Charlotte Nunes
Council on Library and Information Resources Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Scholarship
Southwestern University
Mary W. Elings
Head of Digital Collections, The Bancroft Library
University of California at Berkeley
Jen Wolfe
Digital Scholarship Librarian, Digital Research & Publishing
University of Iowa
Tom Keegan
Head, Digital Research & Publishing
University of Iowa
Archives-Based Digital Humanities Projects: Transformative Potential at Institutions Large and Small (Nunes, Ellings)
This session will focus on efforts to create opportunities for students to learn about digital archives by building, analyzing, and enhancing access to them. Featuring speakers from two very different higher educational contexts (the University of California at Berkeley, a large state university, and Southwestern University, a small liberal arts college in Georgetown, Texas) the presentation will consider how small-scale, archives-oriented digital humanities projects at both institutions have transformative potential for higher education. Emerging scholarship such as Mia Ridge’s Crowd-Sourcing Our Cultural Heritage (2014) offers best practices as well as important insights into the challenges and rewards of projects that connect the public with ongoing archival digitization projects. Yet large-scale public crowd-sourcing projects are often resource intensive, even for a large research institution like Berkeley. There exists no systematic consideration of how smaller-scale, targeted projects can engage faculty and students in the work of archives using digital methods. How can digital archiving practices be substantively incorporated into pedagogies and curricula targeting university students? How might digital archiving processes, including digitization, transcription, and metadata creation, be incorporated in higher education curricula, so as to create meaningful learning opportunities for students? These questions will be addressed through discussion of archives-based digital humanities projects that rely on cross-campus interdisciplinary collaboration. For example, UC Berkeley’s recent #HackFSM hackathon brought together small teams of students to re-envision access to the Free Speech Movement Digital Archives. Southwestern’s Latina History Project involves student participants in digital archiving processes for a collection of photographs and oral histories provided by Latina social justice activists from across Central Texas. Drawing on case studies from multiple projects in process at their respective institutions, the speakers will demonstrate how targeted archives-based digital humanities projects can enhance research and pedagogy at both a large research institution and a small liberal arts college.
Presentation (Nunes)
Archives Alive!: Adding Scalability to Digital Humanities Scholarship, Undergraduate Engagement, and Librarian/Faculty Collaboration (Wolfe, Keegan)
This presentation will include the results of a collaboration between library staff and IDEAL (Iowa Digital Engagement and Learning) faculty that extends a manuscript transcription crowd-sourcing project, DIY History, into the undergraduate classroom. Archives Alive!, a month-long curriculum module for freshmen Rhetoric students, uses DIY History to teach research, writing, and presentation skills through a series of digitally-engaged tasks. Students not only work with primary source materials, but become part of the collaborative effort to build and enhance them. Piloted last year with two courses, the project has grown to nearly 20 classes totaling 400 students. Scalable, interdisciplinary, and open access, the assignment can be re-used and adapted for instructors at any institution interested in experimenting with digital humanities pedagogy grounded in library collections of primary sources.
http://hackfsm.lib.berkeley.edu/
http://research-it.berkeley.edu/publications/hackfsm-bootstrapping-library-hackathon-eight-short-weeks
Archives Alive!: http://ideal.uiowa.edu/projects/archives-alive
DIY History: http://diyhistory.lib.uiowa.edu/