Contact information

E-mail: cevans@nvcc.edu also charles.t.evans@gmail.com
Home page: novaonline.nvcc.edu/eli/evans/

Introduction

What is digital history? Or, is there such a thing? In this course, we will examine some of the major developments in the practice of history in the past decade or so. Some topics and issues that will be examined include: (1) different kinds of digital expression used by historians, (2) the impact of social media and web 2.0 tools on the discipline of history, (3) some basic website creation and design issues, (4) hopefully teaching and learning issues, and (5) conceptual issues regarding the use of historical artifacts. There are a number of assignments in the course, including a student project centered on the creation of a digital history resource.

Textbook

Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and, Presenting the Past on the Web, by Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig. Although this "text" was written quite a few years ago, Roy was one of the earliest pioneers in the field of digital history. Way back in 1994, his unique, hypertext history "textbook," Who Built America, appeared (coauthored by Stephen Brier and Joshua Brown). This was an innovative attempt to combine text, video, audio and images in a hypertext format. Roy was also the founder of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. This "digital history" guide still retains its usefulness today.

Goals and Objectives

• Introduce some trends and developments in digital history
  
• Examine the impact of social media and digital technology on historical expression
  
• Look at some basic tools, such as image and text digitization, and how they can be used in the teaching of history
  
• Study some basic style design concepts for putting historical materials on the web
  
• Understand the limits of copyright

Proviso about the Course and Permanence in the Digital World

Things change fast in the digital world. Please send me any changes/additions that you think would be useful to the course topics and schedule.

Tentative Schedule

Week 1: Introductions
Note: Let's start the course.
What to do before class:

• Review my cv, home page and digital projects
• look over this course syllabus and the required assignments and begin thinking about a project
• introduce yourself

What we will do in class: Talk about the course and expectations about the course

 

Week 2: Really, Really Getting Started with the Course
Note: We start this week by doing some introductory reading.
What to do before class:

• Read Rosenzweig's textbook (Introduction)
• Acquaint yourself with local centers focused on digital history/humanities:
  • at George Mason University, the Center for History and New Media
  • at the University of Virginia, The Virginia Center for Digital History, the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities and the Electronic Text Center (Scholar's lab)
  • at the University of Richmond, the Digital Scholarship Lab
  • at the University of Maryland, the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities
  • at Northern Virginia Community College, Digi: The Loudoun Digital Humanities Project

What we will do in class: Discuss these material and the work of these centers.

What you will do before the next class: Create a blog for your use in the course. (I suggest that you use blogspot since I am familiar with it, and then I will be able to more easily help you with it, but you can use something else.) We will actually talk more about blogs later in the course

 

Week 3: The Evolution of the Digital Web
Note: Let's look at the past and present in online history projects and the evolution of the digital web. These are just some project with which I am familiar.
What to do before class:

• Read Rosenzweig's textbook (chapter 1: Exploring the History Web)
• Check out these digital projects (you are free to add others to the list)
  • Avalon Project
  • The April 16 Archive
  • The Oyez Project
  • Valley of the Shadow
  • Romantic Circles
  • Dickinson Electronic Archive
  • Persepolis: A Virtual Reconstruction
  • American Memory
  • Lascaux
  • Digital Karnak
  • Hurricane Digital Memory Bank
  • Hawthorne in Salem
  • Amiens Cathedral Project
  • Life Outtacontext, In Our Path and Eye Level by Jeff Gates
• Can you place these projects in chronological order? Can you determine how the sophistication and forms of digital projects have changed in the last fifteen years, since Who Built America? Post your comments to your blog.

What we will do in class: Examine these web projects.

 

Week 4: Building History Websites
Note: There are now many options for building a website, such as Google sites, Google Docs, Composer (part of the Mozilla project), Blogger/Blogspot, Webnode, Weebly, Dreamweaver, etc. You will probably need a place to host your digital project. I use webhostingpad.com, but there are many others.
What to do before class:

• Read Rosenzweig's textbook (chapter 2: Getting Started)
• Examine some digital creation tool options.

What we will do in class:

• We will look at the week 3 websites with an eye to design considerations (actually this should come later in the course when we actually look at design considerations, or maybe I should move that design stuff here).
• Discuss your project and what sort of web presence you will need.
• Let's also check out Animoto or Timeline 3D.

