Schedule/Syllabus

This is the abbreviated version of the Digital Scholarship Summer Fellowship program. Click each week for a detailed schedule, including readings and assignments for workshops and labs. Sessions in italics are open to the Gettysburg College community and marked as Public Session; if you wish to participate in a public session, then please review the detailed schedule for the week to see the assigned readings and activities so you can participate fully in the conversation.

Week 1 – What is Digital Scholarship?

  • Monday, 5/23
    • 9am-Noon: Introduction (Library 014)
    • 1pm-4pm: Organizing Research and Annotated Bibliographies (Library 014)
  • Tuesday, 5/24
    • 9am-Noon: Scanning and Metadata (Special Collections Reading Room)
    • 1pm-2pm: Meet and Greet with Digital Scholarship Summer Fellows and Mellon Summer Scholars (Library 014)
      The Digital Scholarship Summer Fellows will meet with the Mellon Summer Scholars to introduce each other and their projects. Educational Technology will also be on-hand to introduce themselves.
  • Wednesday, 5/25
    • 9am-Noon: Sites and WordPress Workshop (Library 014, Public Session)
      Gettysburg Sites provides a web server for students, faculty, and staff at Gettysburg College, allowing the creation of basic websites, as well as more advanced tools such as WordPress that assist with content management.
  • Friday, 5/26
    • 9am-Noon: Elements of a Digital Scholarship Project (Library 014, Public Session)
      With Gettysburg Sites, we have a platform to house a digital scholarship project. However, what is digital, and what is scholarship, and how do the two intersect? How is a digital project different than a paper you would write for class, or a website that you create for yourself? We will review the different aspects of what makes up a digital project and prototype a small digital project using Sites.

Week 2 – Digital Project Planning

  • Tuesday, 5/31
    • 9am-Noon: Project Management and Documentation Workshop (Library 014, Public Session)
      Project management and documenting processes is an important part of developing a digital project. Today, we will discuss  how to create a project charter, begin a project timeline, and look at ways to document the creation of digital projects so others can see how it was made.
  • Wednesday, 6/1
    • 9am-Noon: Copyright for Digital Scholars (Library 014, Public Session)
      So you found a great image or document online and want to use it in your project … but can you? Today, we’ll look at how copyright law affects digital projects, and how the idea of “fair use” can be leveraged to include the content of others. We will also discuss a recent digital project with some copyright challenges, and ways to help others use your projects once you’ve created them.
  • Friday, 6/3
    • 7am-7pm: Field trip to Lafayette College

Week 3 – User Experience, the Web, and Digital Tools

  • Monday, 6/6
    • 9am-Noon: Workshop: User Experience and Writing for the Web (Library 014, Public Session)
      Before putting a project online, it’s important to understand how users will interact with a website, both how they navigate it, and how they read it.
    • 1pm-4pm: Lab: Wireframing (Library 014, Public Session)
      A wireframe is a mock-up of a website, a way to sketch out the design and hierarchy of a website before getting into the technical details of creating pages; it’s an important step in determining how users will navigate a digital project.
  • Wednesday, 6/8
    • 9am-Noon: Workshop: Finding the Right Digital Tools (Library 014, Public Session)
    • 1pm-4pm: Lab: Reverse Engineer a Digital Project (Library 014)
      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. Today, we will try to pry the box open a little bit and see if we can see what different digital scholars used to create their sites.
  • Friday, 6/10
    • 9am-Noon: Workshop: Present a Digital Tool (Library 014)
      Today, we have you present a digital tool! You don’t need to be an expert, but you should explain what it is, what it does, how we would get started using it, and situations where it would be used, as well as provide examples of the tool in action.

Week 4 – Narrative and Storytelling

  • Monday, 6/13
    • 9am-Noon: Workshop: Introduction to Scalar (Library 014, Public Session)
      Scalar is a free, open source authoring and publishing platform that’s designed to make it easy for authors to write long-form, born-digital scholarship online.
    • 1pm-4pm: Lab: Scalar (Library 014, Public Session)
  • Wednesday, 6/15
    • 9am-Noon: Workshop: Introduction to Omeka (Library 014, Public Session)
      Omeka is a free, flexible, and open source web-publishing platform for the display of library, museum, archives, and scholarly collections and exhibitions.
    • 1pm-4pm: Lab: Omeka (Library 014, Public Session)
  • Friday, 6/17
    • 9am-Noon: Workshop: Story Arc (Library 014, Public Session)
      Story Arc is a conceptual project designed by Chuck Kann; it combines events, times and places, and allows users to create arcs through the story.

Week 5 – Time and Space

  • Monday, 6/20
    • 9am-Noon: Workshop: Introduction to Timelines (Library 014, Public Session)
      Timelines, such as TimelineJS and Timemapper, are a way to visualize chronological events in a linear fashion.
    • 1pm-4pm: Lab: Timelines (Library 014, Public Session)
  • Tuesday, 6/21
    • 9am-Noon: Workshop: Introduction to Mapping (Library 014, Public Session)
      Digital maps can be created with narrative-based mapping tools (StorymapJS and Google Tour Builder), and data-based tools (CartoDB) and help us visualize data and tell stories spatially.
    • 1pm-4pm: Lab: Mapping (Library 014, Public Session)
  • Wednesday, 6/22
    • 9am-Noon: Workshop: Assessment and Evaluation (Library 014, Public Session)

