Week 2 – Digital Tools Bootcamp

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

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

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

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

3pm-4:30pm: Research/Project Work (on your own)

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