Megan Senseney
Head, Office of Digital Innovation and Stewardship
University of Arizona
Mary Feeney
Librarian
University of Arizona
Jeffrey Oliver
Data Science Specialist
University of Arizona
Anita Huizar-Hernández
Associate Professor of Border Studies
University of Arizona
An interdisciplinary group of librarians and faculty at the University of Arizona are exploring how historical newspapers packaged as a single “collection as data” can act as a point of convergence for collaborative pedagogy in the university classroom. Newspapers are a source of inquiry for a variety of disciplines, and they serve as useful primary sources for students. As data, newspapers become a vital source for revealing trends within and across communities over time. Our multilingual dataset includes selections from the University of Arizona Libraries’ Historic Mexican and Mexican American Press digital collection, as well as related collections of Arizona newspapers from the National Digital Newspaper Program. This summer, our Data Science Specialist packaged a single, unified dataset and created a low-barrier learning environment for use during the Fall 2020 semester. After gathering collections data from APIs and normalizing the data with local scripts, we used a combination of ReData (our institutional research data repository), GitHub, Jupyter Notebooks, and Binder to ensure browser-based access for students across five different courses. Librarians and disciplinary faculty collaborated extensively through an initial set of in-reach workshops and a later set of workshops and online lessons developed for students. Throughout the current semester, students are engaging with the dataset in a range of ways from brief modules integrated into a course on research with primary sources to semester-long projects. Students are exploring topics in environmental history, public history, literary analysis, composition and rhetoric, and media. In January 2021, the effort will culminate in an online student showcase drawn from across the five courses and a reflection on the uses of text data mining in the humanities, which will in turn be followed by the release of a project white paper focused on how to operationalize and scale collections as data in support of data literacy and digital pedagogy this spring.
https://libguides.library.arizona.edu/newspapers-as-data https://github.com/jcoliver/dig-coll-borderlands