What you will do before the next class: Post these considerations to your blog. (a short assignment this

 

Week 5: The Multi-Talented Blog
Note: The blog was one of the first widely-available web 2.0 tools.
What to do before class:

• Look at these examples of the blog being used as a "blog," i.e., as social media. I'm sure that you could find many more. Some are better than others.
  • NOVA Digital History
  • Russian History Blog
  • Civil War Memory
  • Alexandria Past
  • War Historian
  • Pennsylvania History and Genealogy Blog
  • Lehigh Valley Railroad (actually not a blog)
  • World War II History (are there problems with this blog?)
  • World War I Veterans (problems with this blog?)
  • Virginia Historical Society's Blog (issues here?)
  • Philadelphia Digital History Forum (started nice, but then what)
• Look at these examples of the blog being used as a website.
  • Pramoedya Ananta Toer
  • Steven Udvar-Házy
  • WW1: Experiences of an English Soldier
• Can you find other examples of the different uses of a blog? Post to your blog and be prepared to discuss.

What we will do in class: Discuss the blog, small but powerful! Creator of knowledge or simply a repeater of knowledge?

What you will do before the next class: Post to your blog!

 

Week 6 (16 November): Building a Web Culture (Style Design Standards and Copyright Issues) (Julia Turner visits)
Note: There are a lot of bad-looking websites out there. Remember that in the old days, all a historian had to do was type up a paper--although that was not always easy--now you have to be concerned with how something looks too. Luckily there are a lot of templates available now for use in creating a digital object.
What to do before class:

• Read Rosenzweig's textbook (chapter 4: Designing for the History Web)
• Check out some design information
  • Web Style Guide, 3rd ed.
  • 4 Principles of Good Design for Websites
  • The Principles of Design
  • of course, there is my very old now The New Web Design Center
  • also check out Colors on the Web; The Meaning of Colors; Kuler

What else to do before class:

• Investigate copyright issues, which continue to plague the development of web content (1923 is a key number to remember).
• Read Rosenzweig's textbook (chapter 7: Owning the Past?)
• Have a look at
  • Creative Commons
  • Copyright
  • Copyright and Fair Use
  • A Fair(y) Use Tale

What we will do in class: Talk about all of these issues. (Not sure if I should include material here about ADA compliance)

What you will do before the next class:

• Post, to your blog, your understanding of some of the major points of copyright and style considerations.
• Take the Midterm exam. Log into Blackboard and click on the Midterm exam, enter the password and begin, You have no time limit, but you have to finish once you have started.

 

Week 7: Formal Project Selection (UR Digital Scholarship Lab speaker)
Note: See below for more information on the required project
What to do before class:

• Submit, as a blog post, a one-page proposal that outlines the topic of your project, the kind of resources and materials that you will use and the technology that will be necessary to complete the project.
• Slatington Postcards
• Charles M. Robinson Schools

What we will do in class: Discuss what you will need to succeed with your project.

 

Week 8: The Information Age
Note: There are great databases for online materials and scholarly articles now available.
What to do before class:

• Have a look at History Resources by the Loudoun campus librarians, see also a similar page by the NVCC librarians. Then there is the NVCC library page, with its links. I prefer to use VIVA's alphabetical list of resources when I am starting on a project. But you can often find online resources (not listed in VIVA) at other major university library websites. Worldcat is a great resource!
• Find some online resources that will be useful for your project; post your results to your blog.
• Not sure where to put Wordseer on the syllabus by Aditi Muralidharan.

What we will do in class: Discuss these online resources and databases.

What you will do before the next class: Take the Final exam. Log into Blackboard and click on the Midterm exam, enter the password and begin, You have no time limit, but you have to finish once you have started.

 

Week 9: What Is Real and Not Real in the Digital and Real Worlds
Note: Have you thought about reality in a digital world?
What to do before class:

• Check out the Slatington News Project (real fragments, digitized images, a complete *pdf version)
• Look at some of the week 3 projects, such as Digital Karnak (now flooded) and Persepolis (long gone).
• In regards to historical newspapers, there are some powerful digitization projects underway, and there are also great new searching possibilities. See "The Biographers New Friend" by Stephen Mihm.

