This is a key week in the class: we will divide into groups to work on semester-long projects. I have never put students into long-term groups before, so I am a little apprehensive about how to do it. Right now my intent is to let some (controlled) chaos reign and see if the students sort themselves into groups without help. If they need help, my plan is to have them engage in "speed dating," each talking to everyone else in the class for a fixed amount of time (e.g. two minutes) to test whether they will get along well enough to work together. Following the speed-rounds, students could submit to me a list of people they want to work with, and I could take a couple of minutes to organize the groups on that basis.
No one signed up to give a presentation this week, which might be just as well given the need to break into groups. Depending on how long it takes to organize into groups, I intend to take the students on a guided tour of the Encyclopedia of Milwaukee's successful grant application to the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Reading questions:
Kelly, Teaching History in the Digital Age
What does he mean about books “reading each other”?
What does he mean by “recombinant documents”? Why might you want such things?
What kind of metadata do you take in about primary sources, almost unconsciously, when you start to work with them in traditional formats? How do you get this metadata from digital sources?
What kind of new questions are made possibly by the availability and searchability of digital primary sources? How would this availability change your plans for your own research projects? Would you still travel to archives to conduct research?
What is “text mining”? Why would you want to do this? Given the amount of information produced, how would you make sense of it? Is close reading obsolete?
What history-writing
skills do you think that you (and students) need in the 21st
century? Does the standard college essay format teach you those skills?
How do you feel
about requiring students to write in public instead of just handing in their
work to the professor to read? How should we take into consideration student
privacy issues when putting their work in the public realm?
What do you
think about the comparison to basketball: that we teach basketball by having
students handle the ball from the outset; and we should have students “make”
history right from the outset as well?
Are you
familiar with the idea of the Dublin Core
standards?
What do you
think about designing (undergraduate) courses around skills and understanding
rather than around content?
Cohen and
Rosenzweig, chapters 1-2
19: why wouldn’t
a history website be accepted as “academic
venture”?
22: how Yahoo’s
organization (“librarian’s touch of classification”) helped; how is history
presently organized/accessible on the internet?
What does he
mean by “deep web”? Why don’t searches pull up materials behind paywalls? What
would you do if they did?
25: list of 5
main types of history websites: archives, secondary sources, teaching, discussion,
organizational. Have these five categories blurred more or separated more since
this book was published in 2005?
29: it is easy
to see why amateur enthusiasts don’t care about provenance of primary
documents. But why does provenance matter to scholars?
Why isn’t there
a convention to italicize (or put in quotation marks) the titles of websites in
use in this book?
Do you think
blogs have successfully challenged the journal article?
44: why have
libraries and archives taken to the web to expand their mission to teaching?
50: Is their
charge to become familiar with how history is done on the web before getting
started with your own project still realistic?
53: example of
20,000 documents stored in a database and displayed on the web only when called
up. Why is this a sound strategy for presenting information digitally? What
does it imply about how the contents have to be organized and stored?
Do you need to
know HTML to do digital history? What do you need to know about HTML?
Do you agree that
HTML is basically readable?
How do you look
at the source code for a web page, as they recommend?
What kind of
planning process for your digital project do they recommend?
Generate a list
of questions you should be asking yourself as you plan your group projects.
59: In discussing
the question of whether you need to learn to code, they make a comparison to
reading Dante’s Inferno in English
translation. Does this comparison work for you? Would you venture to produce
scholarship on Dante if you read it only in English?
Why do they so
routinely include the price of software in their discussion?
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