Great Work This Summer, But What’s Next?

“The DSSF working group taught me that this support system is rooted in trust–I trust that the working group, my fellows, and the larger DH community will critique, guide, inform and inspire my work as they have done in the past”.

The above quote is from a blog post I wrote towards the very end of the 2016 Digital Scholarship Summer Fellowship reflecting on the community of practice I had experienced as a fellow at Musselman Library. Now that the school year has begun and I have been asked to give guidance for digital projects, I realize that my position has developed so that I don’t only have to trust others, but people have to feel like they can trust me. It’s through that trust that I will be able to expand the DH community of practice, especially at Gettysburg College.

When presented with a new field, or a new way of thinking, it is easy to be skeptical of how you will be able to integrate it into your life. I know this is how I felt at the beginning of the summer–my experience with digital tools was limited, my project seemed formidable, I had barely any idea what the field of digital scholarship was, and my summer seemingly included a steep learning curve. Yet, through the community of practice I found in the Musselman Library, Lafayette College, the DH community on twitter, and my fellow fellows, I was able to succeed. Therefore, I think that the most effective strategy I can use when promoting the field of digital scholarship to students or professors is to share my own experience. The effort and time that I put into learning how to use digital tools and immersing myself into the DH community of practice was completely worth it. Not only have digital tools helped to transform the way I think about and communicate knowledge, but I also feel like I can collaborate more effectively to create a dynamic project.  All of these values would enhance students’ experiences and challenge them to think in new and exciting ways. The process of introducing DH could begin with sharing my story.

I’m excited to spend the semester bringing more people into the community of practice, and becoming more involved in the community of practice myself, especially on a student level. Sharing my research with other students at Bucknell and learning about their projects is particularly exciting to me because we get to interact on the level of being peers–young people who have the potential to be the future of the digital humanities. Given that everyone will be driven by their own passions and ideas, I have no doubt that my experience will be cross-disciplinary and engaging. The conference will become part of my DH narrative, and I can’t wait to share my experience with Gettysburg.

 

Going Back to My Roots.. aka. High School

Over the summer, the cohort talked about the idea that the digital humanities community thrives off of collective learning. As we have mentioned before, digital scholars learn from one another. One way I can expand my digital humanities community of practice is by slowly introducing my friends, teachers, and professors to digital scholarship.

After learning about digital humanities over the summer, I decided to contact my high school about what I have learned. I wrote to the principal and president that

“I would like to give a presentation that explains what digital humanities is and discuss the importance of digital scholarship. I would also like to have an open discussion on how digital humanities can play an integral part of teaching the humanities and how digital tools can be used in a classroom setting.”

I was able to meet with the principal of academic advising and present a case for digital humanities.

I was able to give examples of digital projects and tools as well as propose ways these tools could be implemented in the classroom. Because I was presenting this knowledge to the high school I attended, I was able to make digital project suggestions based off of previous projects teachers have assigned me. For example, one history teacher always has her students do these presidential outlines. I suggested an idea that she could use Timeline JS to create a timeline of the US presidents. Each president could have their own individual Timeline to document their time in office.

Overall, I think the meeting went well. The principle of academic advising asked me to send him all the digital links that I had shown him. One fear I had coming into the meeting was the idea that he was going to dismiss the idea of digital humanities altogether. Although I only had time to give him a short definition of digital humanities, he was very much interested and enthusiastic about using digital tools in the classroom. He also said that he was going to schedule a meeting with the faculty to talk about using these tools and asked if I could possibly come back to speak with the faculty about my experience with digital humanities.

One reason why I decided to go back to my high school and talk about digital humanities is because I think it is important to start introducing digital humanities to a high school audience. As we talked about before, DH is not just for academic scholars but rather for anyone who is interested in the field. If we are able to introduce DH at the high school level; the idea of digital humanities would not be so foreign when entering college. Digital humanities may also be seen as a more legitimate tool if students are getting exposed to DH by their teachers at a younger age.

In addition to my high school, I was also able to advertise for digital humanities in my 300 methods class. One of the first assignments we had to do was create a picture timeline of US history. Me being thinking in DH terms, I decided to create a timeline using Timeline JS. When the timeline was presented to the class, the professor noted how he liked to tool but also saw the disadvantages of using Timeline JS. Unfortunately, we ran out of time and were not able to talk about the advantages and disadvantage of using digital tools. But I might visit his office hours to discuss what he thinks are the advantages and disadvantages to using digital tools.

I find that I have become a huge advocate already for digital humanities. I seem to inadvertently advertise DH both inside and outside the classroom… I guess I am a digital humanist… I will be sure to keep you updated on how things go with my professor and my high school.

-Best Wishes,

Keira

Fiddling with Fabula

Well it’s certainly good to be back at that Digital Humanities game, even though I don’t really know what to do with all these people in library. Not even two weeks in and I got my first mission: to find a digital mapping tool that’s easier than CartoDB for a Spanish 306 class. Finding a mapping tool that’s more user friendly than CartoDB is an easy feat, but deciding which tool to use is difficult. I already had a list of mapping tools that I had experience with StoryMapJS, Google TourBuilder, ZeeMaps, and a couple of other minor ones that I had looked into while trying to put together my own map over the summer. ZeeMaps and TourBuilder are extremely user friendly but lack the narrative and sophistication of StoryMapJS, and StoryMapJS lacks a lot of mapping features that ZeeMaps and TourBuilder have. Taking this knowledge, I decided to feature out to Digital Humanities Forums and sources to find new mapping tools that would hopefully give me what I was looking for.

At first I tried to work with Neatline, a mapping plugin for Omeka. It’s a very intensive mapping tool with an emphasis on the cartography side rather than a narrative, like CartoDB but slightly more user friendly. If I have time I would like to do more with NeatLine, but it takes lots of time and a lot more patience. And then I found it. The love of my life, my pride and joy: Fabula Maps.

Fabula Maps has the narrative and sophistication of StoryMapJS but with more mapping features like animated markers, base maps, and the option of multiple pathways. Even better, it’s extremely user friendly. Even better, it’s embeddable. And the best is that the markers are animated!! So I was super excited to show this to the professor and she seemed very interested by it, so my job right now is to test the limits of Fabula Maps, like how many markers and how much media I can put in before it crashes, if it crashes. I think that Fabula Maps is a great in class digital tool because it has great user experience and very distracting features which can easily capture student attention.

Along with testing Fabula Maps for Spanish 306, I’m seeing if Fabula Maps would be more suited to my needs than StoryMapJS in terms of mapping out my cadets. While it’s not exactly continuing my research I think it’s important to improve upon what I already have, especially if there is a medium that is more suited to my project.

Speaking of the continuation of my project, the service records have been set back a bit seeing as there was a problem with transferring my files onto my new laptop, so I don’t have any of my research files or records from War of the Rebellion, except for the indexes that I have written in my notebook. It’s a loss of research but with my indexes, I don’t have to start from scratch. I hope to have my records done by Bucknell, which I am super excited for by the way. I think the entire cohort is excited. Then we can reunite with our Lafayette counterparts, admittedly not all of them, but enough to balance out the Digtal Scholar Schuyler Sisters.

-Julia