Week 6 – Text Encoding

  • Monday, 6/27
    • 9am-Noon: Workshop: Introduction to XML and Markup (Library 014)
      XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is a way to encode text in a way that is both human and machine readable; it allows text to be stored, transported, described, and reused across a variety of applications.
  • Wednesday, 6/29
    • 9am-Noon: Lab: Encoding the Letters of Jack Peirs (Library 014)
  • Friday, 7/1
    • 9am-Noon: Lab: Encoding the Letters of Jack Peirs, Part 2 (Tentative) (Library 014)

Week 7 – Data Visualization and Text Analysis

  • Wednesday, 7/6
    • 9am-Noon: Workshop: Datasets and Visualization in Digital Scholarship (Library 014, Public Session)
      Miriam Posner defines data visualization as “Graphical representation of data. We visualize data so that it’s easier to notice aspects and features of the data. Our current moment is obsessed with data visualization, perhaps because we’re moving so quickly that there’s more information to sift through. It’s also expected that we do more now, because we have these tools.” With so much data to try to process, and not enough time to do so, it makes sense to process it in a way that appeals to visual culture. Today, we’ll look at ways to visualize data, as well as the datasets that live underneath the presentation. In addition, Divonna Stebick, Associate Professor of Education, will discuss her use of data visualization with young adult literature and how she integrated it into her classes, and Sharon Birch from Educational Technology will give insight about how she helped bring the project to life.
    • 1pm-4pm: Lab: 3D Printing (West Building)
      And now for something completely different … today we will take a field trip to the West Building to have a 3D printing workshop with Eric Remy from Educational Technology.
  • Friday, 7/8
    • 9am-Noon: Workshop: Text Analysis in Digital Scholarship (Library 014, Public Session)
      Text analysis in digital scholarship takes large bodies of texts (corpora) and uses digital tools to find relationships between words and concepts. This sort of analysis has been happening for decades, to the point where the first thing many scholars think about when discussing digital humanities is text analysis. While it is difficult to learn, projects like Google’s Ngram Viewer has made working with texts easier. Today, we’ll look at some text analysis projects and the tools behind them.

Week 8 – Presenting Digital Scholarship

  • Monday, 7/11
    • 9am-Noon: Workshop: How to Talk About Your Research: Working with Faculty and Elevator Speeches (Library 014)
  • Wednesday, 7/13
    • 9am-Noon: Workshop: “Worst Presentation Ever!” (Library 014)
  • Friday, 7/15
    • 9am-Noon: Workshop: 3D Modeling (Library 014)
      3D modeling isn’t just for games and movies; it can be used to create vivid visualizations such as walkable maps, models of objects, and virtual reality simulations. Greg Lord, Lead Developer and Software Engineer at Hamilton College’s Digital Humanities Initiative, will present ways he has used 3D modeling in his digital scholarship work.

Week 9 – Media and Public Scholarship

  • Monday, 7/18
    • 9am-Noon: Workshop: Public History and Digital Scholarship (Library 014, Public Session)
      Today we will have the opportunity to hear about the work of Gettysburg College professors Jill Titus and Ian Isherwood, both of the Civil War Institute. They will be discussing the importance of public scholarship and how it intersects with digital scholarship, and how they have integrated digital scholarship into their courses.
  • Wednesday, 7/20
    • 9am-Noon: Workshop: Social Media and Digital Scholarship (Library 014, Public Session)
      Digital scholars are increasingly turning to social media and crowdsourcing sites to publicize their projects, as well as enlist public support for transcription and identification. Today we’ll look at the social media presence of a few digital projects, as well as discuss how digital scholars are using crowdsourcing to transcribe historical documents.
  • Friday, 7/22
    • 9am-Noon: Workshop: Using Video in Digital Scholarship (Library 014, Public Session)
      Digital scholarship is a visual way of presenting material, and video is way to provide engaging content to your audience. While not necessarily interactive, it does engage multiple senses, and can be a way to visualize data when an interactive view isn’t necessary. Today, Carrie Szarko from Educational Technology will discuss the use of video in digital scholarship, as well as get us introduced to Microsoft Moviemaker.

Week 10 – Issues in Digital Scholarship

  • Monday, 7/25
    • 9am-Noon: Workshop: Issues in Digital Scholarship (Library 014, Public Session)
      As broadly as digital scholarship can be defined, there are many issues that should be addressed by those who call themselves digital scholars. How do digital scholars include marginalized groups in the conversation? Are there ways to address the wide berth of technological proficiency in digital scholarship? And what happens when the project is “done?” There are many questions, and hopefully we can think of ways to further the conversation.
  • Wednesday, 7/27
    • 9am-Noon: Workshop: Documentation Wrap-Up (Library 014)
      After the project is over, what’s next? As we discussed in earlier weeks, documentation is important for other digital scholars to understand how projects are built so the scholarly work can continue. Is your project a “black box?” Or can someone else come along and recreate it or expand upon it with the documentation you provide? Today we’ll take a look at the projects and get a sense of how someone outside the cohort would see them.
  • Thursday, 7/28
    • Project Presentations: 10am-11am (Library 018, Public Session)
  • Friday, 7/29
    • 9am-Noon: Workshop: Assessment, Feedback, and Final Thoughts (Library 014)
      Our last session! Today we will provide feedback about the final projects and presentations, and talk about what’s next for this cohort of the Digital Scholarship Summer Fellowship.