Blog Post – Due Monday, June 5
Community is an important aspect of digital scholarship work, since no one is an expert in all things, and the interconnectedness of the digital world allows us to collaborate across traditional boundaries of time and space. Based on your experiences at the Community of Practice workshop and the PaLA Spring Workshop, how do you see yourself as part of the digital scholarship community of practice at Gettysburg, and beyond? Did you make any interesting connections? How can you work to develop a community of practice for the remainder of the summer fellowship?
Notes For Week 2
All bootcamp session will start at 9am and end at 11am. However, from 11am-12pm, the Digital Scholarship Senior Fellows will have office hours in Library 014 to help you with hands-on support with these tools. Please expect to spend the 11am-Noon hour working with the tools themselves!
Monday, May 29
Memorial Day (off)
Tuesday, May 30
8:30am-9am: Check-In (Library 014)
9am-11am: An Introduction to Digital Tools and Projects (Library 014, Public Session)
Welcome to the digital tools bootcamp! Finding the right digital tools for your projects isn’t easy; there are thousands of choices at all different levels of technical expertise. Today, we will review ways to find digital tools appropriate to your projects and how to evaluate them. Also, digital projects can often be “black boxes,” that is, we have no idea what makes them tick, because there’s no documentation, shared code, or breakdown of what was done to create it. We will also try to pry the box open a little bit and see if we can see what different digital scholars used to create their sites.
This will be an intensive week. Make sure you are taking appropriate time to read and gather materials as needed.
Readings and Assignments
- Look through the Carolina Digital Humanities Initiative’s tools page. Compare to the DIRT Directory. Bring one or two tools you could see yourself using in your project.
- Familiarize yourself with HTML and CSS throughout this week, and continue throughout the rest of the summer. You can either read over Miriam Posner’s “HTML & CSS” tutorial and work through that, or use Codecademy’s Learn HTML and CSS interactive course. This should be something you are doing throughout the summer as you get more comfortable working with digital tools.
- Ford, Paul. “What is Code?”
- Glass, Grant. “The Black Box.”
- Marino, Mark. “Why We Must Read the Code.”
- Posner, Miriam. “How Did They Make That?”
- Van Strien, Daniel. “An Introduction to Version Control Using Github Desktop.“
Noon-1pm: Lunch (on your own)
1pm-4:30pm: Research/Project Work (on your own)
Wednesday, May 31
8:30am-9am: Check-In (Library 014)
9am-11am: Mapping with Esri Story Maps and StorymapJS (Library 014, Public Session)
Digital maps allow us to visualize data spatially, in modern, historical, and even fantastical constructs. Generally, digital mapping can be divided between narrative maps, that is, maps that follow a path and tell a story, and data-driven maps, or maps that are focused on visualizing various large sets of data (such as GIS). Today we will focus on narrative maps, using the Esri Story Maps and StorymapJS tools.
Readings and Assignments
- You will receive a login to Esri Story Maps prior to the session; please contact Sharon Birch if you did not receive a login.
- McConchie , Alan and Beth Schechter. “Anatomy of a Web Map.” (give it a second to load and click each slide to advance)
- Review the StorymapJS site and browse the examples (specifically The Garden of Earthly Delights)
- Read “Twelve Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do With Story Maps.“
- Look at the following projects: Gettysburg College Through Time, Mapping the Second Ku Klux Klan, Maps as Art: Using Digital Media to Bring Art and Cartography to Life
Noon-1pm: Group Lunch (TBD)
1:30pm-2:30pm: Meet with Kolbe Scholars (Library Apse)
2:30pm-4:30pm: Research/Project Work (on your own)
Thursday, June 1
8:30am-9am: Check-In (Library 014)
9am-11am: Timelines with TimelineJS (Library 014, Public Session)
Just as maps allow us to visualize data spatially, timelines are a way to visualize chronological events that occur in a linear fashion, but perhaps more importantly, show us how to conceptualize a linear progression of time as points of data. We will be looking at one tool specifically, TimelineJS, but others will be briefly introduced. Note: for this session, you will need to have a Google account (you do not need a Gmail address).
Readings and Assignments
- Schöch, Christoph. “Big? Smart? Clean? Messy? Data in the Humanities.”
- Listen to “Roger Ekrich on Segmented Sleep.“
- Look over the TimelineJS site and browse the projects.
- Look at the timelines presented at “Cartographies of Time.“
- Create a Google account (if you don’t have one already)
Noon-1pm: Lunch (on your own)
1pm-4:30pm: Research/Project Work (on your own)
Friday, June 2
8:30am-9am: Check-In (Library 014)
9am-11am: Interactive Images and Sound with JuxtaposeJS and SoundciteJS (Library 014, Public Session)
While we know that images and sound are important components of digital scholarship projects, they can often be static, with little opportunity to interact with them. Today, we will look at two tools that allow for more interactivity with media. JuxtaposeJS allows us to compare two images with a slider feature, and SoundciteJS lets us embed sound clips into text, to bring the words of the past to life.
Readings and Assignments
- Look over the SoundciteJS and JuxtaposeJS tool websites and check out the examples
- Review Yale’s Photogrammar project, the Berlin 1928 project, and The Guardian’s Photography Then and Now site
- Bring to this session:
- Two images, one historical, one contemporary (files or links)
- Text of a famous speech (a file or a link)
- Audio of the speech (a file or a link)
- Bonus: your historical photo is relevant to your speech!
Noon-1pm: Lunch (on your own)
1pm-3pm: Lightning Round and Bootcamp Wrap-Up (Library 014, Public Session)
This afternoon, we have you share what you have learned this week! You don’t need to be an expert, but you should pick a digital tool, show us what it does, how we would get started using it, and provide situations where it would be used, as well as provide examples of the tool in action.
Readings and Assignments
- Come prepared to discuss one of the digital tools you have learned about this week, or show one of the projects you found to be interesting. You will have no more than 5 minutes to present. You may want to look at the Criteria for Digital Tool Evaluation or Criteria for Digital Scholarship Project Evaluation pages to frame your lightning round talk.