk about history and mapping.
Day 9: Jon Eastwood, Associate Professor of Sociology at W&L, led a fascinating session on social network analysis in the context of the course project. He showed a number of examples of how to use R to visualize and analyze patterns in publishing data from literary history.
Day 10: Project work day.
Day 11: Cecilia Marquez from Scholars’ Lab came to talk about Postcolonial DH.
Day 12: Lesley Wheeler, Professor of English at W&L, gave the class a presentation about the poetry of Ezra Pound since he formed a major component of their DH project.
Day 13 – 15: Project work days.
I’ll add some reflections on the course in a future post.
Leave a Reply