Wednesday, May 6, 2015

Week 14: Conclusion

Last night was the last class for History 717, Spring 2015 version. In addition to two terrific presentations from the students about their semester DH projects, we discussed the course as a whole. Here are our class notes on What We Learned This Semester:

What did we learn about digital history this semester?

Evaluating DH projects in terms of metadata, funding, and front and backmatter of the websites.
Challenges DH faces in academia and public history
Perishability of DH
Emphasis on projects to market themselves: how do we build this into future curricula? What do you do about platforms being ephemeral?
problem of credit for tenure and promotion
How digital tools can expand your ability to work with historical documents, reconceive ways of working your topic--think outside the box
A lot of ways to be more organized and more efficient
Presentations on different tools
Learning a new tool doesn’t have to be scary
Blogging can be used professionally, not just LiveJournal
How conservative/luddite/resistant are we?
Potential for tools learned
Don’t have to be part of an institution to be part of a historical project (gold star)

What do you wish you had learned?
Closer connect DH with the public...how does it become public history
How does a database work?

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