What we will do in class: Discuss all of this.

 

Week 10: Digitizing Images and Text
Note: Taking a real object and making it unreal, an avatar perhaps? Remind myself that I have a lot of digital pictures that could be used in a student project. Examine sources for digital materials, such as Ebay, Youtube, Flickr, etc.
What to do before class:

• Read Rosenzweig's textbook (chapter 3: Becoming Digital)
• From my HIS 241 course, take a look at the 1897 map of St. Petersburg and post to your blog what you can discover about St. Petersburg in 1897 from looking at and analyzing this old map. Also, consider the technology involved with digitizing this map.

What else to do before class: Check Ebay for materials.

What we will do in class: Work with scanning materials and determining how to use them in a project.

What you must do after class: Post to your blog!

 

Week 11: Digital Online Archives (Andrea Odiorne visits)
Note: This week we will be working with the Northern Virginia Digital Archive, an Omeka-based project. See also the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank and the Omeka site.
What to do before class :

• Read Rosenzweig's textbook (chapter 6: Collecting History Online)
• Look at these archival sites
• Post some images to the digital archive and try it out
• Log in as an administrator and work with the archive's "back end"
• Check out the Omeka.net hosting service for your project.

What we will do in class: Discuss the pros/cons of the Omeka software.

What you will do after class: Post to your blog about your work this week.

 

Week 12 (9 November): Big Picture and User Participation Projects
Note: I have just noticed these kind of projects in the last year or so.
What to do before class:

• Read Rosenzweig's textbook (chapter 5: Building an Audience)
• Check out the Field Expedition Mongolia (aka the cyber hunt for Genghis Khan), the World Memory Project and the Genographic Project.

What else to do before class: A project update is due and should be posted. You might check out the idea of crowd sourcing.

What we will do in class: Discuss these interactive, large-scale projects.

 

Weeks 13 (23 November) and 14 (7 December, Ellen Bowman visit): Project work
Note: Keep working.
What you should be doing:

• Working on your project, posting to your blog and discussing your project with your instructor.
• Read Rosenzweig's textbook (chapter 8: Preserving Digital History and chapter 9: Final Thoughts)
• Check the Internet Archive: Wayback Machine

What else you should be doing: Consider the future directions of digital history. Read Daniel J. Solove, Dizzied by data, and Daniel J. Cohen, The Maddening Crowd. Post your ideas to your blog.

 

Week 15 (14 December): Project Presentation and review (Andrea re-visit)
What to do before class:

• Finish your project; post a final discussion to your blog.
• Take the Final exam. Log into Blackboard and click on the Final exam, enter the password and begin, You have no time limit, but you have to finish once you have started.

What we will do in class: Critique your project.

Required Course Assignments

• Creation of a blog and at least ten posts to the blog = 100 points
• Week 6 Midterm Exam = 200 points
• Week 8 Final Exam = 200 points
• Week 9 Slatington News comments (posted to blog and emailed to instructor) = 50 points
• Week 10 Map of St. Petersburg comments (posted to blog and emailed to instructor) = 50 points
  
• Project proposal and completion of final project = 400 points

Course grading

Course grades are based on the following scale:
1,000-900: A
899-800: B
799-700: C
699-600: D
599-000: F

Project

You are required to complete a substantial web-based, digital history project, that has been approved by your instructor. Here are some ideas:

• an online lecture that might combine text, audio and visual materials, for example, my remarks on World War II for my Russian history course or my notes on Gilgamesh.
• Use Blogspot, or some other software, to build a content website, such as Steven F. Udvar-Házy, or a content-focused blog like Boston 1775.
• a content website, for example, my Geography of Russia site
• a personal history archive (or some other kind of online archive) or a personal history, for example, Historians I have Known, or personal world histories, which have been done by students
  
• a digital panorama with explanation and analysis
  
• some form of digital collection (could be newspaper articles; could be photos)

The scope of your final project will determine the level of technology that you will need, i.e., how complicated the software resources will have to be. Depending on your project, you may or may not need high level design software, like Dreamweaver or Photoshop, or you may be able to use other less-intimidating software.